World 50 Years From Now: American Culture Technological Innovations

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The World 50 Years from Now
Introduction
The world today is experiencing both accelerating innovations and exponential growth with more and more systems that humans in the last centuries slowly being replaced by more advanced ones. Humans are making radical changes to the settings in which they operate and the world has now become an interconnected neural of networks where solutions to human problems are shared and crowdsourced. This implies that no single human is living in silos, but people have become dependent on others and the technological advancements that have been built since history (McLean np). Such a power of connectedness, which began with the explosion in Internet technologies, has revealed what humans are capable of doing. In particular, the next 50 years will see radical cultural changes in areas such as education systems, communication capacities, and the prowess in the military not only in the United States but also world over. This paper argues that the American culture will be affected by technological advancements in education, communication, and the military that will see an overreliance of societies on technology to carry out traditional activities that were hitherto accomplished by humans.
Education
In the next 50 years, the education sector in the United States will shift to technologically orientated pedagogy with the increased shrinkage of classrooms and the disappearance of teachers. While the traditional four-wall lecture rooms are still the norm presently, these may cease to exist with the increasing access to knowledge and accumulation of information on the Internet (Weller np). Currently, many higher education institutions have implemented digital platforms where students can access degree programs with course materials and examinations anywhere in the world. Upon course completion, successful students are awarded degree certificates that can be shipped to the recipients, thousands of miles away from the awarding institution. The next five decades might also witness a radical disappearance of teachers from classrooms with the enormous changes in education that are now being driven by technological innovations such as massive open online courses (MOOCs), ‘flipped classroom’s’, mobile video learning, and iLearning and eLearning platforms (Kingsley np). Already, MOOCs have captured increased interests of many educational institutions globally and there has been a debate whether these approaches serve as a supplement or a complete alternative to traditional methods of teaching. However, the low cost of MOOCs, in which case most of them are free, has made more people from remote areas and low-income families to access traditional higher education. Flipped classrooms where students watch videos from home might also replace the need for teachers ever coming to classrooms. In addition, the new technological tools and programs such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs have largely influenced how teaching is done in the United States. Therefore, within the next 50 years, the education sector in the United States will witness profound changes with the disappearance of teachers in classrooms and the embracem...