The world is indeed flattening, and we are very happy. Since March, Cristóbal and I have presented Invisible Learning in a dozen countries, and at more than 35 events for debate and discussion. The outcomes from the project exceed our expectations — and, more importantly, open the debate to a wider and global level. Some examples that inspire us:

• An amazing movie from Colombia (made by students of Luis David Tobon)
• A growing translation and interpretation of Invisible Learning into Finnish (including a Wikiversity presence)
• A growing community of knowmads/Society 3.0 creators/invisible learners in the Netherlands and Scandinavia
• TEDxPlazaCibeles in Madrid

…and more…

In less than three months since we opened the book for free access online, we’ve had about 9,500 downloads that we know of — and many, many more that we do not know of. Others are sharing the book alike, including Google Books and OpenLibra. And, it is already attracting great citations. As we embraced a unique approach to blending traditional and “new” publishing, we look forward to seeing how others will respond to our distribution approach.

We look forward to many more conversations in 2012, and we want to thank everybody that helped make Invisible Learning a success. We especially extend our thanks to Hugo Pardo, the XXI Transmedia team, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Andalucia for providing the support to make this project possible.

And, a short video about what’s coming next:

Some ten years into the 21^st century, I find it amazing that we are still having conversations on what skills are necessary to succeed in this new century. We’ve explored some ideas of what skills are relevant before (see this, this, this, and this, for example), and there appears to be a general consensus that there are needs for skills development in creativity, innovation, smart use of ICTs, and social leadership. This is exactly in line with what Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, co-board members on the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills, identify (lifted from the book jacket):

• Learning and Innovation Skills: Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, and Communication and Collaboration
• Digital Literacy Skills: Information Literacy, Media Literacy, and ICT Literacy
• Career and Life Skills: Flexibility and Adaptability, initiative and Self-Direction, Social and Cross-Cultural Skills, Productivity and Accountability, Leadership and Responsibility

What makes this book valuable to practitioners, however, is that instead of building up chapters of reasoning for why we need to adopt the P21 skill set in education, they focus more on what each of these skills mean. Moreover, they tie in examples of the skills in practice with an included DVD, containing real-life classroom examples.

While the book excels at understanding each of the P21 skills and their implications, it falls short on how to build these skills in broader contexts – i.e., as a replacement set for NCLB standards. For this, the text could have benefited with an invitation –and mechanism– for its readers to join the conversation on adopting and embracing new skills for the 21^st century. Instead, leading the conversation seems left to us: Where shall we begin?

Note: The publisher provided a copy of the book for review. Please read our review policy for more details on how we review products and services.

The Education Futures timeline of education

1657 – 2045

By John Moravec (Updated May 30, 2010)

This timeline of the history of modern education provides not only a glimpse into the past and present, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future history presented is intended to be edgy, but also as a conversation starter on futures for education and future thinking in human capital development.

Although this timeline is largely U.S.-centric, the trends impacting it are global, especially as we look to the future. Please consult the glossary, below, for additional information regarding many of the themes presented. As always, we invite your feedback and suggestions for further development!

To share this timeline in your blog or website, insert the following code:

<div><iframe src="http://www.educationfutures.com/flashtimeline/index.html" width="610" height="310" scrolling="no"
frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Source: <a href="http://www.educationfutures.com/resources/timeline">
Education Futures</a></p></div>

Or, to insert a smaller version (500px wide), click here for the code.

Here’s another look at accelerating change. On Friday, the New York Times published an excellent review of Dalton Conley’s book, Elsewhere U.S.A.:

“A new breed of American has arrived on the scene,” Conley, a professor at New York University, declares in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” his compact guidebook to our nervous new world. Instead of individuals searching for authenticity, we are “intraviduals” defined by shifting personas and really cool electronics, which help us manage “the myriad data streams, impulses, desires and even consciousnesses that we experience in our heads as we navigate multiple worlds.” The denizens of our “Elsewhere Society,” Conley argues, “are only convinced they’re in the right place, doing the right thing, at the right time, when they’re on their way to the next destination. Constant motion is a balm to a culture in which the very notion of authenticity . . . has been shattered into a thousand e-mails.”

