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The European Patent Office engaged in a two-year futuring project on futures for intellectual property rights in 2025, interviewing 50 key players - including critics - from the fields of science, business, politics, ethics, economics and law. Their opinions were sought opinions on how intellectual property and patenting might evolve over the next fifteen to twenty years.

Four primary scenarios were developed from the projects activities:

• Market Rules (business): The story of consolidation in the face of a system that has been so successful that it is collapsing under its own weight
• Whose Game? (geopolitics): The story of conflict in the face of changing geopolitical balances and competing ambitions
• Trees of Knowledge (society): The story of erosion in the face of diminishing societal trust
• Blue Skies (technology): The story of differentiation in the face of global systemic crises

These scenarios are driven by five driving forces that create the most uncertainty:

• Power: “globalisation has redefined this power structure, with established sources of authority – such as governments – challenged by the many new powerful actors that are forming alliances and cutting across traditional boundaries”
• Global Jungle: “economic, social and political competitive flattening of the world between a multiplicity of players that include countries, regions, hotspots and city states, market sectors, global companies, organisational and business models, consumer markets and workforces, business and universities as well as cultures. In this global jungle, there are many who are ill-equipped to adapt.”
• Rate of Change: “The growing divide between the short and long-term goals leads us to ask: How do humans and their institutions adjust to cope with the rate of change?”
• Systemic Risks: “There are also major risks created by our dependency on the complex natural and man-made systems that support humanity.”
• Knowledge Paradox: “The transformation of data into information and then into knowledge – information that can be utilised to build capabilities – is also far from straightforward. This raises the question: As information becomes increasingly abundant, what knowledge has value?”

More is available in the free “Scenarios for the Future” compendium, which is available from the EPO website.

Rick Reis’ today posted on his Tomorrow’s Professor mailing list a reprint of a review by Sandra L. Koresoja (and originally published in Planning for Higher Education, January-March, 2008) of College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy, edited by Lloyd Thacker, published by Harvard University Press and Remaking the American University - Market Smart and Mission Centered, by Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and William F. Massy, published by Rurgers University Press. From the review:

In today’s colleges and universities, the influence of market forces has tended to alter faculty as well as institutional incentives, while Internet communications capabilities have blurred the boundaries of academic knowledge and created global research communities (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons 2001). Thacker begins the discussion regarding changes in the admissions process by asking in a section title, “Who Can Do What Needs to Be Done?” (Thacker, p. 181). His suggested initial steps to collective action are focused on students, parents, colleges, the College Board, and members of the media involved with ranking colleges. The suggestions of Zemsky, Wegner, and Massy for institutions seem less concrete. Yet, their book helps to explain the origins and broader context of the admissions arms race; it also furthers a larger discussion of importance to planners and policy makers by raising new questions about the “public good” purposes, or social value, of higher education in today’s increasingly globally connected world.

Read the entire review at Tomorrow’s Professor.

From a recent article from Inside Higher Ed:

For all the hyperbole, facts about what’s actually happening on the ground in China can be hard to come by. A new study by economists at universities in Canada, New Zealand and China aims to document what its title calls “the higher educational transformation of China and its global implications,” collecting in one place statistics and other information about enrollments, demographic changes, numbers of colleges and faculty publishing, among other categories.

From the working paper’s abstract:

The number of undergraduate and graduate students in China has been grown at approximately 30% per year since 1999, and the number of graduates at all levels of higher education in China has approximately quadrupled in the last 6 years. The size of entering classes of new students and total student enrollments have risen even faster, and have approximately quintupled. Prior to 1999 increases in these areas were much smaller. Much of the increased spending is focused on elite universities, and new academic contracts differ sharply from earlier ones with no tenure and annual publication quotas often used. All of these changes have already had large impacts on China’s higher educational system and are beginning to be felt by the wider global educational structure. We suggest that even more major impacts will follow in the years to come and there are implications for global trade both directly in ideas, and in idea derived products. (emphasis added)

Given the explosive growth of Chinese higher education –and potential effects on social, cultural, and economic transformations, it is not surprising that the impact has not been probed. Change may be occurring far faster than researchers and policy directors can measure.

