Doug Johnson

All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. - Arthur Schopenhauer

• Cellphones/smartphones/netbooks/laptops and other student-owned devices in schools. Parents will overrule any school’s attempts to ban these devices, despite how distracting they can be. Good libraries will need reasonable rules surrounding their use. Like these: Student-owned technologies such as cellphones and laptops may be used in the classroom when there is not a whole-group activity, when their use does not distract other students, and when the district’s Acceptable Use Policy is followed. But a total ban isn’t feasible.

• Internet filters, censors and filter work-arounds. Even the most sophisticated Internet filters in schools today block some good stuff and let some bad stuff through. It’s easier for sharp kids to get around Internet filters than ever. (Just do a search on “Facebook workaround”.) Adult supervision of student computer use is still needed. We’ll have to accept that censors will be with us online every bit as much as those in the print world.
• Web 2.0 tools. Although it feels overwhelming, wikis, blogs, Nings, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter and other “social” forms of networking in one incarnation or another are here to stay. The ability to easily create and share content online is just too fun, too useful and too addictive - for both kids and adults.
• Wikipedia. The “wisdom of the crowds” as demonstrated by Wikipedia, Tripadvisor and Yelp is a permanent authoritative source. I don’t care what your Reference I professor said.
• GoogleSearch. It’s easy, fast and effective. Really, would you want Google to go away? Will your library users ever go back to starting with the library catalog? I don’t think so.
• Term paper mills. The Internet is a giant copying machine. If intellectual property is copied and used without citation, it’s plagiarism. Kids copied from print encyclopedias as long as there were print encyclopedias. Electronic copying will be around as long as there is the Internet.
• Stupid YouTube videos, gross web sites, and other time wasters. Anyone who has ever worked with middle school students knows that tastelessness is a primary reason these kids get up in the morning. Seems I remember a couple off color jokes from when I was in junior high myself.
• Gaming in education. The real power of educational gaming is just being recognized. As educators strive to motivate all students, game play - both individual or social - will grow in popularity. Take down those “No games!” signs today..
• Expectation for wi-fi access by students, staff and visitors. Many of us now carry our “external brains” with us in a computing device. If we can’t get wireless Internet access, well, we just can fully function. Oh, those computer labs? Be thinking what you want to do with all that extra space.
• E-books. As I write this in the summer of 2010, Amazon announced that e-book sales surpassed hardback book sales and predicted they would outpace paperback sales soon. E-book readers are close to the $100 price point. E-books are getting “social” with notes and highlights being shared by readers automatically. Are we really going to turn back to print next year?
• Off site applications and cloud computing. Our services, storage and tools are leaving our internal networks, desktops and flash drives. Computing will consist of resources being stored and delivered via the Internet through inexpensive, low-powered computers like netbooks or tablets. It’s the economic model of the future.
• Budget uncertainties, testing, accountability and policy churn. The growing awareness that an educated citizenry is critical to a country’s health and growth is resulting in a lot of political attention being paid to education - some good, some not so good. The ability for a school and all the individuals in it to be able to demonstrate empirically that they are making a difference is a permanent part of the educational landscape.