Personalised learning trajectories must fall within this Fourth Wave. With digital technologies it is possible to assess individual learners more regularly and to dynamically respond to their cognitive progress. The usage of Artificial Intelligence will come to the fore as well. My own research concerns discovery of why learners make mistakes in simple problems, and the cognitive causes of these - which I see as one part of the larger puzzle to address the total renewal of education - using digital technologies effectively and not merely as replacements for textbooks.

The work by Maynard and Mehrtens (1993), which named the fourth wave, as the ongoing rollout of Toffler's wave theory, is certainly interesting to contemplate.  Although educationists may long for the fourth wave, I do not think we are there yet for a number of key reasons.  In the United States, and elsewhere globally, education is still a product of governmental legislation and control, so while I agree with Layton in his thinking that personalized learning trajectories seem well suited to the concept of fourth wave educational thinking, such personalized trajectories do not fit with a constructed curriculum.  Responding to technology in education, and in agreement with both current answers, technology, artificial intelligences and so forth will be an integral part of fourth wave thinking, however, we have barely made the transition into the use of technology for educational purposes across social domains.  Moreover, the technology that is emplaced serves the constructed curriculum, rather than spawning new paradigms of education.  In order for the fourth wave to come to the fore, the market economy will have to release its grip on the outcomes of education, categories of difference will have to lose their tendency towards intersectional conflict, and the purpose of living as an agent within society will have to be redefined.  Can you imagine those who profit on the status quo to willingly concede their means of value extraction for the purposes of individual enlightenment?  As romantic as the idea of individual human value is, as it is framed in fourth wave thinking, the pragmatist in me questions how the current social order, globally, can be transformed to a point where fourth wave values overtake nationalism, capitalism, scientism. . . all the 'isms'.  You ask if it is a waste of time.  I suggest that forcing the transformation implicit in fourth wave dynamics is the central responsibility of educationists.         

I will respond to only one of Butler's argument, on the government control of the curriculum. In South Africa, where I am resident, the curriculum was previously specified on a content basis, and expressed in terms of assessment criteria. However, a recent change has enforced a week-by-week programme in which specific topics are introduced in a controlled manner, with almost no flexibility, and all textbooks have been written to meet this scheduled approach to teaching and learning. This treats all learners on a singular trajectory, in effect that of the "average" learner, and thus does not meet the needs of either the advanced or the slower learners, who will be pushed further and further behind as the curriculum pushed ahead without waiting. A key question in this model is whether the teacher is merely the conduit for this knowledge, or whether they contribute directly in some way using their own interpretation and PCK, since they cannot merely transfer knowledge to learners purely through their presence in the classroom. My thinking is that it the classroom which is in greatest need of redefinition, rather than the entire educational system or curriculum. My argument is that if the teacher knows more about the current level of knowledge of each of their learners, then they are better informed to meet the curriculum needs. The corollary to this is that in the absence of this information the teacher cannot possibly help to achieve educational outcomes. For me this is the most important role for technology in the classroom, to identify the learner's challenges and to communicate this to the teacher. Whether this is a Fourth Wave I am not sure, since I see this as a practical requirement for the advancement and acceleration of learning, and particular in the area of mathematics, my own area of study.

I agree with Mr. Layton.  The classroom is in need of repair.  Since all fruitful educational endeavor, in my opinion, requires feedback -- reflected appraisals -- from all sources, teacher to student, student to student, and student to teacher, constructed curriculums, even as Mr. Layton describes have been newly minted in South Africa, do not translate well to the reflective practitioner.  Since the A Nation at Risk report in the US, circa 1983 off the top of my head,  we have had some variation of a curriculum which has put the teacher on the hook for learning outcomes against a set benchmark for his or her entire class, not for learning gains a student makes from their particular starting point, which makes more sense.  Using technology to inform the teacher (and the student as well) about that student's starting knowledge level is a perfect use of technology with all manner of applications to the student's learning trajectory including the post assessment piece, but there is the catch; Our curriculum doesn't provide a provision for students' learning from point A to point B, rather it just asks if the student met the desired benchmark.  I believe that Mr. Layton and I agree fundamentally, and are both circling around fourth wave ideologies.

I also believe that Mr Butler and I are in general agreement. To this point in time it has not been possible for the teacher to provide the one-on-one approach as is considered an ideal in education. Bloom explored how to structure the classroom into groups to meet this requirement, and various modern authors (such as Wiliam) have identified the role of formative assessment practices to enable the teacher to better understand their class and its individual levels of development. I consider that up to this point the reason this is not in the curriculum, as a fine-grained theory and practice of learner development, is that we have not had the tools to uncover this level of thinking in the learners. Now that such tools are becoming available, it is possible to base curriculum structures and the pedagogic approach in the classroom, towards the common usage of these tools. It is like the curriculum change in mathematics that arose when the calculator became an essential element in the classroom. These tools are pushing the curriculum towards improving the economics of the educational process - achieving greater effectiveness in educational objectives, with less time and effort, and for the first time in history there is a real possibility of providing such fine-grained knowledge of learners to the classroom teachers. With such information available, the curriculum cannot ignore this but must accommodate this, and not at the snail pace of curriculum reform, but as a radical sea-change in the practices. My own concern has been with the validity and reliability of short diagnostic assessments conducted in the classroom, and I have argued that this can only be done by connecting up all learners assessments into a central repository, so that the data sets are obtained in real-time and individual learners can then be structured into groups dynamically depending upon what can be inferred from their responses. I have also argued that the quality of the questions asked is fundamental in terms of whether the results are useful or not, and that not all questions are equal. Thus, I continue my argument that this Fourth Wave is the wave of individual learner, and the tools to allow us to dive deep into learner cognitive models and their minute-by-minute progress, rather than purely on the behavioural outcome on whether or not they have reached a benchmark.

Nice approach, from Mr. Layton. . . a disruptive innovation (technology) actually used disruptively. And no disrespect to the snail, but I agree that it has no place in curriculum reform, which must be done explosively.