(Thanks to Tom Abeles for forwarding the source article.)

Jeffrey Phillips asks:

Here’s a challenge for you. Find me a firm, any firm, that isn’t telling it’s people, it’s customers and it’s investors that innovation isn’t important. Can you imagine that? Telling these constituents that innovation isn’t important is like telling people that oxygen isn’t important. So, let’s take as a given that most firms advocate a bias toward innovation.

How about schools or colleges? How often do we bring up innovation (or discussions of creating pathways toward continuous innovation) with educational leaders only to receive a response of, “oh, we’re already doing that?”

Too often.

In my experience, I would say that perhaps 10-20% of school leaders I’ve talked with believe that they’re “already innovating” or are “innovating enough.” Innovation, by definition, means doing something substantially different, and it’s something that everybody can do. Perhaps what educational leaders are telling us is that we’re failing to define what innovation is and means what we need to do in educational contexts.

Can leaders see the pink elephant in the classroom if they’re looking at their organization through rose-tinted glasses? It’s time to start looking at our institutions differently.

Calú twittered this yesterday evening: Declaración de Ciudad del Cabo para la Educación Abierta http://tinyurl.com/2uob4w

The English version of the document can be found here. In short, Mark Shuttleworth’s foundation and the Open Society Institute are launching a campaign to “transform education” by calling for open, free educational resources to be placed online:

According to the Declaration, teachers, students and communities would benefit if publishers and governments made publicly-funded educational materials freely available online. This will give students unlimited access to high quality, constantly improving course materials, just as Wikipedia has done in the world of reference materials.

This brings up a good idea: if public education systems are paying top dollar for the creation of textbooks and other course materials, why aren’t these materials being made available to the public for free?

The rest of the declaration calls for open source education, but I’m concerned that, even if adopted, opening course materials would do little to change education. The key problem is that we’re looking to new technologies and new social models based on these technologies to drive educational change –but, in reality, we’re using new technologies and social models to teach what eventually amounts to “the same old garbage.” Such a pathway can only lead to failure.

Is there something else that we should focus on where we can use new technological and social models to develop innovative tools for education?

17 projects will receive up to $238,000 in funding as part of the first ever Digital Media and Learning Competition funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and administered by HASTAC (the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). While my proposal wasn’t among the less than 2% of submissions awarded funding, all of the winning projects look awesome:

1. Always with You: Experiment in Hand-held Philanthropy: The Always With You network will connect young African social entrepreneurs with young North American professionals. Using mobile phone technology, which is now widespread, this network will facilitate both micro-funding and the exchange of professional advice to projects in Africa that promote public benefit.
2. Black Cloud: Environmental Studies Gaming: Black Cloud is an environmental studies game that mixes the physical with the virtual to engage high school students in Los Angeles and Cairo, Egypt.
3. Critical Commons: Critical Commons is a blogging, social networking and tagging platform specially designed to promote the “fair use” of copyrighted material in support of learning.
4. FollowTheMoney.org: Networking Civic Engagement: FollowTheMoney.org: Networking Civic Engagement, a project of the Institute on Money in State Politics, is an online interactive site and users’ guide that supports civics research by young people and promotes their understanding of — and engagement with — electoral politics and legislative activities.
5. Fractor: Act on Facts: Fractor is a web application that matches news stories with opportunities for social activism and community service.
6. HyperCities: Based on digital models of real cities, “HyperCities” is a web-based learning platform that connects geographical locations with stories of the people who live there and those who have lived there in the past.
7. Let the Games Begin: A 101 Workshop for Social Issue Game: The Let the Games Begin workshop is a soup-to-nuts tutorial on the fundamentals of social issue games.
8. Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies (MILLEE): Mobile and Immersive Learning for Literacy in Emerging Economies, a project to be conducted in rural India, promotes literacy through language-learning games on mobile phones: the “PCs of the developing world.”
9. Mobile Musical Networks: Mobile Musical Networks will build an expressive mobile musical laboratory for exploring new ways of making music with laptops and local-area-networks.
10. Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally: Networking Grassroots Knowledge Globally, a project of the Global Fund for Children, is a new community and “information commons” that will include blogs, video clips, sound slides, podcasts, and photographs to help share innovative practices for helping marginalized and vulnerable children.
11. Ohmwork: Networking Homebrew Science: Ohmwork is a new social network and podcast site where young people can become inventive and passionate about science by sharing their do-it-yourself (DIY) science projects.
12. Self-Advocacy Online: Self-Advocacy Online is an educational and networking website for teens and adults with intellectual and cognitive disabilities, targeted at those who participate in organized self-advocacy groups.
13. Social Media Virtual Classroom: The Social Media Virtual Classroom will develop an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media.
14. Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab: The Sustainable South Bronx Fab Lab project is a laboratory that allows people to turn digital models into real world constructions of plastic, metal, wood and more.
15. Virtual Conflict Resolution: Turning Swords to Ploughshares: Virtual Conflict Resolution is a digital humanitarian assistance game that creates a learning environment for young people studying public policy and international relations.
16. The Virtual World Educators Network: The Virtual World Educators Network will be developed to serve as an online hub to promote the use of virtual worlds as rich learning environments.
17. YouthActionNet Marketplace: The YouthActionNet Marketplace is a dynamic digital networking platform for young leaders to engage in social entrepreneurship and address critical social problems.

