Writing about the future of the classroom for Forbes Magazine in 2010, d-school director George Kembel wrote: “In 2020 we will see an end to the classroom as we know it. The lone professor will be replaced by a team of coaches from vastly different fields. Tidy lectures will be supplanted by messy real-world challenges. Instead of parking themselves in a lecture hall for hours, students will work in collaborative spaces, where future doctors, lawyers, business leaders, engineers, journalists and artists learn to integrate their different approaches to problem solving and innovate together”. We are now half way to 2020 and this scenario, at least for institutions like Stanford, seems feasible if not right on schedule. The classroom experience necessary to provide students with this mixture of open-ended experimentation, interaction with different domain specialists, and unconstrained movement around the campus, city, or world requires a very different physical and temporal space. Education theorist Sir Ken Robinson describes it this way: “So I think we have to change metaphors. We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process; it’s an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development. All you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.” Classrooms are becoming less defined by the physicality of their space and more defined by the temporal activities that take place inside them. The physicality of the book is changing in similar ways.

Kembel’s prediction in many ways maps on to the Reggio Emilia methods developed by Loris Malaguzzi in Italy in the 1940’s. Malaguzzi theorized that children learn from three teachers including adults, other children, and the environment itself- the ‘third teacher.’ The physical space of the school as well as that of the home, the natural environment, and, of course, the built environment (village, town, or city) all aid in the development of any child. Today this can be expanded to include a fourth teacher- technology- more specifically, technology in the form of online and interactive materials. If the classroom is outgrowing its physical boundaries then certainly the book is following a similar trajectory and breaking free of its reliance on what can be printed on physical pages. Students are blending resources together like never before given the flattening effects of digital technology. Where once a student might watch an instructional video on a video deck connected to a television she is now viewing it on a laptop, phone, or tablet device. On the very same screen she’s reading written text from an online magazine, blog entry, or text message from another student or teacher. Students are increasingly searching online for answers before even bothering to ask others including faculty and staff thus taking charge of the education in new and novel ways. We as faculty are of course, no different. The enormous wealth of information off-loaded to the web makes it a constant presence in the classroom precisely because it is always within reach. Students are coming to rely more on the web than on the library if for no other reason than its convenience and immediacy.

To truly compliment the progressive model of teaching and learning predicted by Kembel, rich resources need to be at the students’ fingertips throughout this messy somewhat self-guided education. Relying, however, entirely on the power of the web may not be the best solution. I think we’ve all experienced just how insidious the internet can be. It is as much a distractor as a clarifier. Nicholas Carr, author of the book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains describes it this way: I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” Suffice it to say, students are not going to take a break to run over to the library to access a book if they’ve got their phone, a laptop, or a tablet sitting at the desk. One of this century’s challenges will be to develop resources that are dynamic enough to fit the changing classroom. And while Kembel’s scenario was most likely not a prescription for how institutions might save money by downsizing their physical plants and minimizing the interactions (and size) of their faculty, it maybe part of the solution to a true 21st-century educational conundrum.