Tag: predictions

my edtech predictions for 2013

So, Dr. Bates calls out Audrey Watters for not making predictions for 2013. I’d love to see her predictions. Fair’s fair, though, so here are mine:1

  1. Lots of people will do small-scale innovative projects with no funding or resources, because they love trying new things and doing awesome stuff.
  2. Some companies or institutions will “invent” or “discover” something that one or more of these people have been doing, and it will be branded as their own.
  3. This branded “innovation” will become co-opted and corrupted, so that it doesn’t really do anything innovative, or anything other than building the reputation of the “innovators”.
  4. People will hype the crap out of the “innovation” as The Future of Education, and The Saviour (or Disruption) of Universities, and present it at conferences and write papers and travel the presentation circuit explaining it to the masses.
  5. The people from 1. will largely ignore the hype, shrug their shoulders, and continue doing awesome stuff because they enjoy doing awesome stuff.

I feel pretty safe standing behind these recommendations for 2013, because that’s the pattern of innovation that’s happened pretty much every year I’ve been playing with edtech.2

  1. some of the details have been left out, but can easily be filled in as an exercise left to the reader [↩]
  2. which, holy crap, has been for almost 2 decades. which, holy crap, is a lifetime or two in edtech [↩]