The Once and Future Kingdom of Learning

**or**

"We're Wired, Webbed, Windowed, Wireless, and Wapped,\
Now What?"

by Bernie Trilling

Senior Director, Think.com

Oracle Education Initiatives

bernie.trilling@oracle.com

*Prologue: A Back to the Future Fable*

In a kingdom long ago, but not too far away, there reigned an
extraordinarily farsighted ruler, King Wallace, and his wonderfully
practical and competent wife, Queen Nettie.

One stormy night, after a rather contentious day at court, King Wallace
had an unusually vivid dream. He envisioned his kingdom transformed into
a beauteously tranquil paradise dedicated to the glorious pursuit of
learning, where all the world's knowledge was easily accessible,
24/7/365, inscribed on a tapestry of myriad and intricate stone walls
weaving throughout the land.

The kingdom was dubbed -- "Learnalot" \[trumpet fanfare\].

He gazed with amazement upon his loyal subjects, young and old, pouring
over the timeless words and great thoughts of the ages, chiseling
brilliant new ideas, inventions, epic poems, and songs of great beauty
and truth, all on this vast network of walls, hailed as the "Great Wall
of King Wallace".

He watched as the Hard Ware Guild Masons furiously mortared stone upon
stone to expand the network infrastructure, while the Soft Ware Guild
Sculptors spread smooth, rewriteable, firewalled clay in countless even
lines, forming neat rows and tables ready for users to inscribe,
on-line, their data upon this base.

And this ever-increasing monument to technological innovation stretched
far beyond the horizon, to the four corners of the firmament, until all
the countless realms of the known world were connected to the one great
World Wide Wall.

What moved him almost to tears though, were the peaceful, contented
faces of the people -- so happy to dwell in a land where each and every
soul could become learned and realize their inborn potentials, where
learning was truly King (next to his Royal Highness, that is). "Ahhh,"
he thought in his dream, "if only *I* could rule over such a peaceable
and noble Knowledge Society."

When he awoke, he found Queen Nettie gazing out the window with a most
unbecoming look of horror. "Look my Lord," she gasped, "something awful
has befallen our kingdom -- there are walls strewn hither and yon like a
frightful maze of dragons upon the land. I knew you shouldn't have
insulted MoreLan the Magician last night!"

"'Tis just like my dream," King Wallace uttered as he reached for his
spectacles (being farsighted) and wobbled over to the window. "Yet a
dream it surely is not -- it is altogether real!"

"Oh, my beloved Queen," the King exclaimed, dramatically sweeping an
outstretched arm across the panoramic view from the turret window,\
"Behold . . . Learnalot! \[trumpet fanfare\] - the Noble Kingdom of
Learning. And we, my dearest, are the Laudatory Lord and Leading Lady of
Learning, the Magnificent Monarchs of Immortal Memorabilia, the Paragons
of Pedagogical Prodigiousness, the . . . "

"I smell trouble," interrupted Queen Nettie.

And down below in the streets, they witnessed an astonishing unfolding
of on-the-wall sights: Knights directing their Pages to inscribe
Jousting Tournament Schedules, noting the odds and where bets could be
made; the owner of the Upin Arms Pub posting advertisements for a
two-night, all-you-can-drink special; an entire section of the wall
devoted to buying, selling and auctioning everything imaginable, all
under an enormous "Wall Mart" sign; an entire thoroughfare, "Wall
Street," dedicated to betting on the future prices of barley, butter and
beer; entrepreneurs chiseling tunnels through the walls for quicker
inter-wall passings, then extorting exorbitant fees to all that passed
through these Portals; and much worse. Lurid illustrations that would
blush the face of any righteous mortal of the realm, plus a hefty
subscription fee to fully reveal more unholy images. Serfs surfing the
walls for notices of "a jolly good time" instead of plowing the fields.
What a nasty nightmare!

