From The Archives...

I was reading today, in eSchool News, about a new report featuring 'Six technologies that soon could be in your classrooms.'  It nudged me to look backwards as well as forwards.

I periodically look at random snippets of my past writing and see how they read today.  Here is part of a piece I wrote at Gartner in 1999 called: Understanding E-Learning Market Dynamics: 2000-2002.  

I said that the critical different types of educational content in any ecosystem will be:

• Classroom: The students and teachers meet at the same time and in the same location. 

• Synchronous: The students and teachers meet at the same time, but in different locations. This includes virtual classrooms and virtual seminars. Virtual classrooms are optimized around one instructor and 15 or 20 students, while virtual seminars may have as many as 1,000 students with one presenter and a group of assistants. 

• Asynchronous: Students access the classroom, book-style material and tests on their own. This is also called self-paced classes. 

• Simulations: Students take on new roles and solve problems in a computer-generated environment. 

• E-Communities: Providers and consumers of information are linked through virtual sites that feature chat rooms and other exchange mechanisms. 

• Just in Time: Technologies and processes are deployed to deliver small chunks of customized information close to the point of need. In some systems, called self-accessed learning tools (SALT), student pull the information. In others, predictive help is pushed from the application.

While I would tweak a bit of the wording today, I am pretty happy (and relieved) with how well that framework holds up.  And with Unschooling Rules, I believe even though the content is more sweeping and controversial, it will hold up even better.

See a list of much of my published work here: http://unschooling-rules.blogspot.com/p/clark-aldirch.html#books.  And feel free to hold me accountable!