Education 2037 – One Vision

A Day in the Life of a 21st Century Learner

Javan had a quick breakfast before heading to his study room, which was equipped with a
60” flat screen multitouch monitor and his educomp1. He turned on the monitor and a
pleasant female voice said, “Good morning Javan. Did you sleep well?” through
speakers placed around the room. A corner of the screen was displaying his current
teacher avatar, which he had fashioned from an ancient green character called “Yoda”
he’d seen in a movie. The 10 year old stifled a yawn and replied, “I guess so. Well,
maybe I stayed up a little late playing Madden 2036.”
“I see. Well why don’t we start off easy today. Let’s do a little review.”
“No, that’s OK. I’d like to get back to Dr. King’s speech.”
“Very well,” said the Yoda avatar. A spinning globe appeared on the screen with a
timeline beneath it. Slowly both began to zoom in until 1963 stretched at the bottom of
the screen and Javan was looking at an aerial view of the Mall back as it looked more
than seventy years ago. But this wasn’t just a picture. It was a fully interactive 3D
simulation of the famous “I have a dream” event. Every feature of the mall had been
recreated from old photographs and TV footage. Javan was able to navigate above and
through the crowd. He could stand with them gazing up at the steps to the Lincoln
memorial or hover just behind Dr. King and see the hundreds of thousands stretched out
before him. And each person in the crowd was an individual, dressed differently, moving
and talking with friends nearby. Wherever he stood, the sound in the speakers was
directionally correct. Javan wished his parents could afford the VR2 headset that some of
his friends had, but the screen and educomp he had were pretty cool.

The crowd in the simulation was milling around, waiting for the great man to speak. As
Javan flew over them someone in the crowd waved to him (well, to his avatar, which
today looked like some kind of crocodile). Javan steered himself down with a joystick
next to a nicely dressed black man. “Good morning,” he said to the man. “Indeed it is,”
replied the gentleman enthusiastically. Javan noticed he carried a sign that said, “WE
MARCH FOR FREEDOM”. “What does your sign mean?” he asked. The man glanced
at the black lettering. “Negroes are not truly free in this country. There are laws that
keep us down, keep us apart. Where I live in Selma Alabama I can’t go to certain
restaurants or stay in hotels.” As the man was talking, the “references” section of his
display was scrolling some additional information with words like “segregation”, “Jim
Crow laws”, and “Selma”. Javan clicked on “Jim Crow laws” and the man paused while
his Yoda avatar explained what the laws were. As she spoke, a montage of photos
showing “Whites only” signs scrolled by. “But why did they have these laws, I don’t
understand,” said Javan. “Remember,” said the teaching avatar, “there was a history of
slavery in the United States and blacks were treated as property.” The scene on the Mall
shrunk to an icon and the timeline drew back to show the expanse of time from the
1700’s to 1963. As the teaching avatar described the introduction of slaves and growth of
the country, a surface graph drew the black and white populations of the U.S., with a
1
Educational Computer
2
Virtual Reality

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shaded area showing what percent of blacks were slaves. After 1860 the shading
suddenly stopped. “How come the slave part went away?” Javan asked.
“Do you remember? We talked about it last Friday. What happened in 1863?”
Javan thought hard. An image of Lincoln appeared above the timeline in 1863. “Oh,
yeah. The president signed something that set all the slaves free.”
“That’s right, the Emancipation Proclamation.” The reference section showed definitions
for “Proclamation” and “Emancipation”.

