This Week in Edtech: 2023 Tech Predictions
How Web3, Metaverse and AI will affect the coming Education landscape
Over the holidays, I’ve been thinking a lot about family and, borrowing a technique from one of my Edtech heroes Ryan Craig’s Gap Letter, I’m going to start this newsletter with a few words from my personal life; in this case, my Dad’s background in technology futurism.
Forgive the self-indulgence and feel free to scroll right past to the predictions!
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Dad The Techno-Futurist
My father was a futurist and the ultimate techno-optimist. He grew up in a working-class family in Bayside, Queens with education in his DNA; his father had a Ph.D in education and was an influential sixth grade English and poetry teacher at the progressive Little Red School House in Manhattan and later a Professor of Education.
Despite a lifelong love of literature, Dad rebelled against his father and decided that science and technology. He earned a full scholarship to Columbia University in Physics (‘a topic my father knew nothing about’), spent post-graduate years as a hippie inventor working on reel-to-reel players and putting fiber optics in clothing, and then pivoted to computer science.
He was early employee at IBM, working on room-sized computers (his story was that they handed him a COBOL manual and said, “if you can learn this, you’ve got a job”). He did a stint at NASA, and was a technical consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton, before settling into a long career at Citibank (now Citi) working on technology products: the first ATMs, cybersecurity and Y2K.
Outside of work, he loved to spot and track the rise of new technologies; he was an incredibly early adopter and champion of the Internet; he was on there before Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL (all of which we had) and closely followed the launch of the (Marc Andreesen-invented, Al Gore-funded) graphical Mosaic browser, followed by its evolution to Netscape and eventually to the browsers of today.
He would often start his web browsing by popping over to the website that listed all the new websites that day and then visiting them. He would breathlessly show family friends, none of which had even heard of the internet at the time, the website of a lab in Sweden where they had set up a live webcam to monitor their coffee maker.
He was a ‘what if’ guy; he loved science fiction, science news (particularly New Scientist and Popular Mechanics), digital photography, 3D television, epigenetics, biomimicry, 3D printing, and every wave of virtual reality, no matter how ridiculous. He taught courses on AI in his 70s at his beloved Lifelong Peer Learning Program.
For my Dad, new technology was not only endlessly interesting and purposeful, but it was also just plain fun- any sense of futurism and optimism in the power of technology to change our lives for the better in Edtech Insiders can be tracked directly back to his epic curiosity and insatiable appetite for the new.
2023 Predictions in Edtech
On the most recent Week in Edtech, we covered “The Year in Edtech”, a mega-episode in which we recapped the Edtech landscape in 2022 and made predictions about where it will all go in 2023. We cover Edtech overall, K12, Higher Ed, Workforce, and tech. Part II, in which we ask some of our top guests from the year to give their predictions, will be out next week.
The full episode can be found here.
In a tribute to my techno-optimist Dad, this newsletter will focus on the tech section, covering three burgeoning technologies of the past year that have been riding the hype cycle hard and making headlines.
Web3/Blockchain/Cryptocurrency
The end of 2022 brought a series of cataclysmic events to the world of cryptocurrency, decreasing the (paper) value of the sector by trillions of dollars and virtually assuring that regulators will not look kindly to the industry for a generation.
I am certainly not going to predict the price of Bitcoin on December 31, 2023 here; anyone with that level of prescience about cryptocurrency is living on a private island. But I am decently confident that there will be at least some continued fallout this year, with at least one or two more major collapses and some political grandstanding (thought likely little to no new regulation in the short term with divided government).
However, cryptocurrencies and Web3/blockchain are not the same thing. In education, there have been a number of nascent projects that use blockchain, the technology underlying cryptocurrencies, to create projects of various types (many of which are dedicated to teaching… cryptocurrency and blockchain).
That said, I predict that one Web3 educational idea might just survive the fallout, perhaps by pivoting its brand away from anything ending in “-coin”. That idea is Education DAOs, which have the potential (at least in theory) to decentralize schooling and allow any group of people to become learners and teachers with full ownership and voting rights of the educational institution they share.
Vriti Saraf and Scott David Meyer have been thought leaders in the DAO space, but even established companies like KPMG have begun thinking about this future. I predict that smart Education DAOs may pivot to allow users to ‘buy in’ directly with standard currency - without needing to establish a digital wallet of cryptocurrency- and that, if they do, they may find unexpected purchase with populations of informal learners, including older learners.
Metaverse/XR
The idea of the “Metaverse”, which is sometimes linked to Web3 and almost always associated with extended reality (which encompasses virtual, mixed and augmented reality), has had quite a year. After Facebook rebranded itself as “Meta” in late 2021, the arms race has been on for which tech company will own the Metaverse.
