Blueprint is:

An ongoing discussion about education and how technology can be used to make learning more engaging, authentic and relevant to students. In particular the software that needs to be developed to support teachers and students inside and out of school.

The world is changing - more rapidly than our schools are.

Students enrolled in most schools today are not being educated to be successful in the world as it exists today, let alone the world they will graduate into.

This situation cannot stand forever due to a multitude of converging factors that when taken together represent significant shift in the way societies, economy and culture works.

Education is an important way in which students of today will become fully functioning adults of tomorrow. Adults capable of rising to all of the challenges they will face as individuals as well as the collective ones the planet will face. Education’s mission is to provision students with knowledge and skills, but more importantly the ability to rapidly adapt to new situations, generate creative ideas as well as new knowledge and work well in a global context.

A new model for education and ‘how we do school’ is needed. This will require radical rethinks of how we build our schools, the expectations we set for teachers and students, as well as shape the design of curriculum and the structure of academic programs.

Blueprint is about my evolving thoughts on how this process of change must take place, and what the future of education might look like.

Justin Hardman is the High School Educational Technology Coordinator at Hong Kong International School (HKIS). He was born in New Zealand but raised in Hong Kong and educated in Australia. Although his educational background is not in education (or technology), his professional passion is working with faculty and students in how to effectively implement technology for learning. His major project is a learning platform developed at HKIS called myDragonNet which is designed for articulation of the curriculum, collaborating in classes and other groups and personal portfolios.