Predicting the Future :-)

I love trying to predict the future and since my field of work is education this summary article called Compressing Stephen Downes interests me a great deal. I've been following Stephen Downes for a few weeks now. His area of focus tends to be online learning, but this article about his thinking is applicable beyond those boundaries. For those of you with more time on your hands here is a link to the full article: The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On

A random thought that I had a year or so ago that has resurfaced a few times is: How will online learning impact student life? If you know me the reason I'm interested in this question is obvious - I work in student life ;-)

I ask this question because as everyone involved in education gets more comfortable with online learning our practices will obviously move more heavily in that direction. My concern (for more then my job) is that their will be less face-to-face interaction. Without this type of interaction I worry that the ability of future students to practice their communication skills in more ways then text messaging, emails, discussion boards, blogs etc will diminish. With less experience at communicating face-to-face I worry that their relationships will not be as deep.

That said, I realize that online learning and interactions can evolve in ways we simply do not understand or appreciate now. For instance, social networking was not an option 10 years ago and I believe it has a great deal of potential to enhance the level of online communication.