2020 is only eleven years away, and thinking back to eleven years ago - 1998 - and seeing how far things have come, it's quite a scary prospect to see how things will be when I'm 32.
However I look in my crystal ball and see Scarlet. She's in her second year at university and things have changed. Of her four units in a semester, two are delivered fully online - two are still physical units to "keep the social aspect of university alive". In the online units, seminars are held online. Everyone logs onto the main-frame at a given time regardless of what they look like to take part in discussion. Nowadays a hangover isn't an excuse, one must simply roll out of bed.
Research is far easier than it previously was. A key-word search in Google now searches not only millions of academic articles, but also highlights important points and compares their usefulness against others. Essays are still alive and kicking, however. A trial whereby a students spoke into a word-processor to have it transcribe their essay had unfortunate mistakes and the traditional essay was favoured.
With all of this technology, do people see each other anymore, or is everything done online? Surprisingly not. Although units have been made online, this has brought everyone together through study groups and some unlikely friends have been made. Scarlet's going out with a few of her course mates tomorrow. It starts on Facebook at 7 with pre-drinks via webcam, and afterwards it's onto the Glasshouse for going out the "old fashioned way".
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I like the way you are integrating on/offline. This is wise because one of the things we learn from the early predictions about a life 'online' as an alternative to IRL is that in fact that never happened except for people who found social interaction hard -and then it tended to result in online connections motivating people to take their relationships offline too.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, some predictions now are that on/offline will become largely meaningless as most of waking life will be conducted IRL whilst 'online' -making that notion almost as redundant as the question of whether we are actually using our mobile at the moment, rather than simply carrying it everywhere and using it for various functions anytime.