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At yesterday’s Horizon Forum meeting at the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Steve O’Conner, Director of Instructional Services for Owatonna Public Schools, presented an overview of an initiative in a classroom in Washington Elementary School where a fifth grade classroom has gone mostly paperless. Desks are replaced with medicine balls and music stands, and textbooks, papers and pens are replaced with laptop computers. We then connected to the classroom by videoconference, and spoke with the students and their teacher, Matt McCartney.

What do the kids think? They love it!

Jeff Cagle from Owatonna People’s Press joined the conversation in Owatonna, and wrote:

Megan Andrist said she found the laptops helpful because she was able to access a number of kid-friendly Web sites for research.

Cam Muchow enjoyed using technology and adding other elements such as digital photography to his assignments.

By removing desks from the classroom, the students are able to instantly reconfigure their learning and work settings. In theory, the instant physical reorganization and software-enhanced environment allows for more individualized instruction. One kinesiologist at the University of Minnesota wondered if the medicine balls could help reduce the need to medicate children diagnosed with neurobehavioral development disorders (i.e., ADHD). Others saw instant potential in the cost savings that can be realized by eliminating traditional desks. Again, we asked: what do the kids think? They love the medicine balls. Cagle wrote:

Most students, including Brady Steinhorst, enjoyed sitting on the therapy balls.

“Usually when you’re sitting in a chair, you have nothing to do,” he said, “and then you talk to a friend.”

Despite the excitement and hope the classroom is generating, a troubling question looms: What will happen to these kids when they graduate from the 5^th grade and enter a middle school with desks, and where computers and other resources are restricted to tightly-controlled laboratories?

Special thanks goes to Superintendent Dr. Tom Tapper, principal Mary Baier, and Matt McCartney for their collaboration on this event.

World Competitiveness. For the first entry of my guest-blogging, this topic would not be too bad, I suppose.

Thus, World Competitiveness.

According to World Competitive Yearbook 2007 by IMD (International Institute for Management Development), Japan is now ranked in the 24th place, sliding out of the top twenty. Allowing China to pass (China rose from 18 to 15), Japan has moved down eight spots, from the 16th in 2006. In fact, Japan is now surpassed by many of it’s neighboring countries, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and even Malaysia (See the below ranking for details). Though there is a debate over if China truly deserves to be ranked so high, let’s put away that debate for the moment and I would like to think why Japan has fallen dramatically.

One IMD research fellow points out why Japan is slipping, noting some of the factors that I have also pondered many times in the past when thinking about my own country’s higher education system. As she puts it:

[...] Entrepreneurship is not widespread (ranking 57th out of 61 countries), business managers are not characterized as having much international experience (52nd) and there is a low participation of women in business (47th). [...] Other obstacles to global integration include a national culture that is closed to foreign ideas (54th) and strict immigration laws (55th), despite the fact that Japan ranks higher for its “attitude towards globalization” (14th).

It has also been pointed out that this low ranking is caused by the serious descrepancies between the skills companies need and the skills Japanese university provides to students.

What does this mean?

To me, it means that the higher education system needs to focus on producing a new type of college graduate: someone who is ready for the globalized economy of the 21st century, someone who can think independently and able to function in the international market, and someone who has great creative mind as well as entrepreneurship.

Yes yes, these points have been discussed for many years by now, but nothing has changed so far, as Japan’s competitiveness ranking keeps dropping down.

I am unwilling to admit, but it looks as though it will take some time before Japan starts climbing back up the rankings… *sigh*

IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2007 (top 30)

1. U.S.A, 2. Singapore, 3. Hong Kong, 4.Luxembourg, 5. Denmark, 6. Switzeland, 7. Iceland, 8. Netherlands, 9. Sweden, 10. Canada, 11. Austria, 12. Australia, 13. Norway, 14. Ireland, 15. Mainland China, 16. Germany, 17. Finland, 18. Taiwan, 19. New Zealand, 20. United Kingdom, 21. Israel, 22. Estonia, 23. Malaysia, 24. Japan, 25. Belgium, 26. Chile, 27. India, 28. France, 29. Korea, 30. Spain.

(Source: http://www.imd.ch/research/publications/wcy/announcing.cfm)

Australia’s Computerworld jumps on the futures bandwagon, and provides insight into the 21st century (in stark contrast to what others are writing on the future). In an interview with British Telecom futurist Ian Pearson, a few daring predictions emerged:

1. “Thinking” is going to seem very alien to many people:

We will probably make conscious machines sometime between 2015 and 2020, I think. But it probably won’t be like you and I. It will be conscious and aware of itself and it will be conscious in pretty much the same way as you and I, but it will work in a very different way. It will be an alien. It will be a different way of thinking from us, but nonetheless still thinking. It doesn’t have to look like us in order to be able to think the same way.

2. Some machine intelligences will outsmart humans by 2020, and they will begin winning Nobel Prizes.

This raises an important concern. Our schools are not preparing students to thrive in an environment with a plurality of creative and intellectual modalities. Rather, through regimes such as No Child Left Behind, they are being transformed into cookie-cutter automatons. The irony is that as machines become much more intellectually-capable and creative, human capital is becoming more mechanistic. Which has the better potential to thrive through this century?

Education Futures is the repository of Global Leapfrog Education (formerly ISSN 1933-0200).

Contents available online are

Volume 1, Number 1 (December 2006):

• Editors Welcome: Arthur Harkins and John Moravec
• Learning 2.0: Juan Cristobal Cobo Romani (reviewed by Suzanne Miric)
• Facilitating 21st Century Education: Leapfrogging Culture and Time through Simulational Learning: Arthur Harkins, John Moravec, and George Kubik (reviewed by Drew Davidson and Juan Cristobal Cobo Romani)

I sent an email out to a few folks with a short question:

Which trend will have the greatest impact on education in the 21st century?

[ ] Globalization
[ ] Rise of the knowledge society
[ ] Accelerating change
[ ] Other: _______

The results will be posted below as I receive them. If you did not receive an invitation, but would like to participate, please email me at moravec@umn.edu with your response.

I will update this response summary over the next couple evenings:

(64 responses recorded as of last update)

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Arthur Harkins and I delivered a presentation on “Meaningful knowledge production by 21st century youth” at the 2nd International Conference on Youth and Education for the 21st Century at Texas A&M, Corpus Christi, TX on May 31. Read on for the abstract or download the PowerPoint slides from www.leapfrogamerica.org.

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