An Explosion of Learning Agents

New roles, processes, and relationships in the learning economy spawn new career paths in education. Includes content experts, learning coaches, network navigators, classroom managers, and cognitive specialists.

Real World Application

An Explosion of Learning Agents describes core trends: Smart Networking and Strong Opinions, Strongly Held from the perspective of the impact area: Educators & Learning.

This area forecasts the expansion of roles and processes for connecting educators and learners in a media-rich world where personalization has become more cost effective. We see the emergence of new career paths from new roles and relationships, such as cognitive apprenticeships, drawing in new kinds of players and offering new possibilities for those already in the profession. This story is about the possibility to revitalize and expand teaching and learning.

Expanded teaching and learning will contribute to the unbundling of education from its traditional packaging in conventional schools and homogenous educators. Open content and curriculum and other publicly available resources will contribute to new ecologies of teaching, learning, and assessment that have the potential to reach more deeply into local and global communities.
Educational careers forge new paths
As education is unbundled into a constellation of functions and roles to meet the needs of the emerging learning economy, the teaching profession will experience a creative breakout. New administrative, classroom, and community roles will differentiate educational careers, attracting new entrants and providing new avenues for experienced educators to branch out—as content experts, learning coaches, network navigators, cognitive specialists, resource managers, or community liaisons. Interactive media link diverse groups of educators and students in ad hoc groups to perform new kinds of collective assessment and evaluation of both students and educators.
Personalized learning focuses on the craft of teaching
Personalized learning plans will leverage new media, brain research, and school structures to create differentiated learning experiences based on individual needs. Interactive and collaborative digital spaces, such as wikis, will provide shared learning portfolios where students, educators, parents, and other learning stakeholders can perform assessments and real-time interventions. New classroom approaches will be controversial for many teachers because they require “unlearning” many basic assumptions about the nature of teaching. Unions may resist the diversification of educator roles or embrace it as an opportunity to be real leaders of change.