Education Futures

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Matt Mason, author of The Pirate’s Dilemma, is pressing for a television piece based on his book and, “how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool and anyone with a computer is capable of reaching more people than a multi-national corporation.”

Check out what he has to say about communication, information, knowledge and innovation in this teaser/demo:

Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, and Nina Kruschwitz wrote an article in Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.’s strategy+business on transforming business thinking to combat climate change.

We cannot meet the 80-20 challenge under the present industrial system. Success will require a sea change in the prevailing kinds of energy we use, cars we drive, buildings we live and work in, cities we design, and ways we move both people and goods around the world. It will require other changes that no one can yet imagine. That’s why basic innovation is so important: Humans must rapidly rethink and rebuild their infrastructure, technology, organizations, and approach to working with nature. Meanwhile, the growing recognition of this 80-20 challenge [to generate an 80 percent reduction of worldwide emissions in 20 years] — among scientists, businesspeople, and citizens — is itself a signal that the industrial age bubble has reached its limits, just as general recognition of the unsustainability of many Internet businesses preceded the bursting of the dot-com bubble of the 1990s.

Indeed, the industrial age is over (at least in industrialized nations), and the world is moving toward a socioeconomic system that favors knowledge and innovation over industrial outputs.  Global climate change is creating an imperative for ecologically sound, innovative transformations of industries and society.  The idea of “business as usual” is no longer economically sound or socially acceptable.

When we talk about schools going green, we often focus on energy efficient classrooms, lunchroom waste reductions, and conservation of office supplies.  Far less frequently, we talk about helping students build a capacity to innovate toward creating ecologically-sound solutions.  We’re producing students that will be successful in 19th or 20th century assembly line jobs, but not for roles they will need to assume in a knowledge- and innovation-based society.

No more business as usual means we can no longer do education as usual.

With this in mind, it’s perhaps appropriate to round off Cobo’s list of skills for knowledge workers with a final point: be responsible. These are all items that schools should work on developing in the communities they serve:

1. Not restricted to a specific age.
2. Highly engaged, creative, innovative, collaborative and motivated.
3. Uses information and develops knowledge in changing workplaces (not tied to an office).
4. Inventive, intuitive, and able to know things and produce ideas.
5. Capable of creating socially constructed meaning and contextually reinvent meanings.
6. Rejects the role of being an information custodian and associated rigid ways of organizing information.
7. Network maker, always connecting people, ideas, organizations, etc.
8. Possesses an ability to use many tools to solve many different problems.
9. High digital literacy.
10. Competence to solve unknown problems in different contexts.
11. Learning by sharing, without geographical limitation.
12. Highly adaptable to different contexts/environments.
13. Aware of the importance to provide open access to information.
14. Interest in context and the adaptability of information to new situations.
15. Capable of unlearning quickly, and always bringing in new ideas.
16. Competence to create open and flat knowledge networks.
17. Learns continuously (formally and informally) and updates knowledge.
18. Constantly experiments new technologies (especially the collaborative ones).
19. Not afraid of failure.
20. Oriented toward building positive social, economic, and ecological futures.

School is out for summer! Education Futures will continue publishing on a reduced schedule until late August. This means, we expect to get an article out once every week or so. We will also use this time to redesign bits of the website. Expect great things!

Few topics are as political as education, in which at least basic schooling is compulsory for all Americans. It is fitting, then, that we conclude this week’s focus on change with a look at the changes that presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama each propose for U.S. education. After analyzing educational policy statements on each candidate’s website, one contender clearly presents an agenda for educational change: Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Sen. McCain only provides a short statement on his educational stance, while Sen. Obama, in addition to an outline for action he proposes, provides a comprehensive plan for lifetime success through education.

McCain focuses his statements on education on school choice –that is, if a school fails a student, then the student should have the freedom to move to a different school. McCain believes that many schools are failing, and No Child Left Behind helps to illustrate the problem. Obama believes that public education was broken before NCLB –and that NCLB was intended to fix the problem, but was poorly conceived, never properly funded, and was poorly implemented.

Excerpts from statements made by each campaign:

On No Child Left Behind

On Science, Technology, Education and Mathematics (STEM)

On Non-Formal Education

On Higher Education

On Responsibility for Education

Right now, Sen. Obama is the only candidate who shares a plan for educational reform. As the election nears, we will revisit the positions on the two candidates. If the McCain campaign comes forward with a plan for educational change, we will share it with you at EducationFutures.com as the election nears.

