Interviews

Leadership and Entrepreneurship: “Knowmads challenge all structures”

1/9/2012
Leadership and Entrepreneurship

De Baak‘s Ralph Blom wrote up a short interview with me for last month’s issue of Leadership and Entrepreneurship. My favorite bit: What skills are needed in a society 3.0? “Because everybody is in it together it is not bounded by a specific generation. Nobody has done this before, there are no role models. We [...]


Whose crazy idea is it anyway?

11/4/2011
Whose crazy idea is it anyway?

As the 21st century digital revolution continues to disrupt the economy, and the traditional knowledge claim held by experts of the 20th century is making way for a global entrepreneurial mindset, (university) education finds itself on the verge of its most radical transformations since the industrial revolution. Whose Crazy Idea Is It Anyway is an academic endeavor that has the ambition to set the agenda in the educational landscape of the coming decade.


Uffe Elbaek on social entrepreneurship

9/1/2011
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Uffe Elbæk is a social entrepreneur, politician, and cultural leader in Denmark. In his knowmadic career so far, he founded the KaosPilots school in Århus, organized the World Outgames 2009, and the Change the Game consultancy. Currently, Uffe is running for a seat in the Danish parliament as candidate from the Social Liberal Party (Radikale). [...]


Matching learning to the real world: Forget the box!

7/24/2011
ali-hossaini

I met up with Ali Hossaini in Amsterdam and Noordwijk earlier this month. In this short interview we made, Ali states that “to think out of the box, you have to start out of the box, and we’re not letting people leave it right now in the current educational institutions.” He advocates for approaches to learning that are collaborative and reflective of real world problem solving that allow people to become experts on the fly (and not just in business, but art, academia, etc.). The development of creative thinking, he argues, is one thing that Western educational institutions could develop as their competitive advantage.


Do it yourself – do it together

7/19/2011
Keimpe de Heer

A couple weeks ago, I had an opportunity to visit the Waag Society in Amsterdam. I visited with Keimpe de Heer, director of the Creative Learning Lab, which is focused on innovation in education. Paired with a Fab Lab, they aim to develop the community they serve into producers of imaginative, creative and innovative outputs — not just consumers.


Godin: “the curious are punished”

12/2/2010
Godin on curiosity

Seth Godin on schools: “… over and over and over again the curious are punished.”


Moravec: Focus on HOW to learn, not WHAT to learn

7/29/2010
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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.


Interview with Gary Knell of Sesame Workshop

11/30/2009

Gary Knell is President and CEO of Sesame Workshop, has been a major force behind Sesame Street’s global mission, and has helped the program expand to South Africa, Russia, China and Egypt. He spoke on the topic of “innovation” at the 2009 WISE Summit, and was able to answer a few of Education Future’s questions after one of the events.


Can technology fix schools?

8/25/2009

Henry Jenkins thinks so. Watch his interview with PBS’s Frontline: More at PBS’s digital_nation site… (Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo for the link.)


Hallo Tegenlicht kijkers!

3/23/2009

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, [...]


Related posts

“The rough guide to the future” – a good starting point

Last month, Rough Guides quietly released Jon Turney’s new book, The rough guide to the future. I was looking forward to the release of this book –not just because I’m quoted in one of its asides– but because I am always on the lookout for new primers on futures studies and serious looks into the future.

Rough Guide to the Future
Review: Empowered (by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler)

Back in August, Josh Bernoff tweeted an offer for a free copy of his new book, Empowered, in exchange for a review at Amazon. I enjoyed his previous book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, co-authored with Charlene Li, so I took him up on the offer. Somehow, there was a delay in getting the book to me, and the text did not arrive until we were well into the fall semester — not a good time for a review. So, this is a little bit late, but better than never.


Review: Education Nation (by Milton Chen)

Milton Chen deviates from the change manifesto genre somewhat by reflecting on his own experiences and the work undertaken by Edutopia, which he previously directed. The book is so deeply oriented toward the work of Edutopia and its key source of income (George Lucas), that, prima facie, it nearly comes across as a swan song of their accomplishments. Reading beyond this, however, the book emerges as another list of indictments of many of the things wrong with the U.S. education system. Where Chen shines, is in making a case for changing our mindsets so that we can find remedies.


Backlight

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 [...]


Top ten list #10: Resources for education futurists

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! Wikipedia Wired The New York Times The Wall Street Journal Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity [...]


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Education Futures explores a New Paradigm in human capital development, fueled by globalization, the rise of innovative knowledge societies, and driven by exponential, accelerating change. Education Futures is owned and published by Education Futures LLC.