Today is the future of yesterday; what is the future of today?

Abstract

In the educational context, understanding the future is important for two reasons. First, we are educating people for future tasks, which need skills that are useful in the future. Secondly, educators have to be able to select the most promising tools and technologies to apply in their work. The problem is that there is no clear way to weigh the importance of the alternatives - what the real importance of a certain technology will be in the near future and especially in the long term. In our paper, we focus on analyzing selected technologies. Our approach applies the framework developed by the authors. The promising technologies are reviewed by a systematic literature study, focusing on and restricted to the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. The findings are classified according to their importance and the time span of their effectiveness. The question we answer is “What should every educator know about changes in technology?”