Archive for February, 2009

On the approaching Singularity

2/21/2009

The Star Tribune’s Karen Youso interviewed me for what I thought would be a short sidebar article on accelerating change, but it wound up taking the full front page of the Variety section in today’s paper. I’m absolutely delighted to see mainstream media discuss the Technological Singularity! … especially since the article contains questions for [...]


Is it too late to bring creativity to schools?

2/17/2009

An interesting conversation on creativity is emerging on the blogosphere. Many people saw Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk on reintroducing creativity into schools, and undermine assembly line approaches to creating automatons out of students. On Sunday, North Carolina 6th grade teacher Bill Ferriter countered, “Creativity is dead, Ken,” and outlined barriers in his classroom that [...]


Siftables: A promising future for toys

2/16/2009

Wow-oh-wow, oh wow!!!! From TED earlier this month: MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables — cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning? More elsewhere: Siftables at MIT D. Merrill, [...]


Singularity University

2/10/2009

This past week… A shockwave passed through the singularity community today with the public launch of Singularity University at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.  Singularity University aims to assemble a world class community of thought leaders, academics, and entreprenuers across the many fields of exponentially advancing technologies (nanotechnology, genetics, medicine, artificial intelligence, etc.) [...]


India’s $10 laptop to be unveiled soon

2/2/2009

Feb 4 2009 Update: Found at Technology Review: “It turns out that India’s ‘$20 laptop’ — a gadget meant to cheaply deliver online educational content to students at more than 18,000 Indian colleges — may actually be more of a handheld web access device than a laptop computer.” And, it doesn’t look like a laptop [...]


Can furloughs save land grant universities?

2/2/2009

A friend and colleague at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington wrote to me that, “UNCW MAY be doing furloughs like we saw at ASU. [...] they will say ‘take off a day a week.’” As more state-funded universities are looking at furloughs to help remedy financial crises, I’m starting to think that furloughs might not [...]


Related posts

Jayson Richardson returns as guest blogger

For the week of October 12, Dr. Jayson Richardson will return to Education Futures as a guest blogger. (I will be away in China.) Jayson is an Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership in the Watson School of Education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research interests include international / intercultural education and global [...]


A campus for rent in Chaska

The StarTribune reports that the town of Chaska, Minnesota, is planning for a new higher education campus, built by an outfit called “EdCampus.” What makes the site unique is that it is being built without a sole tenant in mind: The company plans to erect classrooms as shells, line up higher education institutions as tenants [...]


University-Industry Collaboration

In Japan, promotion of university-industry collaboration has been a key topic at many levels since the early 90′s, and especially since 2004 when all the former national universities became semi-privatized. With this drastic reform in Japanese higher education in 2004, Japanese former national universities need to be transformed into a new mode of knowledge creation. [...]


A boost to online universities

The US Congres recently opened the flow of student financial aid to online universities. Since 1992, the government required that, to be eligible for financial aid, higher education institutions must provide at least half of their classes in person. This change brings new competitive challenges to “traditional” universities. The influence of for-profit institutions is growing. [...]


Press Release: Supporting the University of Minnesota’s Strategic Vision

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (Minneapolis, February 20, 2006) – Arthur Harkins and John Moravec today released action steps they believe the University of Minnesota should take to become one of the world’s top three public research universities within the coming decade. Their effort is independent of the University’s official strategic repositioning process.  It is intended to [...]


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