How East Asian classrooms may change over the next 20 years

Our schools have been experiencing three overlapping waves of technology adoption since the mid-1980s: the personal computer lab wave, the online learning wave, and the digital classroom wave. In this position paper, I tried to explain why we are now at the onset of the digital classroom wave, why it will cause great changes in education and why those changes could not occur prior to the digital classroom wave. By proposing a series of conjectures, I described with some confidence how classrooms in Taiwan may change. I also believed that some schools in other East Asian countries may experience similar changes. Basically, the classroom will undergo a transition from a pursuit of individualization and productivity in the first stage to the pursuit of personalization and global citizenship in the second stage. The linkage between the first stage and the second stage is also the linkage between the Internet world and the classroom world, which are now virtually separate. Technology adoption is determined by the availability of that technology, and we researchers in the field have little influence over it; however, we can build compelling, sustainable and ‘disseminable’ experimental digital classroom sites to set out classroom reform. To shed light on the development and dissemination of experimental sites, I draw parallels between Deng’s economic reform of China and classroom reform. In the process of building digital classroom experimental sites, we are revealing fundamental problems, setting out fundamental changes and hailing the advent of a new era of formal education.