The Future of Educational Job Security:
Many of you may have heard about CNN's use of holograms to report on Tuesday's Presidential campaign. Simply, reporter’s 3-D images were arrayed in studio utilizing cutting edge technology. I thought it was pretty cool, although at this point, it amounts to little more than that which networks have been able to be do since the 1960's, via satellite. However, it got me thinking about our very own industry, education.

I recently stumbled upon a video clip from the Cisco Corporation. This video clip illustrates several of the potentials that exist in the information dissemination field in the future. Take a look into a future where we have available a technology that potentially displaces the classroom teacher. I can see it now, in the year 20??, some school district, say in the Rocky Mountain region, opening its doors in September to students, who stream in with new wardrobes, to rooms filled with holographic portals, projecting private sector educational facilitators, who recently graduated from an educational IT program that marries pedagogy with information management systems, social networking platforms, and information dissemination devices. The economic implications may be extraordinary. Take a private contractor, who pays for their own insurance, developing a unique problem solving, experiential curriculum that caters to public school electives, charter and private school programs, or adult educational services. The individual would perform services across a large geographic region, utilizing tools such as Google apps, ning, delicious, online interactive whiteboards, and other digital tools available at the time. District's can begin to transfer financial resources into infrastructure, rather than salary. Health care, rising salaries, and qualitative instructional limitations would be replaced by a market driven by the surplus of teachers due to budgetary limitations as a result of our current global economic conditions. The tsunami effect such technology could have, would ripple into the very design of education, creating a bi-polar world within education. On the one side, those individuals who stand behind the standardization of students learning, and those who believe in "non-traditional" curriculums and environments.

Or maybe, it simply leads to

A Beautiful Morning!

I am glad to be writing again. I have spent the better part of the last eighteen months avoiding the writing portion of the blogosphere. I have a previous blog called classroom change, which I was very proud of and spent the better part of a year writing and contributing to the educational conversation that was occurring online. I feel I had a modest audience, and was interacting with what may be termed as some of the world's preeminent educational technologist. However, I have let that blog go dormant, where I will let it remain. It has served its purpose in providing me a great start into the read/write web. Since then, I have continued to develop a greater personal understanding of what is occurring and how the future may be impacted. Like some twenty something, needing to go see the Grand Canyon, or a trappist monk seeking peace and understanding in the solitude of Kentucky, I decided to take a break, and travel the educational technologist highway, hitch hiking across the internet in search of some greater enlightenment. I always loved the discussion occurring online regarding the transformative influence technology was having on our world; however, I felt the personal need to provide something of substance and reason.
Thus, I am brought to this moment, in the hopes of compiling a meaningful, thought provoking, dialogue about the future of our world’s educational environment. I am fully anticipating this dialogue crossing over into social, economic, political, technological, pedagogical, and cultural realms of society. In the end, I hold a tremendous amount of hope that any and all conversation will