Chapter 7: Education's Future

Technology has come a long way, but has it come far enough? I guess that depends on the next question: "far enough to accomplish what?" Back in the 80's, there were some videos made about the classroom of the future. These short videos detailed an assignment of a high school track star who was stuck at home with a broken leg. The video however, purveyed the idea that the student was still able to participate in class via video conferencing, and how he was assigned a partner to do a research project for the following day. For his part of the assignment, this crippled track star accessed the school database via voice commands and found an article that interested him and shared it with his partner over the computer.

So, while watching these short videos, I determined that parts of this story were completely plausible with today's existing technologies, but other parts of the technology used may exist, but is not commonly used. Today video conferencing is completely plausible, and becoming quite common actually. We have Skype, we have Adobe Acrobat, and we have other such programs. However, accessing a school's database via voice command from your home computer seems a bit out of reach.


Side note: If they can depict the kind of technology described in the aforementioned videos, and seen in this clip from Iron Man, then why not in reality? If it has been done in reality, why is it not available to the masses?

Anyways, technology may have come far, but it still has a ways to go to match our imagination.