Soon there grew an uprising and wall-to-wall demands for a recall of the
King, led by Sir Ludd (with music provided by his Midi-Evil Minstrel
Band, the Luddites) and his hunky henchman, Sir Arnold. Their political
platform rested on "the protection of the young and innocent from Wall
Spam, the riddance of crass commercialization from the commons, and the
resurrection of failing moral and academic standards." The protestors
were soon joined by the Union of Serf Farmers, whose crops were blighted
by the shade from "all them bloody walls."

Day and night thousands marched through the shadowed rat-maze of walls,
voices united in one unending chant, tight-clenched fists raised with
each thundering cry, "Off The Wall! Off the Wall! Off the Wall!"

Then one morning, as if a billion dotted bombs burst without sound, the
walls crumbled, and vanished into thin air. And everything seemed more
peaceful and beauteous than ever before.

King Wallace turned to his Queen. "Alas, my Lady, you were right all
along. We are not in the least ready for the great Knowledge Age nor the
noble Learning Society. 'Tis time to return to *your* plans my dearest
-- stronger fishnets for the fishermen, improved plows for the plowmen,
better yeos for the yeomen -- and to dream of a future time when
learning is King."

"And Queen," added her Ladyship.

*Are We Ready for a Learning Society?*

One of the lessons you could derive from this somewhat fractured fable
is that there's nothing more disruptive than an idea (or a technology)
whose time has not yet come.

And this leads us to a few pivotal questions asked by concerned
educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, politicians, parents and
futurists alike: Is the Age of Knowledge really upon us? Is the time
finally right for a Learning Society powered by new technology? Are we
really ready for a 21^st^ Century version of our farsighted King's
cherished "Learnalot"?

Please check the appropriate box:

-   Nah, we'll never get there -- not enough funding, too much politics,
    poverty, pollution and people in this world; our technology is full
    of bugs, blackouts and bad design; we'll never overcome our greed
    and baser instincts, and besides, learning has always been for the
    privileged, and those driven enough to become privileged.

-   What's the problem? We're as good as there - we've got more
    technology than we'll ever need; kids everywhere are learning
    online, emailing and instant messaging across the planet every day;
    virtual schools are taking off like rockets; broadband multimedia
    for the masses is right around the corner; the NetGen kids take to
    PDAs, cell phones, laptops, tablets, MP3 players and all the rest
    like babes to a bottle -- just sit back and enjoy the ride!

-   We're getting closer, we've got a lot of the right technology but
    there's so much more work to be done on the best ways to use the
    technology for learning; given our diverse learners, the need for
    personalized learning methods to gain knowledge worker skills has
    never been greater; it may take a long time, but we really have no
    choice but to work hard toward making it happen, for all our
    children, our quality of life, for our future; and besides, the best
    way to predict the future is to lend a hand in inventing it.

If you checked the first box, the Perpetual Pessimist's Position, you
might as well stop reading now -- you will most likely be pretty
frustrated with what follows.

If you checked the second box, the Totally Techno-Utopian Attitude, I
applaud your enthusiasm, but challenge you to read on and open yourself
to a slight attitude adjustment and some new insights that will help you
deal with issues you're likely to stumble on.

As you've probably guessed by now, the third box is closest to the
perspective I see as most appropriate for moving forward -- the Ready
Realist's Response to the educational future that faces us today. So if
you checked this one, much of the following will resonate with you.

*Where Was the Party?*

It happened quietly, without fanfare or fireworks. In 1991, US spending
for Industrial Age capital goods -- manufacturing machinery,
agricultural equipment, etc. -- was exceeded for the first time in
history by spending on information technology -- computers and
telecommunications hardware and software. This turning point can be seen
as marking Year One of a new Age of Information and Knowledge.

Since then, companies in the US and other post-industrial countries have
spent ever more on equipment that makes, manipulates, manages, and moves
the bits and bytes of information than on the machines that do the same
for the molecules of physical matter.

