Victor Yu (Udemy) interviewed John Moravec, editor of Education Futures. He argues that technologies need to be used to help students learn how to think … not tell them what to think:

“I believe we need to engineer new technologies to help them HOW to learn, not WHAT to learn. Our school systems have focused on WHAT for centuries. Likewise, we see too many educational technologies focus on the WHAT as well (i.e., pushing content rather than new idea generation). WHAT technologies are great for producing factory workers, but for creatives and innovators, we need to focus more on HOW to learn. The rapidly changing world demands no less. Students need to build capacities for continuous learning, unlearning, and relearning to be competitive globally. So, I believe that the technologies that address the HOW question will become the key for educational success in the remainder of the 21st century.”

Read the full interview at Udemy.

We had an opportunity to interview Dr. Moira Gunn, host of Tech Nation (carried by NPR and available as a podcast), at the Synergy 2008 conference in Phoenix, Arizona, last month. We wanted to know what she thinks is innovation, the relationship of innovation with markets, how important innovation is for social leaders, and what it would take for a place like Minnesota to take a leadership position in terms of innovation.

For her responses, watch the video:

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!

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.

1. Wikipedia
2. Wired
3. The New York Times
4. The Wall Street Journal
5. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking.
6. Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age. New York: Riverhead.
7. Gardner, H. (2006). Five minds for the future. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press.
8. Kelley, T. (2006). The ten faces of innovation: IDEO’s strategies for beating the devil’s advocate & driving creativity throughout your organization. London: Profile.
9. Owen, H. (2001). Just how good could you be? grow your personal capital: what you know, who you know, how to use it. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub.
10. Harkins, A., & Kubik, G. (2006). StoryTech: A personalized guidebook to the 21st Century. Minneapolis: The StoryTech Group.

1. Informal learning is learning by living – learning isn’t specifically planned, it simply occurs. Two examples of informal learning: 1) taking in what one observes while walking the streets; and 2) listening in on an interesting conversation being held by others.
2. Informal learning is arguably how most people learn most of what they know and are able to do, because the learning occurs automatically within (often) quite specific contexts. Yes, informal learning also occurs within classrooms.
3. Nonformal learning takes place through planned activities that are not strictly regarded as educational. Two examples of nonformal learning: 1) flying an airplane with the assistance of an instructor pilot; and 2)learning to run dope under the guidance of a veteran pusher.
4. Nonformal education is growing. In television, tens of channels are devoted to nonformal learning. The Internet may be said to be a huge and growing nonformal learning context.
5. The Internet is a spectacular engine for both informal and nonformal education, because some of its resources are structured for casual learning and more focused, context-specific learning.
6. Schools are foolish not to use the resources of the Web to help students learn 24/7 and to pass tests, because the Web lends itself to formal learning as much as to informal and nonformal learning.
7. Schools that use the Web to the maximum simply duplicate what is already going on in business and industry around the world. Currently, schools lag the world of work by not emulating the practice of learning through all three modes in real-world contexts.
8. It is possible to imagine a new educational institution evolving from dovetailed, Internet-supported formal, informal, and nonformal learning. Such an institution might be labeled the Global Classroom because it would be (nearly) ubiquitous around the planet.
9. Anywhere/anytime learning is already with us, but it presents a threat to most formal educators. Families and their children can minimize this threat in a number of ways, including joining the Global Classroom and using it to Leapfrog their relative advantages within the world economy.
10. Individualized and peer-to-peer learning are huge changes on the educational horizon. This is exciting because the Web vigorously supports both. Through individualized and peer-to-peer learning, new expressions of formal, informal, and nonformal learning will emerge.

