If 20 17 is considered as the year of artificial intelligence, then 20 19 will be destined to go down in history as the year of 5G. On June 6th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China issued the world's first 5G commercial license, marking the official application of 5G technology.
On June 27th, the World Mobile Congress was held in Shanghai. China Mobile held a sub-forum on "5G Empowerment Education, Wisdom Brightens the Future" at the conference. The White Paper on 5G Smart Campus released at the forum puts forward six smart education application scenarios and solutions, including education and teaching, education management, campus life, smart campus, education evaluation and 5G featured application, claiming that it will fully empower the construction of smart campus through the use of 5G, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other information technology means, marking the opening of the application curtain of 5G technology in the field of education.
5G is the abbreviation of the fifth generation wireless network. Compared with the current 4G, it has three remarkable characteristics, namely, high speed, low delay and high capacity. Therefore, the application of 5G in education also has several important characteristics. First, the network capacity of the Internet of Things has greatly expanded. Through the application of the Internet of Things, teachers can obtain various data of students' study more conveniently and improve the effectiveness of education. Second, lower latency and higher speed will expand the application of VR/AR and expand the capacity of mixing real content and video in the classroom. It is predicted that the delay time of 5G will be reduced to below 10 millisecond, which is 1/30 of the blink time, which will greatly improve the user experience of VR/AR and become a more useful teaching tool for teachers. Thirdly, video and remote synchronization courses will become very convenient and will better promote the sharing of educational resources between urban and rural areas.
Therefore, many media have recently issued comments such as "5G Empowering Education", "5G Changing Education" and "5G Promoting Education Equity", and the discussion on the relationship between 5G and education in the education sector is also very lively. So will the popularity of 5G improve the imbalance of educational resources between regions? What impact will 5G have on education?
Indeed, from the history of education, every technological progress will promote the reform of education. However, how the technological revolution affects education has different paths in different times.
Because education is closely related to each of us, people especially expect the new technological revolution to become an artifact to change education. Just as the Internet subverts the business model and financial system, I hope that new technologies represented by 5G can completely change our education.
As early as the 1960s, when computers began to appear, some scholars wanted to replace human teaching with machine teaching, and some even put forward the "school extinction theory". After the appearance of the Internet, some scholars even called for subverting the current education through network technology. In this regard, the efforts and investment of countries around the world are very great, far greater than that of commerce and finance.
However, until today, education has not changed fundamentally. It is said that Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, put forward a famous "Steve Jobs Question" before his death: "Why did computers change almost all fields, but the impact on school education was surprisingly small?" For this intriguing question, in September of 20 1 1, Duncan, the former federal education secretary of the United States, gave the answer: the reason is that "there has been no structural change in education".
It is generally believed that the application of information technology in the field of education can be divided into three stages: the change of tools and technology, the change of teaching mode and the change of school form. Audio-visual education, PPT courseware, etc. Both are changes in tools and technologies, while massive open online courses and flipped classrooms are changes in teaching models. These are local changes in education and unnecessary changes. If the school form does not undergo profound changes and the educational structure does not undergo corresponding changes, the real educational reform is very difficult, even virtually impossible.
As a cultural style and ideology, as an education closely related to people's physical and mental development and the future and destiny of the country, the difficulty and complexity of reform far exceed the imagination of many of us. So technology alone is not enough to solve the problem of education. We can't expect to solve the education problem once and for all through the technological revolution. This is unrealistic. The same is true of the impact of 5G technology on education.
So far, our research on the relationship between 5G and education is mainly limited to the issues of technology, tools and teaching mode, that is to say, we still stay at the first two levels, and rarely really think about the third level, that is, school form and educational structure.
So, how to break through from the third level? Recently, my new book "Future School: Redefining Education" has preliminarily sorted out this problem, and proposed to build the school into a new learning center, make full use of the convenience, immediacy and sharing characteristics of educational resources acquisition under the background of 5G technology, reconstruct the current school, establish a national quality education resource center and a new credit bank system, and break through the barriers between schools, schools and social educational institutions, and schools and families. And create a "capable person" under the background of school form and educational structure reform, a brand-new educational ecosystem and a future-oriented educational model, which can be realized by using modern technologies such as 5G, big data and artificial intelligence. ▲ (The author is a professor at the Institute of New Education of Soochow University, member of the Standing Committee of Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and deputy secretary-general).