A blinking icon in the “friends” area of the display caught his eye. There was a symbol
with “Yan” next to it. One of his Chinese friends had elected to join his lesson, a girl
named Yan (which he had learned meant “colorful” or “gorgeous”). “Hey Yoda, turn on
my webcam and display Yan.” In a few seconds he could see the eleven year old girl
clearly on the monitor, even though she was thousands of miles away in a city outside of
Beijing. “Good morning Yan”, he said. He wasn’t confident enough in his Chinese to
speak to a native yet. His words were transcribed onto her screen in real time. “Good
morning,” she replied in careful English. “Do you want to watch the speech?” he asked.
“Yes, I have to give a report on it next week.” He sighed, wishing his Chinese was as
good as her English. “Yoda, take us back to the speech, please.” Lincoln, the timeline
and surface graph faded away and the Mall reappeared. Javan was still speaking with the
black man in the crowd, but now Yan’s avatar was next to him, looking almost exactly
like Yan herself. He could see her frowning in the webcam – he guessed she didn’t like
crocodiles that much. The black gentleman resumed speaking. “So that’s why I’m
marching today. To send a message that we cannot be truly free until the segregation and

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the injustice end.” Javan nodded as a voice came from his right. He turned his avatar
and saw Dr. King at the podium. The crowd around him cheered.

As Dr King spoke, Javan and Yan moved through the crowd. They spotted some other
friends, but didn’t chat so they could concentrate on the speech. The words scrolled by in
the “text” section of the display in English and Chinese for Yan. Sections of the text
would occasionally highlight and link to material in the reference section, although each
of them saw different material. Biblical references, definitions, explanations and related
material scrolled by. From an early age, Javan and Yan had learned to listen, see and
process this kind of multimedia onslaught in a way that still mystified their parents.
When Dr. King said, “We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical
violence” Javan heard a man next to him grunt some disapproval. “Yoda, hold the
speech.” He turned to the man and said, “Don’t you agree with Dr. King?” The man
looked at him sharply. “No, young man, I do not. This non-violence approach is not
working. The only thing the whites understand is force – the force they use against us.
We have to fight fire with fire.” The reference area showed the “battle of ideas” with
King quotes on non-violence compared to other black leaders’ statements. There were
links to Gandhi which Javan thought looked interesting, so he highlighted them for his
“check this out later” folder. He asked Yan what she thought about non-violence. “I’m
not sure,” she replied. “I can see both sides of the argument.” Javan nodded. “Yeah, but
when you’re weaker and you know you can’t ever really beat the other guys with force, it
seems like non-violence makes sense.”
“It’s just really hard to sit there and take the abuse and not fight back,” Yan said.
“I know, I know. It’s amazing that so many were able to do it. Let’s keep listening.
Yoda, continue the speech please.”

The speech concluded to thunderous applause. Yan’s avatar waved goodbye. The
teaching avatar asked him a question. “Javan, how many people do you think were in the
crowd?” He shrugged. “I don’t know, how many? Ten thousand?” The yoda face
frowned. “You’re just guessing. How would you estimate something like that?” He
thought for a minute, then flew up above the crowd. It spilled out all over the Mall. “I
don’t think I want to count them all.” The avatar superimposed a grid over the
simulation. “Ahh, thanks for the hint. This is just like that science experiment where we
estimated how many flowers there were in a field.” He zoomed down to one of the grids
and counted about 100 people inside, then zoomed back out. “Let’s see, we’ve got about
50 by 30, that’s 1500 grids times 100 people is, uh, 150 thousand people.” The avatar
smiled. “Not bad. How could you improve the estimate?” He remembered the flowers.
“If we counted inside some more grids and took the average.” That got a big smile from
the avatar. “That’s right!”

Upstairs in the home office, Javan’s Mom noticed the smiling avatar out of the corner of
her eye. She had a similar 60” display that she used for her work as a lawyer. The upper
right portion was dedicated to a copy of Javan’s display and had a small inset video of his
face, automatically tracked by a webcam in the study room. This setup enabled her to
monitor his progress and know what he had worked on that day without disrupting her
work or his. Of course, her husband and Javan’s grandparents and other family members

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could dial in too, from anywhere in the world. Javan always got a notice when someone
was watching, but he’d gotten so used to it he would usually just wave at the camera.
Once a month a professional educator would spend an hour going over Javan’s results,
monitor an hour of educomp usage to ensure the system was functioning properly, and
send feedback to Javan’s parents.