Conley looks at the social transformations that were created by technological change between the mid 20th century through today. Organization and individualism have given way to intravidualism, “an ethic of fragmented selves replacing the modern ethic of individualism.” Work, play, and everything in between are blurring into non-discrete moments of incoherentness. We’re going somewhere, but we do not know where. Then again, no matter where we go, there we are.

This has serious consequences for human capital development. Perhaps to better succeed in what appears to be a directionless society of busybodies, we need to create a New Individualism, and re-orient education for developing strategic leadership at the individual level? …for learning how to cope with increased chaos and ambiguity? …for knowing how to be more selective in how new technologies are used before the technologies use us?

HBS Working Knowledge, notes three key ideas from the book:

• “As an industry, education has certain elements that have made the market difficult to penetrate and lasting reform hard to come by.”
• “As a general rule, the most promising areas for innovation are pockets or areas that appear unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents and where there are people who would like to do something but cannot access the available offering.”
• “To improve education as an industry, businesspeople might consider investing in technological platforms that will allow for robust educational user networks to emerge.”

More in the interview…

Mike Elgan beat me to the punch, though, and posted this article at Computer World. An excerpt:

Half of Japan’s top 10 best-selling books last year — half! — started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times.

The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.

The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.

Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.

In this brave new world of literature where anybody can become a best-selling author using mobile technologies, we need to rethink what a “book” really is. Instead of blocking mobile technologies in schools, what if schools allowed them so that kids could produce their own books?

To be is to do

So Do We?

It is just good teaching

Games taught me that modeling environments and taking on the roles are powerful ways to teach and learn.

Piaget talked about roles as assimilation. You try on the role and see what part of the character is you.

Gibson talked about environment and context, with affordances and constraints. What the world gives you for advice, warning, limitation, and opportunity.

These ideas are present in embodiment and how we might contextualize our curriculum as an activity system.

One of the big lessons from games is design. Good learning is by design. A teacher, like a game designer creates the environment where we learn.

We are already attempting to embody what we teach in purposeful ways with Professional Content Magnets in our secondary schools. In Minneapolis we have Automotive, Cosmetology, Medicine, Business, and Fine Arts—just to name a couple. What we often don’t do is to integrate the abstractions of the core competencies from the traditional content areas into the context of the professional development. I have noticed that the many of the magnets still teach school the same way. Students still go to math and use a math text book, and they learn Math the same way they do in Auto as they do in Medical — they just have some specialized classes and placement programs that allow students to specialize.

We often do not teach our content in the context of doing the professional work. We do not find Algebra in the everyday world of Engineering, we teach the formulas as content rather than showing how a formula can be used for building a model for an engineering project. There is a new kind of engineering for schools – reverse engineering.

Some schools and teachers do this when they design their curriculum. There are books on it and we have explored this idea going all the way back to John Dewey .

Can we teach physics with an internal combustion engine? Dewey thought so.

Games ask us to take on the roles and then teach us to do things in the context of that role in the simulated environment.

That is embodiment.

Schools can do this too.

We can structure reflection to connect experience to our abstracted tradition of curriculum to generalize and transfer.

If you are playing as a doctor, you will do the things that doctors do.

And as you are acting like a doctor, the game gives you clues to achieve a win-state, in the form of feedback and performance assessment.

Games provide performance assessment in real time embodied in the context of what a doctor does and how a doctor gets feedback. So you learn to be a doctor by playing in a simulated world as a doctor. In the process, you are assessed on your performance by the game. It is how they keep score!

In games students are scored based upon criteria for performance that is built into the activity. The assessment is the activity.

This is different from taking tests on the content and elements of performance in print based tests and questionnaires. Thorndike anyone?

This is what games do when they are well-designed, and this is what curriculum can do when it takes these steps as well. Good teaching is good teaching, but often our teachers are not given the opportunity or resources to create hands-on experience for their students with the content built into the context of doing in the world. We tried to do this a number of years ago with the Profiles of Learning and Performance Packages here in Minnesota, but we just did not do a good job of helping our teachers do it.

