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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.

Rick Reis’ today posted on his Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list a reprint of a review by Sandra L. Koresoja (and originally published in Planning for Higher Education, January-March, 2008) of College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy, edited by Lloyd Thacker, published by Harvard University Press and Remaking the American University - Market Smart and Mission Centered, by Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and William F. Massy, published by Rurgers University Press. From the review:

In today’s colleges and universities, the influence of market forces has tended to alter faculty as well as institutional incentives, while Internet communications capabilities have blurred the boundaries of academic knowledge and created global research communities (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001). Thacker begins the discussion regarding changes in the admissions process by asking in a section title, “Who Can Do What Needs to Be Done?” (Thacker, p. 181). His suggested initial steps to collective action are focused on students, parents, colleges, the College Board, and members of the media involved with ranking colleges. The suggestions of Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy for institutions seem less concrete. Yet, their book helps to explain the origins and broader context of the admissions arms race; it also furthers a larger discussion of importance to planners and policy makers by raising new questions about the “public good” purposes, or social value, of higher education in today’s increasingly globally connected world.

Read the entire review at Tomorrow’s Professor.

Contrary to the closed access environments University of Iowa graduate students advocate, I believe that “intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.” Therefore, before the giant hairball of a banana that is my doctoral dissertation over-ripens beyond its useful life expectancy, I am releasing the document as a free download.

More information on my study, “A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education,” is available at http://www.educationfutures.com/dissertation.

Maya Frost has put together an interesting blog to help promote ideas she’s assembling for a book: The world is your campus: How to skip the SAT, save thousands on tuition, and get an outrageously relevant global education. Her take is that people need to balance education with creative life experiences. Why learn about the world in a classroom when there’s a world to explore nearby? Here comes do-it-yourself education!

A few interesting, recent posts:

• Dad sues Wheaton College for unfair study abroad charges: somebody’s putting up the good fight against service fees that don’t return services
• Study abroad programs at 15 universities investigated–Bring on the shakedown! …including my alma mater…
• Personal U: How to create your own university: She argues we have a responsibility to educate ourselves

Since I work in a department that trains study abroad advisors, here’s my question for the day:  In a Web 2.0 world of knowledge sharing, do students and youth need study abroad advisors?  Or, is there a better solution?

Today’s Inside Higher Ed reports on a new book from the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching. In The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (Jossey-Bass), George Walker et al state the obvious: doctoral programs (and their purposive requirements) often are not understood by supervising professors and students. The purposive use of qualifying exams, the apprenticeship model, and dissertations must also be reformed, they argue.

From the article:

Efforts to assess the quality of what goes on in graduate education are minimal, the report says, and many professors aren’t excited about talking about these issues. “One finds attitudes of complacency (’Our application numbers are strong and so is our national ranking’), denial (’We don’t have problems with gender or ethnic diversity here’), and blame (’Students these days just aren’t willing to make the kinds of sacrifices we did to be successful.’),” the book says.

While many programs resist change, many doctoral students find themselves uncertain about expectations or the rationale for requirements that are consuming years of their lives, the book says. “The rationale for program requirements has often been lost in the mists of history: Students may not well understand why certain elements are required or toward what end, and faculty, if pushed, will acknowledge that there is no unified vision underpinning many of the experiences students are expected to undertake.”

The book’s recommendations are built on themes of scholarly integration, intellectual community, and stewardship. Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

Cristóbal Cobo notes that a video of his University of Minnesota presentation on his book, Planeta Web 2.0, is now available for viewing online. The event was held in collaboration with the Institute for New Media Studies and the Digital Technology Center at the University. (You can also watch me provide an introduction.)

Play the video (requires Real Player).

I thought I would share some of the great ICT4D resources. Happy reading!

• International Journal of Education and Development using Communication Technology. An e-journal focusing on both research and practice in ICT, education, and technology.
• Information Technologies and International Development. An e-journal focusing on the intersection of ICT and international development.
• ICT for Development Platform. Brings together ICT4D specialists, best practices, innovations, and experiences. Check out the Connecting People for a Better World book!
• UNDP ICT4D. The United Nations website for ICT4D resources.
• ICTlogy. A blog dedicated to ICT4D issues.

We wrap up our ten days of top ten lists with ten resources that can help you start to think as an education futurist. This list is far from complete — feel free to post your own in the comments!

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.

Ray Kurzweil is going to be interactively live on C-SPAN2’s “Book TV” this coming Sunday from 1100-1400 CST. Here is the blurb from this morning’s NYT:

“Join us for a live conversation with Ray Kurzweil, author of several books about artificial intelligence, including The Age of Spiritual Machines, and his latest, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Participate in the discussion by calling in or e-mailing your questions.”

Here is a book to watch out for: The singularity is near by Ray Kurzweil, to be released in September, 2005.

The following information is cut-and-pasted from Amazon.com’s description of the volume:

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005)
• ISBN: 0670033847

Book Description

The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and controversial advocates for the role of machines in the future of humanity. In his latest, thrilling foray into the future, he envisions an event—the “singularity”—in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines.

The Singularity is near portrays what life will be like after this event—a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed, world hunger will be solved, and our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death.

We will be able to create virtually any physical product just from information, resulting in radical wealth creation. In addition to outlining these fantastic changes, Kurzweil also considers their social and philosophical ramifications. With its radical but optimistic view of the course of human development, The singularity is near is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and provocative books of 2005.

Order from Amazon.com