![](media/image1.wmf)This shift from an industrial-based society to an
information and knowledge-based one has forever altered the "value
chain" of work and the everyday workings of our society. It is getting
much harder to earn a good living from manual work or from
non-technical, repetitive factory tasks that involve little thought
beyond basic literacy and numeracy. Brainpower has displaced
muscle-and-horsepower in the Knowledge Age.

This transformation, as far-reaching as the sea change from the
Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age, has in turn transformed what
each of us must do to successfully prepare for society's life and work.
This "preparation for life's work" is the central concern of education
and learning. But the mission of education today has radically changed
from its mission just a few decades ago. What's more, learning and
knowledge-creating, the core mental work of education and innovation,
have now become the central pursuits of our time and the royal roads to
a successful and satisfying life.

No wonder every aspiring politician wants to be *the* "education
leader," and "knowledge management," "lifelong learning," and "learning
organizations" are phrases common enough in business today to be the
subjects of Dilbert cartoons.

As we navigate our way along this new and bumpy road into the Knowledge
Age, we need to take a closer look at what the future will expect of us
-- what new skills, knowledge and values all learners will need to
acquire, and all knowledge workers will need to apply to their work.

*The 21^st^ Century Learning Formula*

![](media/image2.wmf)So what are the key 21^st^ Century, Knowledge Age
skills, the mastering of which will help ensure everyone's success in
the future? Let's call them the 7Cs:

These seven clusters of skills, along with the even more crucial, basic
3Rs of Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic (what happened to spelling?) can
be considered the "new basics" -- the new formula for success and
achievement in our times:

***3Rs X 7Cs = 21^st^ Century Learning***

Attaining and applying the product of both the basic 3Rs and the higher
level 7Cs skills will comprise the new, expanded definition of learning
achievement. The measurement and testing of the full range of these
skills will be a new goal of our accountability efforts in education and
training.

As we look over the list of 7Cs skills above, an unsettling set of
questions arises: How will we ever get to these new skills when we're
still struggling with doing a good job on the 3Rs? Where are these
additional skills being learned in our existing education system? Where
are the standards that set the learning of these skills as goals? Where
are the tests and assessments that are measuring the learning of the
full complement of these skills? Where are the curricula and learning
programs that are building these skills from the earliest ages right
through to adult education? And where are the technology-enhanced
learning programs that are providing personalized curricular programs
geared to the strengths and weaknesses of each and every learner so that
we truly leave no child behind?

And on top of needing all these enhanced skills, we now live in the most
sophisticated technological world ever devised, where basic science and
technology literacy has become essential for an informed citizenry
participating in democratic decision-making.

We also live in the most diverse societies in history. This can be a
source of great conflict, a tremendous challenge to an equitable and
just society, or a source of great creativity and strength, especially
if this rich diversity of perspectives and backgrounds can be
effectively harnessed toward solving our ever more complex societal
problems.

In short, things have changed most dramatically. Our schools and
education system were *designed for an age that has just passed*. Though
highly effective for the previous Industrial age, and still effective
for some of the old demands that persist in our times, our world now
requires inventing new approaches to preparing our children and workers
for a different future.

But what does this Knowledge Age learning really look like? What role
does technology play in the Knowledge Age classroom? How different is it
really from traditional classrooms?

# The New Learning Environments

![](media/image3.wmf)The following chart outlines the kinds of shifts
that are occurring in classrooms and schools around the world as the
needs of the new Knowledge Society are considered, new research on how
we learn is applied to education, new ways of learning and teaching are
invented, and information and communication technologies are effectively
embedded into the everyday fabric of learning and teaching.

It's important to note that this chart overemphasizes the polarity
between the two Ages. In fact, it is more accurate to say that both sets
of characteristics will, and should, carry on into the future. It's just
that the balance will continually shift to the right-hand side of the
chart as we move farther into the Knowledge Age.

But what would a school of the future really look like if it truly
answered to the needs, the evolving learning tools and our growing
understanding of the Knowledge Age we have now entered? What would we
expect to see?