In response to yesterday’s post: Change is accelerating: Get ready!

Socially adapting to the pace and direction of technology changes has been a mixed bag. Sometimes, consumer pressures have the effect of driving change; sometimes consumers are indifferent; and at other times they challenge or resist a particular technological innovation. In Kurzweil’s case, some consumers are challenging the potential of technologies he’s projecting for the future.

Most challenges in advance of marketable products and services indicate ignorance more than fear. Most consumers do not read speculative (read science) fiction, and those over a certain age (about 35) usually don’t flock to science fiction movies or television shows. (No, “Lost” is not science fiction!) Hanging on to the past is easier and more defensible in the absence of known alternatives.

Where the rubber hits the road is the effects of adoption lags and challenges that affect education. While Leapfrog Institutes actively promotes the use of hand held, Web-enabled devices to facilitate 24/7 learning, schools sometimes challenge Web schools and -in the US- collect students’ tech hardware at the school door. This is a remarkable example of how ignorance of alternatives produces counter-productive and even anti-intellectual outcomes.

Kurzweil has a great projective track record. His futures are already on the way. The spoils will go to those organizations and societies that act as Beta sites for new technologies, not those who compulsively challenge, shrink away, or actively resist. The bottom line: get involved in testing and assessing new technologies, even when they are projected and not yet “real”.

Change is the theme of this week, and we open with a reminder from Ray Kurzweil that change is accelerating. Last week, the New York Times’ John Tierney published an interview with Kurzweil on accelerating change:

Now, [Kurzweil] sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs [of accelerating technological change] already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

Kurzweil has a track record of being correct with his projections of technological advancement. What does this mean for education? What changes would take place in our schools within the next 12-22 years as technology transforms the human mind and human potential? This week, we will consider these questions, and look at both U.S. presidential candidates’ proposals for changing education for a better future.

Speaking of Kurzweil, he is busy adapting his book, The Singularity is Near, into a movie of the same title. Originally planned for release this spring, it’s now slated to surface sometime later in 2008.

Education Futures had an opportunity to cover Barack Obama’s historic clinch of the Democratic Party’s nomination in St. Paul last night. Next week, we will focus on change, and what both presidential candidates believe needs to be changed in regard to human capital development to secure America’s future.

Photos from the event are available here. Also, make sure to visit Minnesota Monitor for more coverage.

Got development ideas for the digital world? The OECD is willing to engage in a dialog by video. The organization’s press release says it all:

OECD – Paris, 29 May 2008

OECD and YouTube launch “Future of the Internet” initiative

“How can the Internet make the world a better place?” This is the question OECD is asking the public on YouTube, the leading online video community, at www.youtube.com/futureinternet.

YouTube users can share their opinion with the leaders and opinion shapers attending the OECD Ministerial meeting on the “Future of the Internet” in Seoul, Korea on 17-18 June 2008.

“You tell the leaders and opinion shapers in Seoul what you think and they will upload responses to your ideas. Join in. Take part in making a difference,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.

The best videos uploaded to www.youtube.com/futureinternet will be shown to ministers and VIPs at the event. They will be invited to react and their answers will be uploaded on YouTube during the meeting.

In Seoul, all participants, including government ministers from more than 40 countries and hundreds of global leaders from international government organisations, business, the Internet’s technical community and civil society, will be encouraged to submit their own answers at a dedicated YouTube booth on site.

For full details of how to participate, see www.youtube.com/futureinternet

Thanks to Dr. Cristóbal Cobo for the tip.

This morning, semiconductor producer AMD announced “AMD Changing the Game,” an education initiative designed to empower youth to learn critical life skills through games with social content. The launch accompanies AMD’s sponsorship and participation at the fifth annual Games for Change festival held June 3 - 4 at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

Starting with a limited scope, AMD Changing the Game will support the following non-profit partner organizations that serve their mission:

• Girlstart (Austin, TX): created to empower girls in the subjects of math, science, and technology
• Global Kids (Brooklyn, NY): seeks to transform urban youth into successful students and community leaders
• Institute for Urban Game Design (Washington DC): teaches science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) skills through the hands-on creation of digital games
• Science Buddies (Carmel, CA): offers a variety of web-based tools that help K-12 students explore science through research-based projects often done at Science Fairs and other school and community events
• 5th Annual Games for Change Festival (New York, NY): dedicated to creating and using digital games for positive social change

…and, it appears they’re welcoming additional grant applications.