A new report that forecasts what education will look like in the year 2020 will help shape the new National Educational Technology Plan due in January as required by the No Child Left Behind Act, as well as the president's budget priorities for education research.

The report, "2020 Visions: Transforming Education and Training Through Advanced Technologies," was released Sept. 17 by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Technology Administration in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education (ED).

"2020 Visions" is a compilation of 14 short stories written by experts and scholars that illustrate what a child's day might be like in a futuristic, technology-infused world.

These fictional accounts describe students learning through simulations, immersive environments, game playing, intelligent tutors, networks of learners, and digitized content.

"They really stretch our traditional notions of education," said John Bailey, ED's director of educational technology. "I think that is always helpful when you are setting out to plan education."

Representatives from Harvard University, the National Education Association, Microsoft Corp., WorldCom, and more contributed to the report.

What is absent from the tales is as important as what they describe, Bailey said. "You don't see a lot of reference to schools, you don't see a lot of reference to grade [levels]," he said.

Some vignettes are optimistic and describe scenes where learning is engaging, enticing, and takes place all day. Students interact virtually with multiple experts, engage in hands-on simulations, and education is personalized for each student.

Others highlight sinister consequences in which students become anti-social, they drown in information, and robots replace teachers entirely while corporations profit.

Each author predicts which technologies will succeed and fail. For example, Randy Pausch, co-director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, writes, "Virtual reality will (finally!) arrive, and we won't use it very much. While the experience of being perceptually immersed is extremely powerful, the cost (not in the technology, but in the content matter) of developing these experiences will remain prohibitive. How often does Hollywood spend $100 million on a film to teach history to third graders?"

Different roles for teachers

Ruzena Bajcsy, director of the University of California at Berkeley's Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, suggests that school buildings might not be necessary in 2020 because of a technology still in development, called tele-immersion. This technology could project a three-dimensional, life-like image of the teacher to a student's home, for example, and they could meet and interact online in real time.

But tele-immersion could present some problems, Bajcsy said. "One open question remains—can the tele-presence reproduce a sense of being there, so that what is learned transfers to the real world?" she wrote. She added that this technology would require significant financial investment to be usable and sustainable.