Back in the study room Javan did some more math using the crowd as a source of
problems. He took fractions of the crowd and worked out how long it would take them
all to march away at different rates of speed. Javan noticed other student avatars looking
at one of the fountains. “What are they looking at, Yoda?” he asked. The teaching avatar
consulted the system and reported that they were some 16 and 17 year olds working on
the physics of the fountain as it shot streams of water. “What’s physics?” His display
showed a map of the different sciences. “Physics is the study of matter and its motion,
space and time. These students are calculating how the force of the water and angle of
the nozzle affect the distance the water travels and the height it achieves.” Javan was
intrigued. “Can you show me more?” The science map faded and was replaced by a
lifelike 3D rendering of a simple water system with a pump and a nozzle. “Try changing
the force of the water by making the pump work harder, then open the valve,” suggested
the teaching avatar. The parts were clearly labeled on the screen. Javan used his fingers
on the multitouch display to slide a speed control next to the pump from “off” to “1/2
power” and he heard it whine to life and start spinning. A gauge near the nozzle push up
to “50 pascals”. He touched “pascals” and a box appeared next to it explaining this was a
measure of pressure –Newtons per square meter. He didn’t really know what that meant,
but he ignored it for now. Next Javan flicked open a switch near the nozzle and a cool
sputtering and hissing sound exploded from his surround speakers. A stream of water
rose from the nozzle, arced through the air, then landed some distance away with a
splash. A grid appeared, numbered with distances from the nozzle both vertically and
horizontally. “So, Javan, with 50 pascals pressure, how high and how far does the water
go?” He measured the height at 2.5 meters and distance at 10.5 meters. “Why don’t you
create a data table for these results?” Javan had learned about data tables last year. “OK,
Yoda, give me a data table with three columns and four rows. The columns are labeled
height, distance and, uh, hmm. What is that called again?” The box near the gauge
brightened to get his attention. “Oh, yeah, pressure.” The data table appeared above the
water stream. “OK, the first row should have the values 2.5, 10.5, and 50.” Javan was
curious about what would happen when the pressure changed. He used a finger to
decrease the pump speed until the gauge showed 20 pascals. The water stream got
significantly smaller. He could still see a faded version of the 50 pascal stream. He did
some measurements and said, “OK, the second row in the table should have the values 1,
4.5, and 20”. Javan repeated the experiment two more times and got two more rows in
his table.

“So what’s the relationship between the pressure and the height and distance?” asked the
teaching avatar. “Well, it looks like the bigger the pressure the bigger the height and
distance.” The avatar smiled. “That’s right. Just so you know, with pressure we say
“lower” and “higher”, not “smaller” and “bigger”. Sometimes it’s easier to see
relationships like this with a graph. Do you remember last month we looked at a graph of

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how far you’d go on your skateboard at different speeds?” Javan nodded. “Yup, it
showed several lines on a grid.” The old graph reappeared with three lines for 10, 15 and
25 kilometers per hour. “OK, Yoda, create a graph for the data table.” The avatar
explained, “There are two axes on a graph, called the X axis and Y axis.” A large blank
graph with labels appeared. “The X axis is at the bottom and stretches left to right. It
shows the value whose change causes the other values to change – called the independent
variable.” The terms appeared with definitions next to them. “What’s the independent
variable in this experiment?” Javan looked at the table. “Height?” he asked tentatively.
“Let’s think about it some more, Javan. Did you physically change the height on the
screen to make other things change?” Javan shook his head. “I changed the pressure. So
is that the independent variable?” The avatar smiled. “Exactly right. So where does that
go on the graph?” Javan read the labels and definitions again, then touched the X-axis.
“Very good. So let’s plot your values.” They spent the next 30 minutes plotting data for
variations of pressure and nozzle angle.

