Friday
Apr272007
Homework in the Future (1981)
Friday, April 27, 2007 at 9:05PM 
Forget jetpacks, Martian colonies and floating cities. We may have found the most astonishing claim made by anyone of the paleo-future. According to the 1981 book School, Work and Play (World of Tomorrow), in the future, homework will be fun! Upon hearing the news every child of the early 1980s choked on their bologna sandwich.
Learning by computer in the future will be fun. This computer is displaying a chemistry experiment for the older child and arithmetic problems for the younger one. The computer controls include light pens to draw on the screens. The chemistry student has done something wrong and has caused an explosion!
See also:
Connections: AT&T's Vision of the Future (Part 7, 1993)
The Road Ahead: Future Classroom (1995)
Reader Comments (9)
Muy interesante tu blog
Morons. One of the first thing you learn about instrucitonal design is that you can't make the negative feedback more gratifying than the positive.
Excelente. Me crié viendo "Walt Disney, Tomorrow...".
Muy bueno tu blog.
How archaic! Have you seen the new 3-D images of the sun NASA just released? They even give you instructions how to make your own 3-D glasses. What a throwback. 3-D: vision of science. Wave of the future.
http://www.theurbannaturalist.blogspot.com" REL="nofollow">The Urban Naturalist
"...studying will be like picking up a book that tells you it wants you to read it, and then won't let you put it down until you're finished!"
Well I, for one, welcome our new eBook overlords.
Ha! I'm a kid myself, and telling from me, NO homework is fun. If we are sitting at computers learning instead of running around, or having fun NOTHING could be. I don't even know why im going to school! I have a free will, you know!
"The Dune Encyclopedia" is an unofficial compendium of articles about things having to do with the Dune series, by Frank Herbert. It is written as though it were actually from that time period -- more than ten thousand years in the future.
In this book there is an article which includes a brief mention of the "fact" that by that time, a baby can be taught some basic things, including rudimentary information about the universe, before the baby is born. This is done by the application of some kind of advanced targeted energy beam technology that interacts with the baby's neurons. This can continue after the baby is born. and saves a large amount of time, so that maybe the child is nine or ten by the time that interaction with human teachers is indicated. Of course, a large number of the people in the Dune books are explicitly upper-class people. It is likely that their remain severe limitations on who can afford this kind of advanced educational technology. The books contain many references to advanced, elaborate private school systems and private tutors -- except as regards a certain desert people, the Fremen, who use a combination of family-based informal teaching and classroom techniques that we would immediately recognize from today. There are also details about slaves, slave gladiators, and other oppressed people. These people, of course, have education that is nonexistent or very limited.
Thank you for post. It is really good read.
I really like to browse www.paleofuture.com.
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The screen tilt is adjustable, nice design touch, the accordion folds are cool.