Instead, we are writing a paper about what doctors do, “because this is what we do in English.” We are preparing for a time when you can be a doctor. You must write first in school, and then you can apply to medical school. Why are we withholding the fun?

I am sure you are saying to yourself that this reminds you of apprenticeship programs. And “what about the value of a good liberal arts education?”

I am with you. I originally wanted to be a philosopher! I still try to connect great books with issues we face in society. My own eight grader helped me by telling me that “sonic the hedgehop is like Odysseus Mr. Dubbels, he is trying to get home.” We also made our own version of the Odyssey– studying it to make a game. The kids said that Odyssseus was put off the bus (Poseidon Bus Lines anyone?) for being arrogant and had to walk home in a modern day, urban Odyssey.

Actions speak louder than word when it comes to learning.

And words are what many students’ days are full of: in the texts, in the lecture, in homework.

I like words, but it is important that I have experience to write and read about to connect. Something purposeful and fun.

I am here to tell you, you don’t need a computer to make learning environments like this. You can construct modern Odysseys.

I am not saying that what we are doing in school is wrong. Good teaching is good teaching, and there are many things I like to do and teach that have nothing to do with video games. I am an English teacher, and I like to read. I like to write, and I like big ideas.

Shouldn’t we be considering how we might work to teach the words-words-words-abstraction-as-content curriculum
in a more tangible way, that allows students to use the skill sets of an historian or botanist with reading, writing, numeracy, technology, and scientific reasoning built-in, as a botanist or historian would do it in the context of their job?

Imagine being Indiana Jones. Would you prefer to be Indy on a mission or in the lecture hall? I think I like the whip for jumping over a canyon better than using it as a teacher.

We can teach traditional content areas and standards as elements of embodied practice. Most of us use reading, writing, and numeracy in the context of our professions and recreation, not as we do in English class or Geometry.

When was the last time you took a content-test at work?

Subject matter expertise comes out in situated performance in my experience. Games are actually built to teach and assess through performance. In addition, games demand mastery and continuous improvement in pursuit of winning the game and even provide replay, scoring, and commentary!

What if we built curriculum in the form of games?

Can you imagine getting an instant replay with color commentary like you get in Madden 2007 on your test? In games, you have to perform with enough mastery to move on, or level up. Games do the assessment as part of their programming.

You may be asking now, “But are there games that can do what a text book does?

“What about the teacher?”

My answer: “do you want your kids learning from textbooks?”

Textbooks are great, but limited in what they can present. And they may serve a valid purpose as a reference point for exploring issues in the contexts of analysis, history of what others have done and thought, as well as jumping-off-points for more serious inquiry and investigation—just like the Wikipedia.

Yes, I know, the wikipedia is only as good as the posters, but at least there is discussion and room for published public dissent on the article in the context of the webpage where the information is posted. Can you do this with a text book?

My work as a media specialist gave me an opportunity to take a serious look at what we were doing with books and how we were using them. I was surprised that my library was more of a repository of relics, curiosities, and histories – as well as some great fiction and how-to-books.

What I was thinking as I weeded out geography texts on Yugoslavia and the USSR, was that much of what we purchase in non-fiction texts actually work better on the World Wide Web. In fact, what makes the WWW better is that we can find starting points for research and inquiry like the Wikipedia; we can read a variety of sites that might inform us and create contrast and opposing viewpoints, as well offer a variety of media opportunities in the form of video on demand, live web-camera viewing, links to other sites, community forums for discussion and community, as well as interactive media like games. And the WWW is generally updated. Not like the books on the USSR and Yugoslavia.

We should be moving beyond the static curriculum of text books.

Games can provide the context and action for our content knowledge in a situated context—almost as good as being there.

Games can do this whether they are computer games, or games that use paper, pencil, and dice.