Meta, Microsoft, Unity, Apple, Bytedance, Sony, Roblox, and other large tech companies have all either thrown their hat in the ring or started partnerships to enter the Metaverse. But Meta’s first mover advantage seems to be drying up, and the Metaverse pivot is being seen by many observers (and even some insiders) as a major mistake, costing tens of billions of dollars, sending Meta’s stock in to free fall, and leading to layoffs.
While this is by no means the end of the story of a Big Tech metaverse, I predict that in 2023, the idea of a non-commercial Metaverse will finally take purchase; Daniel Pianko has written about the Open Metaverse Initiative and suggested that government and higher education institutions could play a larger role in the Metaverse.
Podcast listeners may notice that I’ve been skeptical of such claims all year, from decades of experience watching universities and governments utterly fail to compete with private companies on user-facing technical products for decades, especially when it comes to the world of gaming or simulation. But an exception to this rule is projects created by the vastly overfunded US Department of Defense, whose research initiative laid the groundwork for the internet (along with pioneers at other non-profit institutions and NGOs like Berkeley, Stanford, and CERN).
To wit: as people lose faith in tech giants and start souring on the idea that a single company (or more specifically, a specific Zuck or Musk or Bezos) should run what might be the next iteration of the internet, there will be increased interest in a ‘public’ metaverse, modeled after DARPA’s original internet, the ARPANET project.
I also predict that, despite Meta’s reputational blow, we will see some of the really exciting educational Metaverse companies continue to grow; companies like Transfr for workforce, Prisms VR for math, Immerse for language, VictoryXR for metaversities, Osso VR for surgical training, Praxis Labs for equity, ZSpace for STEM, Dreamscape Learn for storytelling, and more.
What VR really needs is its ChatGPT moment; a tech that goes viral and really showcases the power of the tech. That moment might just come from the education world.
Artificial Intelligence
And speaking of ChatGPT (who isn’t?), we finally come to the undisputed winner (at least from a press and popularity perspective) of the year in tech: Artificial Intelligence.
The rise in AI interest at the end of 2022 has been mind-boggling… but that’s because the technology has been as well.
AI and ML tools has come into the hands of individual users - first, to specialists with products like Google Tensorflow, Amazon Sagemaker, Pytorch, Watson and Azure, and now to the masses with approachable products like ChatGPT, Playground, Midjourney, and Lenso. The importance of this moment cannot be understated.
With the risk of recency bias, I predict that in 2023, AI will becomes the central tech for a whole new generation of Edtech Startups. The sudden increase in power and interest in generative AI- as well as continuous improvements in other forms of AI, will lead both to investor interest (they have been sitting on dry powder, after all) and a flock of Edtech companies looking to take advantage of the educational benefits of Generative AI.
Incredibly rapid, inexpensive content creation opportunities for educators and publishers, threatening the traditional publishers and image libraries
Ability to provide educators OR individual learners with methods to personalize learning materials for any student based on interest or experience.
The sudden rise of mind-blowing user-generated content and a rising internet culture of automated images and videos in an educational context will empower the next generation of learners to engage in peer-to-peer learning
AI tutors, teachers and chatbots will be everywhere…
…and they will use all manner of learning devices, like learning hooks, personalized hints and mnemonics, and interest-based material. They will be customizable by sex, race and age, and teachers (or students) can even duplicate themselves.
Synthesia (above) is one of many new companies that can create video content using AI. In case you can’t tell (and you probably can, mostly from the stilted voices), none of the people in this video are real.
Is that techno-optimistic enough for you? I’ve carefully avoided any conversations about misinformation, echo bubbles, copyright infringement, and the general dystopian malaise that often accompanies predictions about tech in
A Final prediction: I predict a huge spike in the occurrence of “AI Personalities” like virtual influencer Miquela Sousa, especially as we finally make our way through the uncanny valley. In other words, consistent personalities that have their own ways of communicating; this will absolutely extend to education
We will see the next iteration of “Ask Jeeves” in which realistic AI personas answer your search questions.
We will see the first virtual teacher celebrity in 2023; likely from South Korea or Japan.
We will see professors and teachers digitize themselves to expand their scope and reach.
Great article and wonderful tribute to your dad. One question that came to mind is why do you think that DAOs are still potentially disruptive for education? What problem do they really solve?
My concern is that there are still so many actual *education* challenges to microschools and other types of virtual education communities, and that focusing on the relatively *minor* challenge of "distributed financial stakes in the community" could be overly distracting from larger learning goals.
We only have so much mental bandwidth to innovate. It'd be like a small eCommerce startup trying to also invent its own HR system when they could have just used one off the shelf and focused on their core eCommerce offering. I'd rather see DAO technology & community practice get dogfooded *elsewhere* first, and then just borrow whatever works for education later :)
I love this, as someone whose mission is to give students a better roi for the education using metaverse, tailored learning I found this very inspiring as I build and raise our pre/seed for Headstarter