### *Knowledge Age Community Learning Centers*

With a little imagination and some creative speculation, and from
reports from schools that are leading the way, we can begin to project
what some of these future learning environments might become:

*A hybrid campus open 7 days a week that houses a public school (or
schools) as well as a variety of non-profit and for-profit educational,
social, health, community, and recreational organizations and small
businesses, including a learning supplies store, a community computing
center, a health clinic, a social services center, a laundromat, a
family-oriented restaurant, a community gym and recreation center, a
music and arts learning center, an adult education center, etc.; all
locally orchestrated by a site "principal" and regionally managed by a
"district" executive management team in charge of negotiating contracts
and maintaining a balanced, high quality portfolio of services that meet
the needs of the community surrounding each of the district campuses.*

*Small groups of similar-age learners starting and ending each day in
their "homeroom" where their primary learning advisor (still called
"teacher") presents the day's activity options and project choices,
leads reflective discussions on issues and topics of current interest,
reviews progress toward mutually contracted goals, coaches and guides
students through their learning hurdles, coordinates the learning
resources and assistance needed, and provides caring support for the
social and emotional needs of each of their homeroom learners.*

> *A rich schedule of "live" instructional classes, presentations,
> demonstrations, field trips, and discussions and debates led by local
> and distant (through teleconferencing) teachers, experts and other
> students in formal (classroom) and informal (meeting room and
> community) spaces.*

*Small mixed age teams of learners working on a wide variety of projects
under the guidance of "project advisors" (teachers, parents and
community members) with exhibits of past projects displayed throughout
the campus and online - a dynamic "museum" of project-based learning.*

> *A wide assortment of "visceral," hands-on, learning resources --
> well-stocked library-museum-lab-workshop-technology-art-construction
> spaces, multipurpose music-dance-theater-recreation spaces, and
> outdoor garden-farm-biology-ecology spaces.*
>
> *Plenty of access to "virtual" online resources -- portable handheld
> computing with local wireless connections to online learning and
> reference tools, productivity applications and personal databases, and
> global access to multimedia information resources, collaboration and
> conferencing tools, libraries of learning simulations, etc.*

##### *A wide variety of quality "anytime, anyplace" online learning modules and courses for students and teachers, from highly interactive courses with online experts and mentors to rich multimedia reference encyclopedias, online libraries and resource centers.*

##### *Online assessments and certifications of knowledge and skills mastery, including simulation exercises and electronic portfolio reviews by learning advisory teams that include students, teachers and community experts, as well as in-person reviews by both teachers and students of hands-on performance in authentic, real-world and meaningful tasks.*

These Knowledge Age learning centers will extend into the community,
with apprenticeships, local service projects, storefront
mini-businesses, neighborhood projects, etc., as well as into the home
through telecommunications. And the community will extend back into the
learning centers with active community participation in a wide variety
of projects and programs.

Community college campuses, in some ways, are the early prototypes of
this model, especially those that are broadening their services to
include the needs of both younger and older learners and community
members.

### *What's Next: Top 10 Challenges for Education and Technology*

We have briefly looked at a fabled past, a challenging present, and the
outlines of a future for learning and teaching in our new Knowledge Age.
So how do we continue to invent this future together? The following
ten-point "challenge list" is offered to all who want to dig in and lend
a hand in shaping a better future for all of our Knowledge Age learners
and workers:

1.  **Personalized and Universally Designed Learning**\
    With the most diverse populations of learners in history, we must go
    from "one size fits all" to "the right size for each one" using
    technology to help personalize, differentiate and deliver a more
    flexible, universally designed curriculum; assistive technology has
    brought inclusion at the margins, now we must move what we've
    learned at the margins to the mainstream and treat each learner as
    "special", giving each student their profile-based version of
    learning resources that best matches their sensory and cognitive
    abilities, learning styles, level of competence, interests and
    preferences.

