If you’re new here and like what you read, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.
Thank you for visiting!

The European Patent Office engaged in a two-year futuring project on futures for intellectual property rights in 2025, interviewing 50 key players - including critics - from the fields of science, business, politics, ethics, economics and law. Their opinions were sought opinions on how intellectual property and patenting might evolve over the next fifteen to twenty years.

Four primary scenarios were developed from the projects activities:

• Market Rules (business): The story of consolidation in the face of a system that has been so successful that it is collapsing under its own weight
• Whose Game? (geopolitics): The story of conflict in the face of changing geopolitical balances and competing ambitions
• Trees of Knowledge (society): The story of erosion in the face of diminishing societal trust
• Blue Skies (technology): The story of differentiation in the face of global systemic crises

These scenarios are driven by five driving forces that create the most uncertainty:

• Power: “globalisation has redefined this power structure, with established sources of authority – such as governments – challenged by the many new powerful actors that are forming alliances and cutting across traditional boundaries”
• Global Jungle: “economic, social and political competitive flattening of the world between a multiplicity of players that include countries, regions, hotspots and city states, market sectors, global companies, organisational and business models, consumer markets and workforces, business and universities as well as cultures. In this global jungle, there are many who are ill-equipped to adapt.”
• Rate of Change: “The growing divide between the short and long-term goals leads us to ask: How do humans and their institutions adjust to cope with the rate of change?”
• Systemic Risks: “There are also major risks created by our dependency on the complex natural and man-made systems that support humanity.”
• Knowledge Paradox: “The transformation of data into information and then into knowledge – information that can be utilised to build capabilities – is also far from straightforward. This raises the question: As information becomes increasingly abundant, what knowledge has value?”

More is available in the free “Scenarios for the Future” compendium, which is available from the EPO website.

Here are the slides from the first half of my talk with Dr. Cristóbal Cobo at CUAED (UNAM) yesterday that described the pathway toward Education 3.0:

In addition to the work I mentioned during the talk, I recommend the following resources to participants:

1. Allee, V. (2003). The future of knowledge: Increasing prosperity through value networks. Amsterdam ; Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
2. Gibbons, M., Lomoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage.
3. Hakken, D. (2003). The knowledge landscapes of cyberspace. New York: Routledge.
4. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking.
5. McElroy, M. W. (2003). The new knowledge management: Complexity, learning, and sustainable innovation. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
6. Moravec, J. W. (2006). Chaordic knowledge production: A systems-based response to critical education. Theory of Science, XV/XXVIII(3), 149-162.
7. Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age. New York: Riverhead.

Update 18 April:Dr. Cobo posted more thoughts and resources from the conference at e-rgonomic.

From a recent article from Inside Higher Ed:

For all the hyperbole, facts about what’s actually happening on the ground in China can be hard to come by. A new study by economists at universities in Canada, New Zealand and China aims to document what its title calls “the higher educational transformation of China and its global implications,” collecting in one place statistics and other information about enrollments, demographic changes, numbers of colleges and faculty publishing, among other categories.

From the working paper’s abstract:

The number of undergraduate and graduate students in China has been grown at approximately 30% per year since 1999, and the number of graduates at all levels of higher education in China has approximately quadrupled in the last 6 years. The size of entering classes of new students and total student enrollments have risen even faster, and have approximately quintupled. Prior to 1999 increases in these areas were much smaller. Much of the increased spending is focused on elite universities, and new academic contracts differ sharply from earlier ones with no tenure and annual publication quotas often used. All of these changes have already had large impacts on China’s higher educational system and are beginning to be felt by the wider global educational structure. We suggest that even more major impacts will follow in the years to come and there are implications for global trade both directly in ideas, and in idea derived products. (emphasis added)

Given the explosive growth of Chinese higher education –and potential effects on social, cultural, and economic transformations, it is not surprising that the impact has not been probed. Change may be occurring far faster than researchers and policy directors can measure.

(Thanks to Tom Abeles for forwarding the source article.)