1. Schools of the agricultural and industrial ages produced graduates suitable for their economies and societies. Change is accelerating, and students that are being prepared for old society jobs cannot be expected to succeed in a rapidly evolving socioeconomic environment. Today’s schools must reorient themselves toward producing graduates that will adapt and lead in societies that do not yet exist.
2. Knowledge is meaning, and meaning is knowledge. A new emphasis on the production of knowledge/meaning in formal education will mean students should not be viewed merely as vessels to into whom knowledge is downloaded, but should be vigorously involved in new knowledge co-creation. A good starting point toward creating new meanings is to bring dialogue and dialogical approaches to education back into the classroom.
3. No Child Left Behind undercuts the quest for meaning that is part of every intelligent human life. To reverse this damage, the schools must leave behind NCLB and psychometric-centric school cultures behind.
4. Many new ways of attending formal education are now available in a number of societies. The major implication of this is that families have greater choices in determining blends of educational contexts, and can contribute to the further development of new knowledge-producing contexts
5. Innovation is derived from the timely and effective use of knowledge. To help produce both knowledge/meaning and innovation, the schools will have to routinely seek out new contexts, problems, and experiences to bring into each classroom.
6. Schools routinely firewall the Internet. The simplest ways to minimize the losses to imagination and creativity generated by this practice are to stop fighting information and open access to the net; and develop improved ICT tools to help students harness their creative potential.
7. Generally, families are sources of educational conservatism. Such squeamishness about potential changes of school missions from download education to the production of knowledge/meaning and innovation can be abated by engaging parents in future-oriented storytelling conversations, such as StoryTech.
8. Schools in America tend to ignore or even denigrate creative, imaginative students. A quick fix for this problem is to remove creative students immediately, and place them in supportive contexts where they can build upon their individual knowledge and begin to innovate immediately.
9. Production of knowledge/meaning and innovation in the schools can vastly increase the choices available to society. The problem with this is that the choices quickly may quickly become overwhelming. New technologies must be developed and embraced to help support and mediate personal and social decision-making.
10. To further overcome the problem of “knowledge and innovation overload,” a minority of students may have to partner with adaptive technologies to maintain cognitive competitiveness with their more choice-comfortable peers.

1. No Child Left Behind. NCLB is producing exactly the wrong products for the 21st Century, but is right on for the 1850′s through 1950. NCLB’s fractured memorization model opposes the creative, synthetic thinking required for new work and effective citizenship.
2. Schools are merging with prisons. As soon as students enter schools, they lose many of their fundamental rights, including the right to free speech. Students who do not wish to conform to prison-like, automaton production must develop individual creativity to survive… often at a price.
3. Inadequate teacher preparation, recruitment and retention. The U.S. public schools have always been lemmings, but are now failing to produce teachers who are savvy to the contemporary trends their students must learn and respond to in times of accelerating change. The other half of the picture is teacher-modeled creativity, something the public schools have never seriously attempted.
4. Insufficient adoption of technology. The squeeze is on from both ends: Student-purchased technology is usually derided, suppressed, and sometimes confiscated. These tools are part of the technology spectrum kids know they will have to master. On the other end, technology in the schools is dated, the Internet is firewalled, and there isn’t enough equipment to go around.
5. Focusing on information retention as opposed to new knowledge production. Disk-drive learning is for computers. Knowledge production and innovation are for humans. The first requires fast recall and low error rates from dumb systems; the second, driven by intelligent people, builds the economy and keeps America competitive.
6. Innovation is eschewed. Most U.S. teachers think innovation is something that requires them to suffer the discomforts and pains of adaptation. They don’t accept change as a necessary function of expanding national competitiveness. Many U.S. teachers might be more comfortable in industrial world economies and societies represented by China and South Korea, or 1950′s America.
7. Continuous reorganization of school leadership and priorities, particularly in urban schools. Serious questions can be raised whether schools are the organizations required to cope with semi-permanent underclasses, violent youth, incompetent, irresponsible parenting and negative adult role models. What institutional substitutions would you make for the schools?
8. National education priorities are built on an idealized past, not on emergent and designed futures. Blends of applied imagination, creativity, and innovation are required to visualize preferred futures, to render them proximal and grounded, and to forge them into empirical realities. On the other hand, it is quite possible that Secretary Spellings and other highly placed education “leaders” have never had an original thought in their entire lives.
9. Social class and cultural problems in schools and communities suggest that the schools live in a Norman Rockwell past. Bright kids capable of novel thought and new culture creation have never fit into the industrially modeled American schools, and lower-middle class teachers have little respect for working- and poverty-class art, music, and culture. It appears that the schools are populated by timid, unimaginative, lower-middle class professional placeholders who crave convention (spelling bees, car washes, exceptional sports performances) over invention.
10. Failing to invest resources in education, both financially and socially. Education is formal, informal, and non-formal in structure and function. It is possible that formal education will be recognized as the least powerful of this trio, in part because it is so dated, and in part because it occurs in such a small percentage of life compared with the other two types. Perhaps new funding algorithms and decisions must follow this ratio.