IEEE Future Directions
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In representation of EIT Digital I joined yesterday a panel at ETF Conference “Torino Process 2017: Changing Skills for a Changing World”. The panel theme was on how education can foster innovation in the coming years.
I was intrigued by the assertion fro one of the panelists, Eli Eisenberg, ORT Network, who flatly stated that “entrepreneurship, creativity and team working are not essential in the next decade, they are a survival kit!” The point is that without them you won’t be able to generate revenues and make a living.
Obviously, this cannot be true 100%, there will be plenty of works that will be needed and will not necessarily require those three characteristics but it is true that they will become more and more important, a sine qua non, for many future jobs (with the underlying assumption that most of those that will not require them will be taken over by robots, both in hardware and software form).
He also observed that we are basically teaching old stuff (the same we taught 200 years ago) in an old way (whilst kids are now used to interact in a quite different form). I guess that some of the old stuff (like learning to read and write, do some calculus) is still valid today and still need to be learnt, but I am fully with him that we are not leveraging on the potential of technology to improve learning and make it more effective. Besides, the gap between the way learning is funnelled (the way teachers communicate with pupils) is getting broader if we look at the way they are use to communicate every day…
I made, among else, the point that as evolution accelerate and knowledge expands it gets close to impossible to keep the pace. In the time a medical doctor read a research paper (say 15 minutes) 25 more papers are being published… A hopeless chase.
Knowledge is not just “growing”, it gets obsolete as well (the half time of knowledge in engineering was estimated in 35 years in 1930, it went down to 10 years in 1960 and it is now, according to several estimates, less than 5 years – see graphic).
Hence there is and will be a strong need for a continuous education but people are not eager to go back to school once they have tasted the “outside” world. Current attempts at creating MOOCs for continuous education do not seem successful.
What I see in the future is a response to this need coming from AR (Augmented Reality) applied to continuous education. As you do what you are supposed to do you get prompts on alternative ways that are now becoming possibile. Learning on the job with a personal twist is what I see as really promising. This is also a reason why industrial doctorates will be more and more useful, both for the students taking them as well as for the industry leveraging on them. EIT Digital is committed to become a point of reference in this area.
