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I leave this weekend for Mexico City, where I will participate in the La Universidad en México en el año 2030: imaginando futuros conference at UAM-Cuajimalpa. I will present a paper (see draft submitted) based on my doctoral dissertation, and, with Arthur Harkins and Cristóbal Cobo, will also engage in discussions with academic, high tech/business, and government leaders on how we might be able to collaborate on new initiatives for innovation in education.

…and, the three of us will hold a reunion with Mexican students who participated in last summer’s “knowledge to innovation” co-seminar.

“Version 2.0″ of the open seminar “From Information to Innovation Knowledge” will kick off on January 24, 2008. Partnering institutions include the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Ecuador, and FLACSO-Chile. Confirmed guest lecturers include Dr. Nora Sabelli at SRI International and Ismael Peña-López at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

University of Minnesota students may join the co-seminar by registering for EdPA 5102 section 2 (”Knowledge Formats”). All others should contact Ana Karla Romeru at FLACSO-México for information on how to participate.

Utilizing Web 2.0 social technologies, Skype and Adobe Connect platforms, the course will connect the three FLACSOs with the University of Minnesota for both synchronous and asynchronous learning. Course content includes discussions of:

• A New Paradigm of knowledge production
• Tools for information and knowledge management
• Collective intelligence
• Learning technologies (including open sourcing of education)
• Knowledge, innovation and new context-creating workers
• Human capital development
• Complex systems
• “2.0″ technologies and beyond

The Minnesota sessions will be facilitated by Dr. Arthur Harkins and myself. Dr. Cristóbal Cobo will coordinate the course among our Latin American partners. For more information on the project or our co-seminar approach, please email me at moravec@umn.edu.

Cristóbal Cobo notes that a video of his University of Minnesota presentation on his book, Planeta Web 2.0, is now available for viewing online. The event was held in collaboration with the Institute for New Media Studies and the Digital Technology Center at the University. (You can also watch me provide an introduction.)

Play the video (requires Real Player).

Blackboard Beyond’s Greg Ritter sent me a note announcing that “the issue [I] experienced with SafeAssign that enabled [me] to gain access to a SafeAssign user’s paper has been resolved. Blackboard released a new version of the SafeAssign central service as well as a new version of the SafeAssign Building Block last Tuesday, November 20.”

Since the issue has been fixed, I am now de-redacting my previous post on the issue.

As guest blogger coming off a Thanksgiving-typtophan stupor, I found myself asking the very question many of my English students have posed over the years.  A recent posting on Insidehighered.com  told about a curriculum redesign of  writing for frst-year students. 

Scott Warnock of Drexell University says about the redesign:

“The conventional way that assignments are presented to students isn’t always relevant to them,” Warnock said. “We can change that by trying to create context.” 

First-Year Writing Gets a New Look

Here is an example of educators collaborating in an attempt to move toward both relevance and context creation. 

The following is a brief excerpt from an article in the Orlando Sentinel regarding a study of Florida Virtual School.

The article is referring to a recent report by Florida TaxWatch Center for Educational Performance and Accountability. 

While the results of this study, not surprisingly, focus on student outcomes with regard to economic efficiency, it is striking to note the remarkable lack of such words as “innovation” within the study.  While the study’s focus is efficiency, it seems like another example of traditional structures being replicated in an online world. 

I’m still in China, so this is just a quick note that CNN.com published a special report labeled “Just Imagine,” a vision of what life would be like in 2020. The learning section is quite good, and contains an interview with Yasuaki Sakyo, who founded Shibuya University Network — and implemented a lifelong learning approach that is infused into the community it serves. In effect, the entire city of Shibuya becomes a classroom.

More thoughts on this next week, along with a potentially BIG announcement on Leapfrog in China.

I shudder to think.  This notion came to mind as I watched this video, Do Schools Kill Creativity,  delivered by Sir Ken Robinson at a TED Conference in Monterey, CA. where he again raises the concern that our educational system is about the business of educating people out of their creativity.   Over the years, I’ve inspired many a catatonic state as I slogged through the cannon of American Literature with the ferocity of conviction of Jonathan Edwards.  

 “Students in the Hands of a Zealous Teacher.” 

Aye, but there’s the rub.  On the one hand, educators are accountable to bureaucratic reporting structures that demand accountability to standards that are not about building creative capital, while that is precisely what we all need as we manage change and create the future.  This tension bespeaks the need for leapfrogging.

Sometime ago, I had heard Thomas Friedman suggest that we often have 21st Century students and 20th Century teachers.  I felt indicted by this statement and hope that on my better days, that might actually be true.

I taught for years in an urban setting, teaching for St. Paul Public Schools, and I began to question the relevance of what I brought to the classroom and the manner in which I delivered it.  It caused me to reflect on my own education, training, and experience in a world where change is accelerating at ever-increasing rates.  It caused me to begin asking what we must do to address an educational system that is clearly “preparing” students for a world that no longer exists.  It caused me to ask, how might we prepare students for a world and workforce that doesn’t yet exist.

That brings me to my current role/s.  I am exploring these questions in both my academic life and in my work life.  It is an arena where theory and practice meet and often collide.  It is an arena in which I continue to evolve and ask the question: what does education need to look like for the 21st Century and beyond?

I have recently accepted the role as Curriculum Director for BlueSky Online Charter School, Minnesota’s first fully online public high school.  That said, it is often easy to be lulled into sense of complacency, thinking that simply being an online school is innovative in and of itself.  Simply delivering traditional curriculum in an online environment is not enough. 

For academics and the theorists, these questions are anything but new, and for the NCLB-strapped practioners, day to day survival often dictates something other, and the chasm between theory and practice is often substantial. So over the next few days, I will be musing about how we not only bridge that chasm, but leapfrog into the 21st Century. 

I received a call this afternoon from a third-party developer who confirmed the Blackboard Beyond Initiative is working aggressively on a fix for the critical flaw in its SafeAssign product reported at EF on Tuesday. The good news is that student data is no longer being distributed into the wild. This is a huge gain for students and faculty concerned about privacy.

The quick turnaround on this issue merits extra credit. In the interim, SafeAssign’s grade gets changed to an “Incomplete” until the fix is released.