Someone always asks the math teacher, “Am I going to use calculus in real life?” And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no. He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age.

A couple highlights from around the Web:

• We covered a little bit about Don Tapscott before, and we love his message. Now, in his Edge feature, he’s saying the university as we know it is about to disappear.
• A few weeks ago, I sat down for a discussion on Education 3.0 with Corinne Nederlof, who runs Onderwijs van Morgen (Education for Tomorrow). She posted her thoughts online in Dutch, but you can use Google Translate to read it in English.

If there is anybody you would like to see interviewed by Education Futures, please drop us a note, and we’ll follow-up!

TED is looking for an eclectic, heterogeneous group of young thinkers and doers from the fields of technology, entertainment, design, the sciences, engineering, humanities, the arts, economics, business, journalism, entrepreneurship and NGOs. More information is available at http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/

What are the roles and qualifications for the Teacher of the Future?

This is the question that Education Futures is asking participants of the Education 2020 unconference in Islay, Scotland on June 12, 2009. (Watch my greetings for the conference.) Whether you’re participating in the event or not, you are invited to share your vision for future educators in the form of a classifieds ad-style job description for the Teacher of the Future, dated June 12, 2020. Submissions will be compiled and published at www.educationfutures.com in July of 2009.

Please download and complete this form [Word .doc] [Rich Text .rtf], and return it to me at john@educationfutures.com. Since all responses will be shared online, you are invited to also share a mini biographical statement and photo of yourself to introduce your contribution. Submissions for Teacher of the Future job descriptions must be received by no later than June 30, 2009, to be included for publication.

[...] the U.S. Education Department quietly revealed this week that the Fund for the Improvement in Postsecondary Education will forgo its main open grant competition. The main reason: The program’s funds have been drained by “special focus” competitions mandated by the Obama administration and by Congressional appropriators, as well as by pet projects imposed on the agency by members of Congress, for the second time in four fiscal years (it also happened in 2005).

[...]

A spokeswoman for the Education Department said on Tuesday that the Web statement about FIPSE had been posted accidentally, and that the cancellation of the competition was a “non-story” because Congressional appropriators, in crafting the department’s budget for the 2009 fiscal year in an omnibus spending bill in February, had essentially left no funds for what is supposed to be FIPSE’s general competition.

Read the full article at Inside Higher Ed…

I just returned from my talks at the Creative Company Conference, ITSMF Academy, and the University of Oxford. The themes of each presentation were different, but I was able to work from a common subset of slides that built from ideas shared in the Designing Education 3.0 series at Education Futures:

Special thanks and greetings go to Rudolf van Wezel, Jamila Ross, Linda van der Heijden, Corrine Nederlof (@nederlof), Fons van der Berg (@helikon), Jeroen Bottema (@jeroenbottema), @roscamabbing, Donna Schaap (@SoyDonna), Ralf Beuker (@iterations), Arne van Oosterom (@designthinkers), Sir Ken Robinson (@SirKenRobinson), the Kaos Pilots, Amnon Levav, Michael Krömer, J. Roos, Agnes Hadderingh, Bert van Lamoen, Dan Sutch, Cristóbal Cobo, Ken Mayhew… and the many others I met and worked with over the past week!

• Highly materialistic and self-absorbed
• Caring and tolerant
• Change-oriented
• OK with high educational debt
• The most cosmopolitan age group in America
• More likely to live abroad for an extended period of time
• Does not expect job security

How is today’s educational system tapping into the rich culture and valuable assets of this generation? If our schools, curriculum, pedagogies, and structure are built on a social system, social values, and student attributes that look nothing like they do today, they are not really meeting the needs of this new generation of students. As noted in this blog “No matter how hard we try to cover up 19th century institutions, they will still be 19th century institutions.”

Following DI, I will travel to Amsterdam for the Creative Company Conference and ITSMF Academy. The CCC, in particular, should be interesting as I will join Sir Ken Robinson, Frank Heemskerk (Dutch foreign trade minister) and human capital expert Mirjam van Praag in a discussion on creativity and entrepreneurship in education. This will be fun. Stay tuned!

• Technology is taught as an add-on and is not infused throughout
  programs.
• Educational leadership courses are not measuring or ensuring that
  leaders who get the university’s rubber stamp of approval are technology savvy.
• Outside of maybe a dozen folks (that we know of), the issue of
  technology leadership is not getting a lot of attention. Scott McLeod and I
  recently completed a study attesting to this fact. It should be published in
  a special edition of the Journal of School Leadership soon.
• As noted over on Dangerously Irrelevant, service in higher education is usually seen as the lesser of our obligations as faculty members. How can we get our technology interested faculty members on board to directly work with more schools, leaders, and teachers on topics related to technology when the institutions that promotes them do not value this type of work (that is to say our service if judged less than our research and teaching)?

Most higher education institutions see value in technology and do want technology to be infused in their educational leadership programs. Bryan Setser of North Carolina Virtual Public Schools spoke to my class of EdD students recently. He said “if you are thinking that technology is only a tool, you are already behind. Technology is a process, it is not a tool.” Why then are school leadership programs not teaching our school leaders to change how they do the business of education versus teaching them how to use tools to make their job easier?

I find the Education 3.0 framework as proposed by John Moravec aptly applies to school leaders too. As John said: 

This will all require new forms of educational professionalism, tapping well beyond traditional teachers [and school leaders], and blending together with the communities that schools serve. The future that kids and adults co-create can provide the emerging knowledge/innovation economy a boost, greatly enhancing human capital and potentials.

The debate continues: What is the role of a teacher? The sage on the stage or a guide on the side? In a recent Tegenlicht episode, Frank Furedi argued for a return to “classical,” power-based, download-style (banking) pedagogies. I countered that we need something different. Here’s my take:

Download-style education fails when we try to provide students with knowledge and skills that will enable them to lead in a future that is very different from what exists today –and, in a future that defies human imagination. Teaching facts or knowledge that was relevant in the past may not be acceptable today or in the near future. Moreover, if teachers are as unprepared for the future as students, why not learn invent it together?

Teaching in Education 3.0 requires a new form of co-constructivism that provides meaningful extensions to Dewey, Vygotsky and Freire, while building the future. Specifically, teaching in Education 3.0 necessitates a Leapfrog approach with:

• Adults who are eager to imagine, create and innovate with kids
• Kids and adults who want to learn more about each other
• Kids and adults who partner to collaborate in teaching to and learning from each other
• Kids who work at creative tasks that mirror the innovation workforce
• An understanding that kids need to contribute to all economic levels, and with better distribution of effort than in the past

This will all require new forms of educational professionalism, tapping well beyond traditional teachers, and blending together with the communities that schools serve. The future that kids and adults co-create can provide the emerging knowledge/innovation economy a boost, greatly enhancing human capital and potentials. How would you teach, learn, and create in Education 3.0?