IDC has updated their forecast of expansion the digital universe to accommodate bigger and faster growth. Some highlights:

• The digital universe in 2007 — at 2.25 x 1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) — was 10% bigger than we thought. The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication.
• By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
• As forecast, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

More in the report (and executive summary)…

From this morning’s MACTA keynote address: Co-constructing Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century

Career and Technical Education is poised at the inflection point of a technological and social change process identified as the “J” Curve. Just like the letter J, the “J” Curve describes a sharp upward turn in the exponentially accelerating rate of change. The effects of the “J” Curve will be felt -indeed, are already being felt- by every institution, company, government, and school in all societies. This presentation centers on the leadership that can be exerted by Career and Technical Education in the context of the “J” Curve’s increasing impacts.

To view the slides in a larger format, click here.

Here’s my presentation from this morning’s La Universidad en México en el año 2030: imaginando futuros conference at UNAM in Mexico City.

(Click here for the Spanish version.)

This paper introduces how the convergence of globalization, emergence of the knowledge society and accelerating change contribute to what might be best termed a New Paradigm of knowledge production in higher education. The New Paradigm reflects the emerging shifts in thought, beliefs, priorities and practice in regard to education in society. These new patterns of thought and belief are forming to harness and manage the chaos, indeterminacy, and complex relationships of the postmodern.
(Read more …)

The flak I caught yesterday regarding SafeAssign got me thinking about term papers in the 21st century. Information and communications technologies make it easy and rewarding to share information. More recently, however, ICTs are allowing people to build creative and innovative products from the information available. We’re evolving into a “cut-and-paste society.” Some examples of which are:

• YouTube, which allows anybody to share videos that interest them with anybody in the world for free
• Mogulus, which allows anybody to create their own TV station for free (something that very recently required a sizable staff and millions of dollars of funding)
• GarageBand, which provides people with tools to record, mix and publish their own music
• Hip-hop, which often mixes, juxtaposes and generates new meanings from music, images and texts

Academic culture and traditions have not caught up to 21st century society. What real meaning is there for society if we were to continue to place heavy focus on traditional term papers, and police the content to make sure no influence is present from modern society?

Creative work, also, is being generated increasingly by machines. Two examples are Brutus and the 20th century’s MINSTREL (see Noah’s comments). Why should we worry about originality in student work if we are perhaps only a couple years (or months?) away from machines that will be able to write original essays, theses, novels, etc., for them? …and what if these machines could write these documents better than –and vastly outperform– most students?

Is there something else schools should focus on?

Slides from Saturday’s Global Youth Policy Seminar presentation by Arthur Harkins and myself follow:

Australia’s Computerworld jumps on the futures bandwagon, and provides insight into the 21st century (in stark contrast to what others are writing on the future). In an interview with British Telecom futurist Ian Pearson, a few daring predictions emerged:

1. “Thinking” is going to seem very alien to many people:

We will probably make conscious machines sometime between 2015 and 2020, I think. But it probably won’t be like you and I. It will be conscious and aware of itself and it will be conscious in pretty much the same way as you and I, but it will work in a very different way. It will be an alien. It will be a different way of thinking from us, but nonetheless still thinking. It doesn’t have to look like us in order to be able to think the same way.

2. Some machine intelligences will outsmart humans by 2020, and they will begin winning Nobel Prizes.

This raises an important concern. Our schools are not preparing students to thrive in an environment with a plurality of creative and intellectual modalities. Rather, through regimes such as No Child Left Behind, they are being transformed into cookie-cutter automatons. The irony is that as machines become much more intellectually-capable and creative, human capital is becoming more mechanistic. Which has the better potential to thrive through this century?

People seem really concerned about “future-proofing” in a world driven by accelerating change and accelerating uncertainty.  For example:

• How do we future-proof our schools?
• How do we future-proof our libraries?
• How do we future-proof our wealth?
• How do we future-proof our careers?
• How do we future-proof our families?

This promotes dichotomic thinking along the lines of, “if the rest of the world is going to change, how can I (or my beloved institution) best survive by changing the least myself?” Why shouldn’t we expect ourselves to change significantly as well? To leapfrog beyond the contradictory thinking of “future-proofing,” perhaps we should ask ourselves:

• Does the future need schools?
• Does the future need libraries?
• Does the future need wealth?
• Does the future need careers?
• Does the future need families?

…and we ought to also ask how, why, and what do we need to change today?