Javan was using the same experiment as the older kids, but his lesson didn’t go as far as
theirs into the more advanced topics of trigonometry. Samantha, one of the other
learners, was following a side path into nozzle shape and the impact of small
imperfections in the smoothness of the nozzle surface. That content had been created by
some engineers at a precision manufacturing company in Japan who were interested in
sharing and teaching what they had learned. Since their content was relatively new, the
system asked Samantha for feedback and her ratings and comments were sent to the
engineers so they could improve the material. Her feedback was also correlated with her
prior experience so they system could know what kind of prerequisites to look for with
future students.

After each interaction, Javan’s results were compared to his peers and combined into one
of the most extensive databases of learning on the planet. He remembered learning that
thirty years before, the earliest internet companies like Yahoo and Google were
accumulating 10-15 terabytes3 of data per day. Now the educomp systems were gobbling
up hundreds of terabytes of data per minute from all over the globe, stored in cheap
molecular memory assembled in the latest nanomanufacturing facilities. Of course it was
only possible to process all that data by using the nearly one billion educomp systems
worldwide in a distributed processing network, aided by gigabit speed fiber optics to
every home. For example, when Javan answered “height” instead of “pressure”, the
system found he was one of about 250,000 learners to make that mistake. The avatar’s
question “did you physically change the height on the screen to make other things
change” was one of eight different questions that a human educator had entered into the
system years before. The “height” mistake and each question were coded with a
“pedagogical basis”. So the system was able to pick a question likely to get Javan to the
right understanding based on similar mistakes he and the 250,000 learners had made and
the “corrective questions” which had worked for them.

After a break for lunch with his Mom, the teaching avatar suggested Javan put together a
report on Dr. King’s speech. Using the multitouch display, Javan spent the next hour
3
Terabyte = 10 ^ 12 characters, 1,000,000,000,000 bytes

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scrolling through the materials he’d seen, “snapshots” of the 3D simulation he’d
experienced, including video snippets of his conversations with the two men, and the text
of the speech. He put together a kind of movie with hyperlinks in it, simply dragging
material from his screen onto a virtual storyboard, narrating sections of it and writing
short paragraphs for others. He also included the graphs from his water fountain project
and attached them as a hyperlink to a photo of the fountain. While he was working he
reviewed the set of related information that he had tagged for the Dr. King speech. He
hovered over one term, “Oratory” and a definition popped up – “the composition and
delivery of speeches”. He clicked through and scanned some information on effective
speaking. The teaching avatar asked, “Do you think that was an effective speech?”
“Definitely.”
“Here, listen to this.” The teaching avatar opened a midsized window and showed a close
up of a realistic-looking Dr. King simulation giving the “I have a dream” speech. But this
time, he gave it in a flat monotone, like he was reading names from a phone book.
“Wow!” said Javan. He hadn’t realized what a difference Dr. King’s voice had made.
“Why don’t you try reading some of the lines of the speech with different inflection and
cadence,” suggested the teaching avatar. The words “inflection” and “cadence” appeared
on the screen with their definitions. Javan touched “inflection” and three sample
inflections for the words “have a dream” played. He touched “cadence” and heard three
sample snippets with very different cadence. “OK, that sounds like fun.” Javan spent
fifteen minutes recording and playing back different versions of some key sentences in
the speech. He decided to add an “Oratory” section to his report to explain how the way
that Dr. King spoke really made a difference and he included some of his own speech
fragments with explanations of how each one made him feel when he said it and heard it.

