Microsoft’s future vision videos for education

Keeping tabs on the latest Microsoft future vision videos is almost becoming a job in itself. Following the critically acclaimed “2019” productivity vision video, the newest member of the “Labs” family – Microsoft Education Labs launched today with two vision videos focused on education in the next five to ten years.

Although these education vision videos are not as flashy in technical wizardry as compared to other videos in the series, it certainly demonstrates what many existing technology today can do for education if there is Utopian-like synergy between the products and services. That and perhaps if every school could afford at least a dozen Surface tables.

Until then, the pen and paper lives on for a little longer.

16 insightful thoughts

  1. It would seem to be an expensive task, but given the concept, it’d be great to bring this to life.
    Sadly though, we all know high schools will just spend their time bypassing the filters XD

  2. Those videos didnt really have anything more than our current stuff today.

    The big difference is, Messenger is blocked at school and no schools use Live Services. Apart from Live mail to send docs around.

    Clearly these videoes are fairy old as it had Windows Live Wave 2 pages. I found it funny that it looks like they had patched all the Messenger windows for no ads 😛

  3. What if the world was filled with meaningless platitudes?

    What if we used technology in totally unnecessary ways?

    What if people didn’t want to spend their whole lives learning how to use various screens?

  4. What d’you mean launched today? I was watching these videos last week! Shneaky bugger making out like it’s a scoop 😛

  5. They still seem to be using Soapbox which is going to be closed soon as per various news sources. I am wondering what will happen to all these videos then ?

  6. They need to publish some high def quality videos to match the pretty decent cinematography. Long, I’m sure you can get them to release some nicer looking WMVs or MOVs… :p

  7. These have already been available on the Microsoft Video site for months, at least the last time I saw them. It’s still nice to see someone exposing them though.

    This seamless synergy could work pretty well in schools of the future if touchscreen tablets were more affordable, some education/tech company could develop the software and services to make this really easy (Microsoft and Encarta?) and school administrations could be a bit more looser when it comes to using technology in schools (My school can sometimes block useful websites

    Until then, we’re going to have to rely on the inefficiencies of paper, pencils, and textbooks.

  8. These are very reminicent of the old sharepoint learning scenarios. Unfortunately, everything that was the underlying pins has been killed off. Class Server, dead. Encarta, dead. Student, dead.

    You can find more info on the project here http://www.learninggateway.com/

  9. I’ve seen these videos before.As we all know that in past Microsoft has also functioned with Hewlett Packard and Iverson Computer Associates to give institutions a perfect solution to deploy Encarta Class Server

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