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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.

David Brooks wrote an excellent op-ed piece in today’s New York Times. He states that individuals cannot be successful in a globalized world without building advanced capabilities to transform information into meaningful knowledge:

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations. These abstractions, called “the Chinese” or “the Indians,” are doing this or that. But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning. It emphasizes that different societies are being stressed in similar ways by increased demands on human capital. If you understand that you are living at the beginning of a cognitive age, you’re focusing on the real source of prosperity and understand that your anxiety is not being caused by a foreigner.

This is one of the few articles in popular media that effectively ties globalization with the need for revolutionizing human capital development. And, it is one of the very few articles that contain the words “globalization” and “pedagogy” together in the same paragraph.

Read the entire article…

Charles Leadbeater, Debbie Powell and Tim Cowie assembled a short video based on Leadbeater’s We-think book, which “explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.”

(Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo for the link.)

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.)

Jayson Richardson forwarded this link to audio from the Third Global Knowledge Conference (GK3):

From UNESCO’s Communication and Information Sector’s news service, the conference centered on the development of knowledge societies, and:

Topics ranged from community radio, telecentre, CMC in Asia, Africa and Caribbean, present and future conferences, ICT for disabled, Citizens media, Brain Store, Fund for youth, eTUKTUK, Free and Open Software and Shareware, E-inclusion of indigenous, Open Source Software for radio streaming, ICT4D, etc.

Bill Farren, a technology integration facilitator in the Dominican Republic, created a response to Karl Fisch’s Did you know? slides:

Farren asks:

How is preparing students to enter an economic and industrial system that is at war with itself preparing them for the future? Wouldn’t we be better off educating people so that they can improve their chances of living well on a planet with a finite biosphere? Shouldn’t the purpose of an education have to do with living well, not with supporting economies?

In other words, in an education world dominated by measurement regimes, are we missing something?

Makes me wonder…

[Cross-posted from e-rgonomic]

Special thanks to John on showing how a paper cup is a technology (see post). Here is a small demonstration of the Open Seminar 2.0 conference and the emergence of M-Learning (mobile learning) era. This is a success story for the intelligent use of domestic mobile ICT and education. [Idea: Edwards Bermúdez]

[Marduk in his impressive connections tower in the middle of an English-Spanish conference: USA, Ecuador and Mexico]

Following-up from yesterday’s post on the characteristics of co-seminars, here’s a taste of what they look like.

This joint co-seminar, organized between the University of Minnesota, FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Chile and the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja is an “open seminar” – that is, with permission from the students and collaborating institutions, all course content and most of the interactions are available online through the course content management system and blogs for each of the participating institutions (see the class blogs for UMN, FLACSO-Mex, FLACSO-Chile, and UTPL).

The four institutions connected each work through a different syllabus, but we meet virtually to discuss intersecting points of interest related to various knowledge formats, knowledge management, etc. In this co-seminar, we chose to post mini-lectures online, which are available in both English and Spanish (see Spanish and English examples of this week’s video). Students then bring their questions to a bi-weekly video conference (and Skypecast) for discussion. To compensate for instances where technology breaks down, podcasts of recorded discussions are made available for download, and instructor responses students’ questions are made available as YouTube or Google Video:

So, what makes co-seminar experiences different from other online or in-person learning options? I’ll post more reflections as the seminar continues, but several key areas have already emerged:

1. Student work (posted on the blogs) is phenomenally improved over what typically is produced in courses. What has been posted so far in the past two weeks has been refreshing in terms of thoughtfulness and academic scope – is this because they know other people are viewing and reviewing their writing as professional work?
2. Without a shared, core “empirical reality” of what knowledge is among the cultures represented, participants at each institution are beginning to learn to embrace and attend to the chaos and ambiguities that emerge in such a course.
3. The amount of coordination among international partners required by instructors is tremendous –but, it’s all worthwhile as we are all learning new things and making new contacts.

More on co-seminars coming up over the next few months…

USC’s Lloyd Armstrong posted a link to a draft article for New Directions in Higher Education (2007, Wiley Periodicals) where he argues that globalization has had a small effect on higher education. In his blog, he writes:

But why has higher education responded so slowly to the opportunities and challenges of globalization? I argue that the major reason has been the place-based nature of our history, and consequently, of our missions. There are also constraints in the way of change, which include the reality that at present, US higher education has been dominant in the competition for international students and faculty; that the constituencies that support higher education are not open to a greatly changed role; and that government in the US has not addressed the question of what it expects of higher education in a rapidly globalizing world.

Sure. If you’re thinking of globalization as internationalization, there hasn’t been much change. If you’re thinking of internationalization as study abroad or as attracting more foreign students, creating branch campuses, etc., you’re not going to see much change, either.

There are far more dimensions to globalization than just “internationalization,” and far more dimensions to internationalization than study abroad. A globalized institution attends toward developing a chaordic balance between dichotomies of the local and the global, the real and the virtual, the periphery and core, and its interdependence among and with various actors.

This also means that a globalized university, inherently, is more creative –and its levels of creativity need not operate at administrative levels. Globalizing activities may occur at institutional, departmental, and individual levels within universities. If Armstrong is looking for macro-level signs of globalization, he will ultimately fail.

Breaking away from 20th century paradigms, Armstrong needs to explore how globalization also extends beyond the development of institutional “brands.” Global universities harness the opportunities provided by the interdependencies and dichotomies of globalization. An example of a globalizing activity is the upcoming (”version 2.0″) knowledge co-seminar/open seminar organized between the University of Minnesota and FLACSO-Mexico with linked classes at FLACSO-Ecuador, FLACSO-Chile, and the Technical University of Loja –and with additional participants from the Open University of Catalunya and SRI International. Such projects typically fall under the radar if you’re looking for macro-level signs of globalization or internationalization.

Perhaps the question Armstrong ought to ask is, how do we identify creative, global activities among our institutions?

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 …)