A few days earlier, Marie, an associate professor of linguistics at a community college in

Kansas had authored a primer on oratory using great speeches of the past. She created
her content with a very easy-to-use suite of multimedia tools that had pedagogical
patterns and templates built into them and directly supported concepts of different
learning styles and levels of experience. Given Javan’s interest, the teaching avatar
decided to offer it to him. “Javan, there is a new mini lesson on oratory – would you like
to try it out?” Javan nodded, “Sure, sounds interesting.” Because the professor was a
new contributor without a track record, the system logged every interaction as Javan went
through two quick lessons. He struggled in a few places to figure out what to do next and
the system noted both the pauses and, using the webcam, recognized frustration in his
facial expressions. About ten minutes later, the teaching avatar asked him what he
thought of the new material. “Well, it was OK, but I didn’t really get the side-by-side
comparisons. I liked the way the sliding controls worked to make the language simpler
and change the pacing, that was cool. Overall, I’d give it a 5.” The system recorded his
comments and they were immediately made available to Marie in Kansas, along with
various individual and aggregated heat maps showing usage and flow through her
material, along with emotion and engagement measures. She was able to use all of the
feedback and analysis to create a much more compelling second version, which was
posted a few days later for a new set of students to try out.

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Javan manipulated some folders on the screen and dragged his newly completed movie
into a “published works” folder. With a sense of accomplishment, he decided to take a
break and play a game with a friend. In the background, an alert was automatically sent
to his family and friends telling them about the newly published report. His dad, who
was flying to a business meeting, was able to view the movie a few minutes later on his
seatback computer. He typed a quick IM4 to Javan praising his work, especially the
physics project, which wasn’t something learners at Javan’s level usually tackled. The
IM appeared on a scrolling window below the hyper-realistic football game Javan was
playing with his friend Claude from France, where it was evening.

At around 2pm Yoda stuck her head into the game, “Javan, just a reminder that you have
community time at 2:30.” He nodded. “OK, thanks.” Community time was when he and
other kids from the neighborhood met to play sports, practice music, put on skits and
plays and hang out together. He finished the game, said good-bye to Claude and visited
with his Mom for a few minutes before walking over. He returned at 4:30 and took a
quick nap before dinner.

Since the educomp system eliminated the need for “homework”, Javan had plenty of free
time in the evenings. He talked with his Mom and Dad (who joined via telepresence
from his hotel) about what he’d learned today – she’d also seen his video report already.
She could tell he was troubled by the history of slavery and the struggle for freedom in
previous centuries. “People are capable of both evil and good, Javan. Over the course of
history there have been many examples of terrible things that people have done to each
other. But there are also many examples of great men and women who create change for
the better. Overall, I think we’re making progress.” The conversation continued and left
Javan in a pensive mood. After helping with the dishes he retreated to the study room
and turned on the educomp. “Want to play a game?” the avatar asked. Javan almost
always played some kind of game in the evening. “No, thanks. I think I want to do some
painting.” The screen raised itself up from it’s tabletop height, turned around and tilted
slightly, then presented him with a blank white canvas that looked like it was on an easel.
He had expressed interest in painting early, so his parents had gotten him some electric
“brushes” that were fashioned like real brushes. Each was electronically coded so the
painting software could know its type and orientation and correctly apply the virtual paint
he picked and mixed in the onscreen palette. Of course this wasn’t real painting, but the
simulation of the paint texture was excellent and for young painters, the ability to undo
strokes and color choices vastly reduced the frustration. (Not to mention the easy clean-
up). In her last review, the professional educator had looked at Javan’s work and
recommended that his parents buy Javan some real canvas and paints, which they were
going to do for his birthday.

Tonight, though, Javan chose a subdued palette onscreen and painted a somewhat dark
portrait of Dr. King, using snapshots from his report for inspiration. He was having
trouble with the mouth so he asked for help. “I can’t quite get the mouth right, Yoda.”
The teaching avatar accessed a gallery of African-American male mouth samples created
by professional artists. “What’s the emotion you’re trying to portray, Javan?” He
4
IM = instant message

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thought for a moment. “A combination of sadness and hope.” The avatar displayed a
dozen mouths that had been tagged with those words. Javan started in on the mouth
again and felt better about it. When he was done he filed the painting away and said,
“Good night, Yoda. See you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Javan. Sleep well.”

© 2008 Gerald Huff

Berkeley, CA