2.  **Online Collaborative Learning Environments\
    **We must make the web a great place for learning with spam-free
    email, easy web page creation and sharing, and rich messaging and
    collaboration tools for discussion, debate, research and
    collaborative learning projects for students and teachers across the
    globe. Projects like Oracle's Think.com are leading the way in
    providing this kind of integrated, hosted collaborative learning
    environment delivered to any learner's or teacher's web browser.
    Audio- and video-based collaboration and telepresence tools,
    templates and tools to support all stages of online learning
    projects, lessons and cross-cultural exchanges, as well as new ways
    to collect samples of all this work in digital portfolios, are just
    some of the areas for future enhancements of these learning support
    services.

3.  **Encyclo-medias, Learning Games and Simulation Libraries\
    **The time has come to get serious about creating a global online
    library for learning that would provide universal access (free, like
    the US library system, and available in many of the world's
    languages) to rich assortments of online multimedia encyclopedias
    for any subject imaginable; age-appropriate commercial-free news and
    information; and most importantly, a diverse library of high-quality
    interactive simulations and learning games that would immerse
    learners in all sorts of worlds, from chemical photosynthesis to
    stellar evolution, simple machines to complex economic cycles. Many
    of these learning resources could even be created by students, like
    the highly successful ThinkQuest program and library of
    student-built learning websites sponsored by the Oracle Help Us Help
    Foundation. This would go a long way to answering the question posed
    in this article's subtitle, "We're Wired, Webbed, Windowed, Wireless
    and Wapped, Now What?"

4.  **A 21^st^ Century Balanced Approach to Learning\
    **With all of our new choices in learning technology comes the
    weighty responsibility of using it appropriately and effectively.
    This is where we need a new balance in our learning methods -- a
    balance of online and hands-on, on-screen and off, virtual and
    visceral, instruction and construction, teacher-initiated and
    student-led. We especially need more models of learning programs
    that effectively combine on-screen activities, projects and
    simulations, with hands-on construction kits, design challenges,
    probeware, discovery labs, and real world explorations.

5.  **The Mobile Learning and Teaching Tablet\
    **The time is right to design, from the ground up, a mobile
    handheld/tablet (a "handlet"?) device that has learning as the
    number one design objective, and to assemble the integrated online
    services suite that would fully support all the tasks a student
    encounters in the day-to-day learning process -- research,
    messaging, composition, data collection, multimedia publishing, or
    running learning simulations. The same for teachers and all the
    tasks involved in the teaching process. Also one for administrators
    and their administrative tasks, data-informed decision-making and
    leadership work. Most of the puzzle pieces are there -- they now
    need to be integrated, web-enabled, and made super easy to use.

6.  **Digital Portfolios and Embedded Assessments\
    **As we move toward doing more and more of the daily business of
    learning and teaching onscreen and online, it makes great sense to
    be able to capture snapshots of this digital work in an electronic
    portfolio, for review, assessment, parent conferences, and for
    students to see their capacities grow. It also makes sense to embed
    within the daily onscreen work, electronic diagnostics and
    assessments that provide the feedback needed to keep learning on
    track. Much good work is being done here already -- further efforts
    are needed to expand the range of what is being assessed (like the
    7Cs skills) and to use more efficient methods like adaptive
    assessment that significantly decrease the number of items needed to
    gauge a student's proficiency level.

7.  **Leadership Development for Digital Educators\
    **The speed and level of success of the transformations in learning
    and teaching outlined in this article are totally dependent on the
    capacity of educators to lead and sustain change, especially in the
    face of unbelievable constraints and opposing forces. Transformative
    change, the most difficult kind of change to manage, is not yet a
    regular subject of administrators' leadership development, nor of
    teachers' professional development. It needs to be. And the role of
    technology in stimulating, supporting and sustaining this
    transformative change must also be in the training. Here is where
    successful business leaders, also challenged by the times, could
    help educators, allowing for the fact that the worlds of education
    and business have some very significant differences.

