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Twenty-five years ago, one would have been hard-pressed to predict that the "Internet," a small confederation of computers found mostly in computer-science departments, would evolve into an indispensable tool of education (and everything else). Only a true early-1980s visionary could have seen the original "brick phones"—the first "portable" cell phones, marvels of their day—and imagined our GPS-enabled, media-streaming, IM- and e-mail-flooded, camera-equipped, tilt-sensing smart phones. Projecting ahead to 2034, how will information technology affect how students learn at Future Duke?
First, don't panic. The future of computing and information technology will not involve bulky cyborg explants. We will expect continuous active and passive access to the world's collective and constantly updated "cloud" of information—the totality of human knowledge at a given instant. We will indeed use a variety of devices to access and contribute to the cloud, but these devices will be discrete. Many will be ubiquitous in the world around us; others we will carry, wear, or have implanted. There will still be a role for keyboards and other specialized devices to aid in the production of large amounts of text, but most interactions with the information cloud will be through alternate, more natural means that will make it unnecessary for us to go to a "computer." (Who knows, maybe voice recognition will even work by then!)
Students in 2034 will have grown up in the cloud, and they will hardly think twice about the "T" in IT. A century ago, electric motors made possible a host of new inventions, but each motor asserted itself on the user, requiring frequent maintenance and attention. Eventually, engineers learned to design maintenance-free motors that simply "disappeared" into the devices in which they play a vital role. Old-timers in 2034 recounting tales of downloading firmware patches and updating device drivers will draw the same looks of incredulity that great-grandpa gets today when he describes checking the commutator brushes for sparks.
Nearly every manufactured item, and many natural ones, will be tagged with sensors and enough networking smarts to relay, at a minimum, the existence, location, and overall state of the item to the cloud. It may very well have a camera and microphone, to capture the state of its local environment, as well. This network will be largely self-organizing and self-maintaining. The cloud and the devices we use to access it will augment reality: If we choose, our earpiece will be able to whisper the name and major of the casual acquaintance passing us in the quad; information about the dietary value of the meal we're assembling in the Great Hall will project onto our tray. During a lecture, supplemental information about a term we are unfamiliar with, or alternate solution techniques for a problem under discussion, may discreetly appear in the margins of our notes.
Today, social-networking sites allow us and our "friends" to capture, preserve, and carefully index selected still photos of us at our best and not-so-best (whether we want them to or not). User-generated, casually recorded video is in its infancy today. Twenty-five years from now, the output of hundreds of millions of fixed and mobile video cameras combined with automated video indexing and archiving will fundamentally redefine privacy in ways that could make 1984's Big Brother seem to be an amateur. Students in 2034 will be among the first to have grown up with carefully indexed multimedia records that have captured nearly all moments of their lives—flattering and otherwise. Faculty members and students alike will be struggling with what this means for the future of humanity.
"Telepresence" technologies will permit compelling "in-person" interactions among groups of people, regardless of geography. This will doubly challenge the residential university model: Why should I have to move to Durham to take Duke's classes? Why shouldn't I just assemble a smorgasbord of the best courses from all over the planet? Duke will accommodate aspects of both objections with aggressive remote-presence programs of our own, but our administrators will continue to wax eloquent on the value of four years spent on our idyllic campus.
Many on the present-day faculty bemoan reliance on simple Web searches and "amateur" productions like Wikipedia for serious scholarship, but by 2034, the tools of editorial judgment and peer review will have been applied to the complete corpus of traditional academic output. Imagine a Wikipedia successor in which article summaries expand (when desired) to monograph length, with exhaustive annotated bibliographies. All the discipline-specific measurements of the quality of an article (reviews, relevance scores, citation counts) will be carried as part of its metadata.
Accessing every opinion ever written (or spoken or filmed) about the causes of the French Revolution will not be the challenge facing students in a freshman history course; the job of the academy will be, even more than today, to teach students how to home in on high-quality information. Though libraries as repositories of printed information will be largely obsolete, librarians will be more important than ever to index, archive, and teach navigation in the cloud. Strap on your sensors, and don't forget, the cloud remembers all!
