Eirik Newth (http://www.newth.net/) key note speaker in the conference "Learning in the Work Place", Copenhagen, 23-24 May 2007.

Abstact in very short:

Eirik Newth: Education in 2027: Virtual, social, autodidact It is a matter of combination of technology and sociology
For example: Television changed us, and we changed television – and it goes in a circle.

Knowledge is digital, searchable, linked.
(Google Book Search)
It costs approximately 10 dollars to digitalize a book. Lots and lots of books are digitalized. Digitalizing books Norwegian is now being done by the National Library.

Huge archives of information: www.archive.org
What does this do to us?? A conference in 2027 - a conference room will be full of computers. The audience will check out what the speaker says in the same time.

Knowledge is cheap and free
We have lots of content creators and endless content pages. Mostly for free. We have to make services in connection with the content. we cannot earn money by creating content. MIT open course ware (the opposite to restrictions)
Control of knowledge is getting even harder.

Sociology
+ technology
= prosumer media

Reading on the screen is now bigger than reading newspapers (1 hour to 30 minutes) TV-watching went down by 40 per cent last year (Norway). 30000 blogs (Norway) - all those want to be content producers – we have to learn them to be content producers.

We are at a turning point – it has been a matter of beeing anonymous, but now we have to show up in the net world. How to be visible in the net? Truth is flighty and individualized

Virtual: Always consuming: We are going to be online all the time.
Epyrus (e-boka), the soft screens
We will see the merging of: Electronics, piercing and tattoos
Computers integrated in clothing – and later on in the body.
On-the-eye-projector.

The trend: Keep the technology as close to people as possible

Social: Always producing
My life bits: A camera with you, takes a picture every minute – making a complete record of your day.

Autodidact: Always learning
How do you manage all this stuff, the amount of content is already huge.
F. ex. 1,5 million pictures are produced in 8 hours in Flickr.

A vision in 1958: "Push button education" “Closer than we think." (Showing people sitting in front of some quite big machines, pushing big buttons.)!

HUMANS are necessary, even we get a lot of technology.

Video presentation: Education in 2027: virtual, social, autodidact. ( 45 min.)