8.  **21^st^ Century Learning Spaces\
    **New learning methods, new learning technologies, and a new mission
    for education demand a fresh look at the physical environment
    necessary to enable and support a new learning and teaching model.
    The 21^st^ Century Schoolhouse will have to provide students
    personal spaces for their digital equipment as well as their books;
    group areas for computer-supported teamwork on projects; places to
    project electronic work on big screens; electronically-supported
    studios for art, music and media productions; science labs with
    handheld electronic sensors and probes feeding data into laptops for
    analysis and display; portable electronic field packs for collecting
    data, taking digital photos and videos, and studying local
    environments. The design of schools and community learning
    environments will be a fertile area for experimentation and
    innovation.

9.  **The Integrated Learning Utility\
    **We've heard a lot about data warehouses and integrated portals for
    education, and there's been much progress with initiatives like the
    School Interoperability Framework (SIF). Given the financial woes
    that have swept across states and countries recently, we may need a
    fresh strategy to move this integration effort along. It's time to
    look at creating an integrated, open source, hosted web services
    approach to running all the administrative systems of a school
    district or state, and connecting this, in the same data repository,
    to a standards-based comprehensive library of learning resources.
    The challenges here are tremendous given the legacy systems
    involved, but improving the quality and efficiency of education is
    totally dependent on being able to link student information with
    instructional strategies and to provide the right resources to a
    student or teacher when they most need it. The efficiencies gained
    here could free up dollars to invest back into instructional
    programs too. This may be the holy grail of educational computing,
    but it's time we get serious about the quest.

10. **A Global United Learning Alliance\
    **The healthy development of a whole child -- body, mind and spirit
    -- is, and always will be, a tremendous challenge. And now that
    we're putting more and more of the resources addressing this
    challenge on the World Wide Web, any local effort can instantly
    become a global one. It therefore is necessary to begin to tackle
    the 21^st^ Century learning needs of our children from a global
    perspective. We need an international alliance of education,
    business, health and government to take up the challenge of
    preparing as many learners as possible to join the knowledge
    workforce of our times. Through distance learning programs, online
    mentoring, and collaborative learning projects, the opportunity to
    learn can be extended farther than ever before. This Global Learning
    Alliance could provide the leadership to attract and manage the
    resources necessary to coordinate this effort. Our economies, our
    families, our quality of life, and our future depend on our children
    getting a quality 21^st^ Century education.

*Towards a Global Kingdom of Learning*

We have seen some of the important work that must be done for technology
to continue being a powerful partner and catalyst in the transformation
of learning and teaching. These are just a few of the needed pieces in a
much more complex, 3-D educational jigsaw puzzle of social, political,
economic, infrastructural and, most important, human components.

The challenges that our newly arrived Age of Knowledge brings to
learning and education are great, but the promise of a Renaissance of
learning -- a 21^st^ Century Learning Society that lives up to King
Wallace's "Learnalot" dream -- is even greater. There is much good work
to be done in helping to make this vision of a global "Kingdom of
Learning" a reality for all lifelong learners and workers in our new
Knowledge Age.

For More Information

This article is based on an earlier and more in-depth paper by the
author and a colleague that includes an extensive bibliography. It can
be retrieved from:

[**http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/learning_technology.pdf**](http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/learning_technology.pdf)

More information about the free Think.com protected email, website
creation and online collaborative learning tools for schools can be
found at:

[**http://www.think.com/**](http://www.think.com/)

Further details on the ThinkQuest program where students create learning
resources for other students and teachers can be located at:

[**www.thinkquest.org/programs.html**](http://www.thinkquest.org/)

Information about the School Interoperability Framework can be found at:

[**www.sifinfo.org/about.html**](http://www.sifinfo.org/)

Further information about 21^st^ Century learning can be found in an
online publication from the Partnership for 21^st^ Century Skills:

[**http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/downloads/P21_Report.pdf**](http://www.21stcenturyskills.org/downloads/P21_Report.pdf)

To see and hear about schools that are pioneering their way into the
Knowledge Age, visit the George Lucas Educational Foundations website:

[**www.glef.org/**](http://www.edutopia.org/)