Guest Author Ray Gallon
If a child grows up with Augmented Reality (AR) all around, what notion will that child have about what is “real”?
In a world where fake news abounds, and is easy to produce, what can we do to know which news sources we can trust?
When interconnected objects take autonomous decisions, how do we trace accountability for those decisions in the event of a lawsuit 15 years later?
When your loved one’s surgery is performed by a robot, will you be willing to accept that they might die, as you probably would if the surgeon were human? What education do we need, as patients, before being operated on by a medical robot?
These are just some of the types of questions that the teachers educating our children in the next five to ten years will need to answer, if we want them to be prepared to live in the Industry 4.0 world and beyond.
Paradigm shift technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Human Bionics are posing numerous epistemological, ethical, and cognitive challenges that society is going to have to deal with. We information specialists are among those that already have some expertise dealing with these issues, and we have a potentially important role in developing how society responds to them, and how we educate ourselves to live well amongst them.
Because this is such a vital issue, the Industry 4.0 Consortium is putting together an educational working group. It is composed of teacher trainers, instructional designers, education theorists, cognitive scientists, educational technologists, and professional trainers, many of whom are equally well known in information and education circles. Among the issues to be tackled:
- How to live together in hybrid communities that include machines and humans?
- How do we define diversity and interculturality in that context?
- How do we turn eInformation into eKnowledge?
- What does critical thinking mean on the Internet?
- Can we relearn how to have real dialogue?
- Etc.
We plan to formally announce the working group in July of 2018, at the biannual conference of the World Federation of Associations for Teacher Education (WFATE), in Melbourne, Australia. But some work is already in progress, and you can hear two experts in the field talk about it at this year’s Information Energy conference, March 1-2 in Amsterdam.
- Dr. Linda Daniela, Chair of the Council for Promotion of Pedagogy of the University of Latvia, Head of the Scientific Institute of Pedagogy, and Expert in Education at the Council of Sciences of the Republic of Latvia, proposes that there is a Generation 5 coming, and asks if we are ready for them – indeed, if we have any idea of what criteria we need to be able to evaluate success in their education.
- Dr. Patrice Prusko, Instructional Designer at Cornell University, Lecturer at SUNY Empire State College School for Graduate Studies, and consultant, asks, “What Does It Mean to Be an Educated Person in a World Where humans, machines and information are interconnected?” She’ll show how she uses the SenseMaker software and methodology to try and arrive at some conclusions.
You can learn more about their presentations at Learning for and around 4.0. Then, register for the conference, and join us in Amsterdam, to exchange, interact, and debate with us on this and so many more vital subjects.
About the Author
Ray Gallon is the co-founder of The Transformation Society, a research and consulting company. He has over 40 years as a communicator, first as an award-winning radio producer and journalist, then in the technical content industries. His management experience includes a stint as program manager of WNYC-FM, New York City’s public radio station.
Ray has always been interested in the meeting point between technology and culture, and has used his broad experience to advantage with companies such as IBM or the OECD, as well as in smaller companies and startup enterprises. Ray is a university lecturer and a speaker at events throughout the world.
