In the 21st Century Learning-intensive Society, there could be no more education system with traditional schools but Learning Spaces, the new model of how people learn and how what they learn is used in everyday life. This visionary snapshot of our society-to-be is the rigorous result of the recently published study titled "School's Over: Learning Spaces in Europe in 2020: An Imagining Exercise on the Future of Learning", carried out by Riel Miller, Hanne Shapiro and Knud Erik Hilding-Hamann on behalf of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS).
The report is based on trends already in action today, in particular the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies that rise and spread social networking, collaborative content creation and democratised innovation, as well as a parallel tendency to self-generated personalisation in a do-it-yourself attitude which breaks down the barrier between amateur and professional.
It moves from the term 'Learning Spaces' (LS), used in a report published in 2006 by IPTS, and pushes its meaning ("a way to embrace a different view of future learning") forward, by refining the concept. The re-elaborated idea of 'LS' encompasses new ways of ensuring that people have the capacity to control, direct, share and deepen their knowledge throughout their lives.
In 2020, LS will enable people to build their identity as inter-dependent and inter-connected social beings producing in this way the wealth and community in which they live. Therefore, two major changes will occur in learning: the abandonment of the technocratic, hierarchical and exclusive approach to education and the marginalisation of institutionalised learning.
LS in a Learning-Intensive Society (LIS) will have the following characteristics. They will be:
- Personal digital spaces, a life long track of one's own learning achievements and ambitions;
- Connecting and social spaces, where all the learners meet physically and virtually to share experience;
- Trusted spaces, where everyone can assess both his own achievements and those of the others;
- Motivating and emotional spaces, where people approach the learning process with all the emotional and motivational feelings connected;
- Controllable, creative/experimental and open/reflexive spaces, where diversity , flexibility, creativity and self-reflectivness are key processes;
- Evaluated and certified spaces, where skilss and comptences are assessed and certified.
In such a framework, major policy measures will be needed to ensure appropriate and reliable digital learning accounts, with a verifiable identity controlled by the individual, and reputation systems, in order to set up evaluation, rules and institutions in charge of it. Appropriate universal systems regulating intellectual property rights and transactions as well as network rules and governance are other priorities to be addressed, together with indexing, referencing and privacy on the web. It should also be foreseen the announcement of the end of compulsory schooling, which will give way to the development of alternative and more efficient institutions. In order to meet all these challenges, the creation of a European Think Tank for Learning Spaces would be desirable.
Full report :
http://ftp.jrc.es/EURdoc/JRC47412.pdf
The Asia-Europe Classroom Network Conference (formerly known as International Teachers' Conference) is an annual meeting since year 2001 that gathers secondary and high school teachers and educators from Asia and Europe who take a keen interest in fostering collaborations among their students using infocomm (ICT) methods and tools. The online collaborative projects initiated at each Conference are referred to as the AEC Projects.