The other day, I blogged about how technology education had to better prepare students for the future, but I didn’t come up with many ideas for how. Ultimately, it’s hard to prepare for the unknown and I evade predictions about the details. It’s really hard to educate for the future, if you don’t know what it will be like. However I think there are some things that we do know – mostly because they’ve already started happening.
But what can we say about the future?
- Being able to find stuff will be more important than knowing stuff.
- Not being comfortable with technology will be a huge disadvantage.
- Need to be adaptable due to the fast changing nature of life and work.
- Everything will be customizable.
- We will need to be smart about our privacy.
- Context and location awareness will become more prevalent (you can already see this with your todo list on Remember the Milk)
- Interactivity will take on new meaning – check out this iPhone book, and the future of shopping.
- Connectivity will be ubiquitous.
- Never lose touch with friends because of services like Facebook.
I think informatics education makes students better prepared for the future. Informatics is becoming increasingly prevalent – especially in biology, geography (GIS) and physics. So I think we’ll see a rise in joint degrees, and a good grounding in technology will be as necessary as basic math.
Now to convince everybody else…