Further, what games do well is provide context and necessitate performance. I am not the first person to say this and many more have said it better. The big idea here is that games represent an opportunity to be in a role, doing things that people in those roles do, in places where they do them, and then get assessed in that performance. A nice book on this – I like books—is David Shaffer’s book and his take on Epistemic Games. What David proposes is that there are beliefs, acts, and contexts for what the professions do.

A game I like that does this is Global Conflicts Palestine. I have been using this game with middle school students in Minneapolis at Richard Green-Central K8 school to teach about being a journalist; teach about issues in Jerusalem that affect us all as a planet; and issues in composition such as thesis and supporting details, the use of data collection, writing to inform, and rhetorical situations like writer’s purpose, audience, topic, and context. The cool thing is, in this game you play the journalist and you deal with these issues as a journalist. And this includes the creation of the articles from informants you have quoted in the game. You have to do the things I teach in English class, but while playing as a journalist.

Yes, Playing. That typically means fun is included there too!

There are still two unanswered questions here:

“What about the textbooks?” and “what about the teachers?”

Texts can tell a story, provide relevant reference, as well as provide models for how we create texts. I do prefer reading fiction from a book. There will always be a place for texts. But should they be our primary tools?

Teachers become coaches, resources, and designers of instruction. They help students through the experience of becoming. Help students set goals. Assist them in connecting their experience and structuring reflection. They become more connected.

These are not new ideas either, but they have not been implemented. Texts and teachers are often the focus of the classroom experience, even though experience and common sense tell us that student learning should be the focus. Teachers can create contexts, structure reflection, and provide resources like text books and other references to further the growth and learning of their students. They become the designers of content systems, instructional environments, or whatever you want to call them. We do need support in this. As teachers, we are not islands or independent states. Administrators, school boards, other teachers, parents, students, schools of education, game companies, philanthropic entities ( my email is below if you are a philanthropic entity) can all help.

And like I said, many of us do this now. We use cooperative learning, projects, performance, experience, and encourage students to have wonderful ideas. And this is what creates knowledge and innovation. What our country was built upon. But maybe we can take this a step further and become student growth centered. Games can help us do that.

In the next entry, I will be going into aspects of games and how they might be used to extend learning time outside of the classroom and bring the lives of our learners in. Games provide a great opportunity for distance learning. My last post will be a description of how I taught with games and some outcomes, and maybe most importantly, how I was able to get the equipment and make it happen. And to get to the point: I had no grants. I had no special resources. I bought no equipment.

1. Wikipedia
2. Wired
3. The New York Times
4. The Wall Street Journal
5. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking.
6. Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age. New York: Riverhead.
7. Gardner, H. (2006). Five minds for the future. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press.
8. Kelley, T. (2006). The ten faces of innovation: IDEO’s strategies for beating the devil’s advocate & driving creativity throughout your organization. London: Profile.
9. Owen, H. (2001). Just how good could you be? grow your personal capital: what you know, who you know, how to use it. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub.
10. Harkins, A., & Kubik, G. (2006). StoryTech: A personalized guidebook to the 21st Century. Minneapolis: The StoryTech Group.

The following information is cut-and-pasted from Amazon.com‘s description of the volume:

Product Details

• Hardcover: 624 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (September 22, 2005)
• ISBN: 0670033847

Book Description

The great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of the best-known and controversial advocates for the role of machines in the future of humanity. In his latest, thrilling foray into the future, he envisions an event—the “singularity”—in which technological change becomes so rapid and so profound that our bodies and brains will merge with our machines.

The Singularity is near portrays what life will be like after this event—a human-machine civilization where our experiences shift from real reality to virtual reality and where our intelligence becomes nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than unaided human intelligence. In practical terms, this means that human aging and pollution will be reversed, world hunger will be solved, and our bodies and environment transformed by nanotechnology to overcome the limitations of biology, including death.

We will be able to create virtually any physical product just from information, resulting in radical wealth creation. In addition to outlining these fantastic changes, Kurzweil also considers their social and philosophical ramifications. With its radical but optimistic view of the course of human development, The singularity is near is certain to be one of the most widely discussed and provocative books of 2005.

Order from Amazon.com