In their transition to the home school pods of the Global Village, teachers changed. In the schoolhouse classroom, teachers were like shop foremen in a manufacturing workshop. The shop produced widgets; the classroom produced knowledge-infused students.
In the workshop, it was easy to manage and motivate workers. Fall behind in your productivity quota and your paycheck shrunk. Make too many mistakes on the assembly line and the foreman reprimanded or fired you.
In the classroom, students learned at the pace set by the teacher. Fall behind and your GPA dropped. Goof off and the Principal disciplined or suspended you.
It is not like that in the Global Village. Teachers encourage learning in more creative ways. The very concept of sitting in front of a screen while a teacher speaks and the student listens is now archaic.
Intense interaction is the jet engine of online learning. Teachers use virtual reality and gaming to induce learning at the speed of thought. Students don’t memorize facts and details, they experience them.
Instead of reading about historical figures, students actually interview them using holographic presentations set in virtual reality. The power of gaming technology acquaints them with math and science skills. Audio and video surveillance creates a daily record of each student’s progress. Their teacher uses an AI-supported analytic system to evaluate their progress. This system not only benchmarks individual progress, but also compares each student’s progress with peers across the Global Village. At first, parents and some students objected to this intense comparison. So teachers explained that in the golden age of arcade video games, Taito’s Space Invaders, popularized the use of a posting high score for all players. Several video games in the next several years followed suit, by tracking high scores such that included the players’ initials in games like Asteroids in 1979. High score-chasing became a popular activity and a means of certifying skill levels using the unique handles of the top rated players. This same spirit vitalizes the learning process in the Global Village.
The Space Invaders Championship held by Atari in 1980 was the earliest large scale video game competition, attracting more than 10,000 participants across the United States, establishing competitive gaming as a mainstream hobby
Industrial Park teachers provided “just-in-case” learning; Global Village teachers provide “just-in-time” learning that meets the challenges of a rapidly changing world. Very little of what students learned in the Industrial Park is useful in this world. But it did prepare everyone just-in-case they competed in trivia games like Jeopardy and The Chase.
Today, knowledge is growing exponentially. In many fields, the useful life of knowledge is now measured in months rather than years. This has transformed the Teacher from pawnbroker of second-hand knowledge into a curator of essential and trusted new knowledge. There are no schoolhouses in the Global Village, there are only learning opportunities for everyone who sees learning as a life-long necessity.
The Future matures in the Present. That’s just the way it is in the Global Village.
