As I mentioned in an earlier post, Robin Good, in his recent “10 Technologies which will change the way we learn in the future” discussed several discrete trends and challenged us to think about how they may affect the world of learning. I believe that all of Robin’s listed technologies are already here, and I’ve been thinking of technologies that are really “out there”, imagining Matrix-like learning delivery systems, Artificial Intelligences, or even a return to some new kind of human-computer apprenticeships.
Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed pointed me to an article at Educause [PDF] which comes at this future in a different way: instead of seeing Robin’s technologies as discrete entities, authors Ellen R. Cohn and Bernard J. Hibbits explore what happens when these technologies all intersect. After exploring the some of the shortcomings of “e-portfolios” — a current trend in higher education which sees students collecting research, classwork, writings, photos and other materials into an online space which represents the results of their time in school — they cast their view wider, asking:

What do we wish for? That every citizen, at birth, will be granted a cradle-to-grave, lifetime personal Web space that will enable connections among personal, educational, social, and business systems.

They give this system a name, a “Lifetime Personal Web Space” or LPWS. Imagine we could connect our Flickr accounts or Shutterfly accounts, our blogs, our bookmarks on del.icio.us, our RSS feeds on Bloglines, our friends on Friendster and Orkut and our instant messenger buddy lists, our business contacts on Linked-in, our mail on Gmail and Hotmail, our PCs via Google Desktop Search, our bulletin board postings, our Yahoo! calendars and evite invites, our purchase histories on Amazon and iTunes Music Store, our college coursework on Blackboard, the full text of every book and textbook we’ve ever bought, digital copies of our purchased movies and albums…
Go further: connect in your entire banking history from your first dollar in a savings account when you were in first grade, your health records, your pets’ health records, your public school report cards, your driving records, your passport stamps and electronic toll records, your telephone logs, income tax returns…
It could be scary, but what if YOU had control of all this information, strongly encrypted and stored in small replicated pieces a la Freenet or similar schemes? What if YOU could link this information together any way you want, make any of it public or private, inerconnect it with other people’s records? Or what if you let the system suggest linkages along lines you approve, collaboratively filtering many aspects of your life, finding similarities and dissimilarities between you and the other billions of people of the world? And when you die, your LPWS lives on, perhaps with a visual simulacra of yourself acting as an interface to this repository, answering questions about you, telling your stories; this “ghost” of you, automatically links to the LPWS of your children and perhaps your friends.
What effect would this have on learning? How would we comprehend the world if we had available to us at any time and anywhere everything we have ever learned? What would the world be like if you could never forget anything? Not even those love letters and poems you wrote in 5th grade? One of my friends, in her early forties, is constantly telling me that she is having “senior moments” where she can’t remember the name of someone we both knew many years ago, but who has since dropped out of our lives, or the name of a bar we used to frequent, or so many other things. Another friend recently emailed me to remind me that 10 years ago that day, we’d seen the Jesus and Mary Chain play at a club long-since closed in Manhattan. (It was a great show, but I never would have remembered.) Imagine that was automatic.
Ahhh… techno-utopia…