Infographic: the future of ed tech

The future of education technology is an infographic which envisions a set of emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on education over the next thirty years. It’s the result of a collaboration between  TFE Research and Michell Zappa, a Berlin-based emerging technology strategist with Envisioning Technology.

The image is organized around three environments – classroom, studio, and virtual – and several overarching concepts – gamification, opening of information, digitized classrooms, disintermediation, and computing, and virtual/physical studios.

Moving from top to bottom, six stages are laid out in numbered gray boxes, ending with this prediction:

Over time, education becomes a continuous, interconnected effort, allowing students to cope with a perpetually changing world.

This kind of forecast can be very useful to an institution as a discussion starter. You might start by asking yourself these questions:

• Which parts of this vision are the most plausible?
• Which ideas seem the most outrageous?
• What’s missing and what doesn’t belong?
• What are we already doing?
• What do we need to start exploring?
• Do we need a vision for ed tech?