Bill Sharpe
Introduction
We are living through a time of profound change in the landscape of digital technology and the way it interacts with our everyday lives. We are all familiar with the growing range of digital gadgets that have brought computing off the office desktop and into our homes and pockets - digital cameras, smart phones, GPS navigators, music players, personal video recorders and so on. However, these are just one strand of a much bigger generational shift in digital technology that can be likened to the Cambrian explosion of life on earth. At that time, after billions of years of very simple organisms, life reached a tipping point in which there was a massive growth in variety and complexity, giving us everything from social insects to societies of humans. After just fifty years of the computing industry we are also at a tipping point, for we are on the brink of a major shift in the range and complexity of artificial systems that will share our lives.
This shift creates an era of opportunity for education. At the heart of education and learning lie the encounters that an individual has with people, places and things, and the opportunity each encounter presents for interaction, challenge and growth. As digital technology pervades everything around us, we can enrich each encounter to harness the global resources of the information world and of learning communities, to make it more appropriate in that moment to that individual. This article describes the main components of the technology evolution that is under way, and some of the collaborative research between technologists and educational researchers that is revealing its educational potential.