How will e-learning change in the next half century

I was talking to a group of graduate students about the use of information and communications technology in international education yesterday, and suggested that the technology would transform education in their lifetimes. For that reason, we are trying to get students used to current technology. In our current course we are using electronic reserves, email, online readings, social bookmarking, discussion boards, a classroom with computer and projector, video clips and Power Point presentations in the classroom, computers to analyze data and display information in an interactive fashion.

It made me think. It is now 50 years since I first taught at a university. I had the previous year learned to program on the Standards Western Automatic Computer, SWAC. Built in 1950, the SWAC was perhaps the first computer made using existing technology, simply to function as a computing device, rather than as an experimental device to advance the state of technological art. While it was already being replaced, it was deemed more than adequate for undergraduates. It was a machine lacking even an assembly language, with a tiny memory and millisecond clock speed.

Of course there were no video recorders, few sound recorders, and the sales of color TVs had begun only five years previously. UCLA had, as I remember, two computers, and was seen as a leader in the field. Lasers were being invented, as were integrated circuits, and fiber optics were in the future. Had anyone suggested that in my lifetime there would be a billion personal computers, each with many times the power of the largest commercial machine, all connected by an internet that included satellite linkages I might well have suggested psychiatric care!

What does the future hold from today's students? I simply can not immagine!