Never mind the bubbles - a future fable

Graduating Class of 2035! My name is Indira Xi. I was born, like most of you, in 2017.

This was around the time that many of our teachers themselves graduated from school. We have heard their stories of 1-to-1 classrooms; mobile devices; MOOCs and learning journeys. Looking back, it is obvious that our forebears came up with some great ideas for education, but they didn't find a way to scale them up in practice (the average completion rate of MOOCs was 15%, and for the larger enrollments, it was typically much lower). Of course, we now know how to get it up to 100%!

Back in 2017, the big technology companies (their vampiric acronym was FANG) were dabbling with algorithms, serving up content which matched the interests of their users, and they had begun to accumulate information covering many aspects of people's lives (by studying location data, they knew who 90% of all adults were spending the night with). In those years, however, they didn't yet realise what power they had!

By 2022, five years later, everything was different! The FANG engineers had introduced recursively self-improving algorithms which very quickly sharpened the personalisation of everyone's Internet experience (it took milliseconds). When the optimum content was not available, the programs set about manufacturing and distributing stories (so much more efficient than waiting for your friends to recommend the very best videos and articles). They made digitally-generated movies which varied the cast and storyline depending on the preferences of whoever was watching. The FANGS did not survive this revolution as separate entities; they united into one huge engine called Facebubble.

Then, as you know, self-improving algorithms were introduced into education and they immediately unified every MOOC into one enormous course representing the sum of all human knowledge (the type which can be taught online, at least). They used their knowledge of every past interaction to analyse each teaching moment and to perfect a learning path for anyone to learn anything and to enjoy it. They knew their students' needs through a combination of metadata, Facebubble clicks and information from wearables (pupil dilation, skin conductivity and heartrates).

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Governments were delighted. They called the new program Epystematic: a system to organise all knowledge and to personalise for each citizen exactly what society needed them to learn. Then by tweaking people's known motivations, they made the process maximally efficient. We didn't even need public exams any more: the Epystematic already knew what we could do. Universities loved that! And once the machines started calling every election result perfectly, there was no point holding votes any more. So they didn't.

Fellow students, this is the learning world we entered.

The classroom was so personalised that no two students were learning the same thing at the same time. We put on our VR goggles and Epystematic knew us better than our own parents, friends or teachers (whose role had been reduced to handing out the equipment). There was no social contact with other children in the class; why would we need anyone else when the output from our headsets was so finely tuned to our own brains? We made no choices. And the more we used Epystematic, the better it did its job. It was personalisation, but it was not personal.

This time was called, as you will remember, The Great Sedation.

So what changed?

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After five years, in 2027, came the punk teachers and their Personal Unfiltered Network of Knowledge. There were some in every school; the punks took on the Epystematic dinosaur. Happily, they had some excellent weapons (which had been around since 2017) to help them in their battle.

Ad Nauseam, the application which simply and silently clicks on every single ad link to make the data they are gathering about us completely useless. The punks taught their students to obfuscate their digital contrail.

Solid, the decentralised web tools, built by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, which make sure that our personal information is kept in a vault so that web companies must request our permission for access when they need to consult it. The punks showed us how to take back ownership.

Wikitribune, a platform which unites journalists and volunteers to produce news stories which can be easily verified and improved.

A DIY sensibility: Inspired by the historic upheaval in music half a century earlier, the punks rejected the status quo.

The tide turned. The punks had no need of large institutions and began small independent schools which decided for themselves how they would organise their learners, like the one we are graduating from. We recognise learning as a social process; personalisation gives way to personal learning; we all have a role in deciding what and how we learn; we recognise that learning is sometimes a messy and difficult experience. And every day, our punk teachers help us negotiate that process.

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With their heads no longer in the bubble of an algorithmic feed, people started thinking for themselves again and democracy returned.

Fellow students, our journey has only just begun.

Yes, technology may be your friend, but it is only people who can teach and learn!