This is one question that keeps pondering in our minds!
In the slighest sense, the future is merely a set of all moments yet to come. However what makes the future distinctive is not that it has happened yet, but rather a time when everything looks different from now. In this sense, if nothing about our society changes for the next 20 years, then the future is 20 years ahead. If things change in a decade, then the future is nearly at hand. No one can accurately predict the future but we know two things; it must be rooted in today's generation and it's going to be different.
Each generation is driven by a parental component like the previous were driven by agriculture in the agrarian age and crude oil that powered machines in the industrial age. Today's generation (information age) is driven by ICT and almost everybody around the world is connected by the internet.
ICT is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, thickening our capabilities to greater heights. Other animals are instinctively driven to build things like nests, honeycombs but we are the only ones that can invent new things and better ways of making them. We don't decide on what to build by making choices from some cosmic list of options given in advance, instead; by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world.
These are the kind of fundamental truths taught to students, but they are easily forgotten in a world where so much of what we do is to repeat what has been done yesterday. Our focus to re-enforce the basic truths should therefore target schools - a place where we start building our life!
With rapidly advancing ICT affecting our way of life, certain skills are becoming obsolete while others are in higher demand than ever before. Take an example back in 1990s, the first few years of the World Wide Web, creating and putting up a website required a specific set of skills and knowledge; a person had to know how to et up a server o the World Wide Web, how to get a domain name, how to write web pages in HTML and how to troubleshoot various technical issues as they piled up. Presently, many people manage their personal and business content on their websites and blogs without any technical knowledge on setting up servers, domain names, etc. It is very important to stay near the technology trends by developing the rightful skills that partly determine one's success.
ICT being naturally disruptive, is unbelievably intimidating because we think its next phase will be something we have never heard of before. But no matter how novel and exciting it may appear, it must evolve in some way from the technology that preceded them. All future ICT will be derived from the present ICT.
As it continues to proliferate in these Covid-19 times, promoting its consumption is the safest route to ensure that nobody is left out in this digitally connected world. Every person should keep nearby and keenly observe the ICT pattern because all new technologies will not be dropped by aliens, we shall create them as humans.
By setting productive educational ICT usage trends today as integrated into dotShule (a School-Teacher-Parent-Learner ICT system), we can have a vivid picture of how the future will be like; now that educators collaborate digitally and the early learners' exposure to productive usage of ICT to access quality education.
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