Taking the Classroom to the Cloud
A classroom entirely in the cloud is a stretch for many of us who have been taught in classrooms made of brick and mortar – get over it! Cloud-based learning is second nature for millennials, who spends more time learning outside of the classroom in social media, through online gaming, and via rich, pervasive media.
Doubtful? If you have kids, nephews, nieces or grandchildren just look at the way they play. Guess what? That’s the way they will work.
Don’t make the mistake of setting these games aside as simply a form of entertainment. If you could engage kids in a classroom to just one-tenth of the degree that they are engaged in online gaming, you would have likely achieved super-teacher status.
As a parent of millennials I have to admit it isn’t always something I embrace. My son Adam plays games online that I see little educational value in at first glance. For instance, online war games. Their realism and the degree to which they make play out of a scenario that involves a battlefield is for me profoundly disturbing.
Yet, this is a reflection of how modern warfare is being fought in military theaters around the world where hi tech soldiers are operating drones and using lethal force thousands of miles away from the battlefield. Do I like this? Absolutely not. Does it make war antiseptic in a way that I find troubling? Of course. Would I prefer that if Adam some day becomes a soldier he fight a battle by joystick rather than in a trench? Do you doubt that any parent would?
This discussion of gaming may seem a departure from the notion of education in the cloud. It is not. My point is simply that we are re-engineering education in ways and in experiences that we are just beginning to understand. A generation of kids is being raised to expect a level of realism from all education that does not just mimic the real world but is indistinguishable from it, and in some ways preferred to it. If we do not bring that experience to the classroom we will lose the attention of this generation faster than you can change the channel on your TV.
The ultimate power of the cloud is to broaden the reach and gravity of education across as many minds as possible by engaging these minds wherever and whenever they are. Not just a billion minds but seven billion – every last one one the planet.
However, there is something beyond engagement that offers an even more compelling value proposition for education in the cloud, and it’s one that most of us do not consider often enough.
Education leads to empowerment: it broadens our appreciation for our potential both as individuals and as a society. The overriding trajectory of this empowerment is the creation of a society in which we collaborate much more freely and place a much higher value on the process of collaboration.
This eventually leads to an appreciation of the role of democratization as a political institution in which the individual perceives a greater likelihood of prosperity. The protection of that prosperity then becomes a central theme for individuals and institutions. The result? It’s been said that in the history of the world, no two established democracies have ever gone to war with each other. While this is a hotly debated statement, depending on how you define an “established democracy” and a war, it does hint at how democratic self-interest translates into intereliance and the need to maintain stability wherever and however possible. Beyond degrees and accolades this is the greatest benefit that universal education can confer.
The dramatic changes in education that result from the cloud will ultimately be the greatest force in changing the way we experience not only the cloud but life itself. They will set the expectation for what our play and our work should look like and also what our personal and professional interactions should feel like. To imagine that future at this point may require a fair amount of speculation and conjecture, but unlike past changes of this magnitude, we will not have to wait for generations to pass in order to experience this change and the behaviors it will bring.
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