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 all have to co-create this together. Knowmads are highly engaged, creative, innovative, collaborative and highly motivated. They adapt fast in new situations and contextualize ideas due to situations. So schools need to find out how we can learn skills in motivation, creative orientation, being friendly, and an ungoing mindset on always keep up with technologies. All of us have to learn to share without geographical limitation. We have to create global footprints, go beyond the small communities and learn how to engage people all over the world in open and flat knowledge networks. A big cultural mindshift is needed, we have to start thinking that learning is everywhere, always and naturally. It is quit normal that even the biggest leader says: “Can you help me learn that?”. The most successful entrepreneurs do it all the time: “I don’t know how to do this. I have this idea. I want to get it to the next level. Can you help figure this out?” Innovation will not come from software and new technologies. It’s about mindware. That is our imagination, our creativity.”

Read the full interview on De Baak’s website.

The work conference takes a specific angle to tackle the education issue: the (presumed) tension between entrepreneurial and academic values. Where do these values overlap and when do they contradict each other? What kinds of learning environments can start to emerge when both these worlds join forces? And how can these new learning networks be equipped to address urgent societal issues?

Following a “Yes – No – What the Fuck” intermission exercise facilitated by the Knowmads business school in Amsterdam, I gave a keynote talk that centered on invisible learning, and how higher education can contribute toward building Knowmad Society.

Later, I chatted with Andrew Keen on how we might foster entrepreneurship and expressions of innovation in higher education. Unfortunately, the studio lighting couldn’t mask my jet lag and emerging head cold:

Other interesting interviews:

Parag Khanna

Zoltan Acs

Thieu Besselink

Hrobjartur Arnason

In the Invisible Learning project, Cristóbal Cobo and I revealed that the development of soft skills are critical for success in Knowmad Society. In an era where the useful lifespan of information and personal knowledge decreases at an exponential pace, soft skills are increasingly seen as critical to help individuals navigate and lead in a perceptively chaotic and ambiguous world. When posed with the question of which skills and competencies are critical for successful social entrepreneurship, Uffe cited four key competencies from the KaosPilots program:

1. Meaning: If you don’t understand what you’re doing and why you are doing it, your activity will fail. It is important to create meaning through what we do.
2. Relationship: Today’s society requires more teamwork and sophisticated communication and problem-solving skills. Building good relationships with the people you work with is critical.
3. Change: You have to be able to unlearn what you already know so that you can learn what is important in a changing world.
4. Action: You need to produce solid, visible results.

Update: In September 2011, Uffe was elected to the Danish parliament. On October 3, he was appointed the Culture Minister of Denmark. Congratulations, Minister Elbæk!

Read more on Uffe’s work:

• Fast Company: Business school for KaosPilots
• Ode Magazine: The most unusual college in the world
• Uffe Elbaek talks project design

Ali does a lot. Read his bio posted at ArtLab.

Watch the interview with Keimpe. The first ten minutes discuss the Waag and the Creative Learning Lab. The real fun starts at 10:48 into the video, where Keimpe challenges the “do it yourself” movement with “do it together” collaboration. Using open source concepts, Keimpe explains how “we” can be better than “me.” At 14:45, he shares some products bring developed at the Fab Lab, including a $100 $50 prosthetic leg and tank tread upgrades for wheel chairs.

This was my second visit to the Fab Lab in Amsterdam. For a summary of my previous visit, and comparisons to the Fab Lab at Century College in Minnesota, click here.

July 20 update: Keimpe wrote to correct that the Fab Lab is working on a $50 prosthesis, not a $100 prosthesis. Even better!

CURIOSITY from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

(Thanks to @KnowmadsNL for finding and sharing this video!)

“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.

Sesame Workshop President and CEO, Gary Knell, spoke on innovation and early childhood development at the 2009 WISE Summit in Doha, Qatar.

Education Futures was able to corner Mr. Knell after an awards dinner and ask him about a globalized Sesame Street, emerging technology, and Baby Einstein.

Link to interview at archive.org

More at PBS’s digital_nation site…

(Thanks to Cristóbal Cobo for the link.)

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, here are a few resources to get you started:

• An overview of “Education 3.0″
• A presentation on Society 3.0 and how it necessitates Education 3.0
• Knowmads: The new type of workers in Society 3.0
• How the Chinese are packaging teachers in mobile devices
• Christensen, C. M., Horn, M. B., & Johnson, C. W. (2008). Disrupting class: How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking.
• Leapfrog Institutes at the University of Minnesota

And, for those of us outside of the Netherlands, here’s what the episode is about (adapted from my quick and dirty translation of Netherland 2′s description):

How can we ensure that talent is fully developed? And what is the importance of our knowledge? Rob Wijnberg converses with Frank Furedi, a British sociologist and author of, among others, the controversial book Where have all the intellectual gone?; Robbert Dijkgraaf, Professor of mathematics and physics and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; and, John Moravec, from the University of Minnesota and author of A new paradigm of knowledge production in higher education. In this last broadcast on the topic of Excellence we meet with a number of experts looking for answers to the most pressing questions with regard to education. What is needed for better talent in the Netherlands and what is associated with more diversity? The interviews are done by Rob Wijnberg, writer, director and journalist for NRC•Next. The main question in the interviews is: What are we really educating children for? a) To perform at the maximum (economic). b) To become happy (personally). c) To maximize contributions to society (citizenship).