My doctoral dissertation, A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education: A Delphi Study, is available for purchase online or for online preview: Click here to preview the first chapter Or, purchase a PDF download or hardcover copy of this document online at the Education Futures store SPECIAL: Download now and save! For [...]

The StarTribune ran a positive piece that raises awareness of David Shupe’s eLumen Collaborative, a Web-based, enterprise-level application for tracking student competencies. The project began as a response to a simple question that higher education institutions and graduates have a hard time answering: What, precisely, did graduating students learn, and what competencies have they developed? [...]

The semantic web approaches! Powerlabs, which will launch in early September, utilizes Powerset, a large-scale search engine that breaks the confines of keyword search and takes advantage of the structure and nuances of natural language, according to the company. At the moment, they’re accepting sign-ups for pre-release experimentation.

One of the big ideas from 6.0 was that kids are not naturally good at complex games. They often have the time, resources, but they do not always have the guidance of a mentor. Many kids are playing games designed by adults for adults. This is good and bad. Good in that the adult games [...]

Reader Arturo B. from Durango (Mexico) notes that Karen Littman posted an outstanding essay from 1992 in which she describes why she started Morphonix (creators of Neuromatrix, discussed in an earlier post): Even young children will become researchers as they discover and explore new information at their own pace. New technology is multisensory. It allows [...]

Do kids just naturally get it? Are they just good at games, computers, phones, and all things digital? My experience and common sense says no, although I wish it were a general truth. Do kids need to learn about games in school? Yes, if we want to guide them in optimal usage, and maybe learn [...]

What was presented yesterday is how to embody and teach a lesson on Voice. Trying to teach voice sounds pretty boring, especially when you tell them excitedly in your teacher nerd-talk that “you’ll like it, it’s fun! We’ll look at poetry and other fiction and examine tone, emphasis, word choice, syntax, volume, and all the [...]

I sent an email out to a few folks with a short question: Which trend will have the greatest impact on education in the 21st century? [ ] Globalization [ ] Rise of the knowledge society [ ] Accelerating change [ ] Other: _______ The results will be posted below as I receive them. If [...]

Games as Expert Systems It seems like common sense to assume that the best way to learn something is to work one-on-one with an expert. Unfortunately, many of these experts are busy using their expertise in important projects at the Louvre, saving lives, winning Nobel prizes, and putting out fires—and sometimes a great expert is [...]

I am developing the following ideas with George Kubik and John Moravec. We welcome any feedback you might have. To date, divisions of past, present, and future have been a necessary condition for a paradigm of futures research. We assert that the futures research field must progress beyond traditional assumptions and categories of past, present [...]