Mark your calendar! This week, I confirmed that I will give a talk at the Creative Company Conference in Amsterdam on May 26. The CCC has a great list of speakers (including Sir Ken Robinson, Google’s Ji Lee, and TCHO‘s Louis Rossetto and Timothy Childs), and it’s a great honor to join them! More about [...]

Are the old basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic relevant in the 21st century? Or, is it time for an upgrade? Arthur Harkins and I assembled a list of New Basics for education that can help us leapfrog to an education paradigm that is both innovative and relevant for the 21st century and beyond. These [...]

Click on image to start video. Education Futures is receiving a lot of visitors from the Netherlands – supposedly viewers of tonight’s Tegenlicht episode. I enjoyed the interview, and hope that you’ll find the program engaging. I’d like to hear what you think! Also, if you’d like to learn more about the topics I discussed, [...]

The future is getting harder to imagine –so much that the SciFi channel is giving up on science fiction and rebranding the channel. Rather than pushing for bold futures, network executives at NBC Universal have decided to retreat into the make-believe worlds fantasy, the supernatural and pro wrestling. From their media release: By changing the [...]

Cristóbal Cobo sent me this link to the Ung Kommunikation [Young Communication] project. The project examines the convergence of new technologies, youth culture and learning. And, by looking at the influence of youth culture on digital communication, the project might be able to identify a bridge between the divide of formal and non-formal learning. From [...]

OLPC may see a new competitor enter the market. Utilizing a new microprocessor technology that embraces probabilistic logic computing rather than traditional boolean logic computing, a team at Rice University is designing a digital, touchscreen, LED slate for deployment in developing countries. Probabilistic computing permits devices to provide correct answers most of the time rather [...]

About an hour ago, Maya Frost tweeted something utterly disturbing: Not So Global: Share of US public elementary schools teaching foreign language classes drops by 40% in last decade http://tinyurl.com/ak4at9 From the linked article (via Public School Insights): The share of U.S. public elementary schools teaching foreign language has fallen by almost 40% over the [...]

The March 13 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education has a list of 13 reasons why colleges are hurting in the current economic downturn. They write that colleges managed their investments poorly, failed to show leadership in building quality institutions, ignored their customers’ needs, failed to get the support of state legislatures, and dodged [...]

Fox News recently delved into the realm of the bizarre and ultra-hysterical with their new program, Glenn Beck’s “War Room.” The program does a disservice to the futures field by focusing on wildly improbable scenarios that seem intended to drive viewers into a state of fear and paranoia (especially in regard to the current presidential [...]

Last Wednesday, I sat down for an interview by Rob Wijnberg for VPRO’s Tegenlicht (Backlight) at the Lloyd Hotel in Amsterdam. For the episode that is to air on March 23, the question was asked, “what do education systems need to do to excel in the 21st century?” The program first interviewed Frank Furedi, who [...]