Extreme predictions by Bill Gates and Nicholas Negroponte
At a Technology conference in Lake Tahoe, Bill Gates predicted that the best education will come from the web in five years.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/bill-gates-education/
I know there are plenty of online courses and huge pools information available on the web, all for free, but the only way Gates’ prediction works is if access to this same material is lost to those in the traditional school environment.
While you can get a lot out of a self-guided education, having the assistance of professional educators only helps to accelerate your learning. He did state that traditional higher education isn’t going away and K-12 is of vital importance, but it just seems silly to think that people don’t benefit from being immersed in a learning environment.
At the same conference, Nicholas Negroponte said that the physical book will be obsolete in five years.
He compared paper books transition to their digital counterparts to the music and film industry of a few decades ago.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/06/physical-book-dead/
I like this prediction, because the writing is on the wall as he says, and the powerful corporations with all the money are already shaping the transition. And that’s what really determines how fast the shift will take place.
Of course books won’t be completely replaced. Even though production will shrink, there will always be a market for physical, hold in your hands, flip through the pages, good old fashioned – books.
If nothing else, they will be prized like a
