What will continuing professional education look like in 100 years?
Continuing Professional Education in 2112
Predicting the future is a risky and uncertain business, despite what psychics and fortune-tellers might proclaim. Still, I’ve been thinking about science fiction transformed into reality by the successful landing of NASA’s Curiosity Mars explorer vehicle. How many years before the first humans embark on the six-month journey to another planet? All this wondering has inspired me to consider what continuing education might look like a century from now.
So here goes – some predictions for continuing professional education:
The focus of continuing education requirements for professionals will shift away from accumulating a set number of accredited CPE course hours, and reflect an assessment of the richness and density of practitioners’ electronic networks and their contributions within and beyond these networks
The primacy of skills in researching and locating information will be replaced by skills in creating/designing an individualized architecture to harvest, sort, store and share essential knowledge and ideas
There will not be slideware
Knowledge Curator will be a popular job title
The CV will be replaced by a tag cloud or an infographic resume with active links to relevant media, and this will be a more accurate reflection of professional contributions and experience
Education will be evaluated based on net benefit to learners in practice, and this will be possible at low cost due to the proliferation of mlearning applications and integrated performance databases
Didactic lectures will still exist, but they will look more like (high production value) TV commercials and less like (low production value) infomercials. They will be a lot shorter too.
For fun – here is a tag cloud for this website updated October 2012:
educateria 
These are some great, creative predictions! What do you think elementary education of the future will look like?
Such a great question!
I am thinking of the pioneers and their one-room schoolhouse with chalkboard slates and not much else (because books, paper and supplies were so scarce). Will we come full circle?
So students will all have tablets, but they will be more than social networking and information access tools. In 100 years (probably less) students will engage seamlessly with the built and natural environment due to GPS and face/figure recognition software advances. Literally “just in time” learning that is totally salient to context and location.
Also, 3-D printers will be the most sought-after classroom enhancement.
And classrooms will be integrated within large academic centres that address learning needs across the lifespan.
My 2 cents – and welcome other comments…