How can we fund more of these projects?

Today’s Inside Higher Ed reports on a new book from the Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching. In The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (Jossey-Bass), George Walker et al state the obvious: doctoral programs (and their purposive requirements) often are not understood by supervising professors and students. The purposive use of qualifying exams, the apprenticeship model, and dissertations must also be reformed, they argue.

From the article:

Efforts to assess the quality of what goes on in graduate education are minimal, the report says, and many professors aren’t excited about talking about these issues. “One finds attitudes of complacency (’Our application numbers are strong and so is our national ranking’), denial (’We don’t have problems with gender or ethnic diversity here’), and blame (’Students these days just aren’t willing to make the kinds of sacrifices we did to be successful.’),” the book says.

While many programs resist change, many doctoral students find themselves uncertain about expectations or the rationale for requirements that are consuming years of their lives, the book says. “The rationale for program requirements has often been lost in the mists of history: Students may not well understand why certain elements are required or toward what end, and faculty, if pushed, will acknowledge that there is no unified vision underpinning many of the experiences students are expected to undertake.”

The book’s recommendations are built on themes of scholarly integration, intellectual community, and stewardship. Read more at Inside Higher Ed…

President Clinton gave an impressive talk on empowering young people at the American Democracy Institute’s Empower Change summit at UCLA:

From LA Cityzine:

…I think in the past 7 years many of us have forgotten what a good presidential speech sounds like. His calm demeanor, personal conversational tone and straightforward way of speaking, reminded me of what a great speech should look, sound, and feel like. Now that he is out of office he is doing even more, and he is doing it as a citizen, just like you and me. Whatever your political views may be, this is a great speech to listen to. It made me feel inspired to be an active citizen and motivated me to try and make a change in the problems I see around me day after day. If the speech does it’s job and you feel inspired, check out empowerchange.org they are a great place to help you get started.

People seem really concerned about “future-proofing” in a world driven by accelerating change and accelerating uncertainty.  For example:

• How do we future-proof our schools?
• How do we future-proof our libraries?
• How do we future-proof our wealth?
• How do we future-proof our careers?
• How do we future-proof our families?

This promotes dichotomic thinking along the lines of, “if the rest of the world is going to change, how can I (or my beloved institution) best survive by changing the least myself?” Why shouldn’t we expect ourselves to change significantly as well? To leapfrog beyond the contradictory thinking of “future-proofing,” perhaps we should ask ourselves:

• Does the future need schools?
• Does the future need libraries?
• Does the future need wealth?
• Does the future need careers?
• Does the future need families?

…and we ought to also ask how, why, and what do we need to change today?

One of the big ideas from 6.0 was that kids are not naturally good at complex games. They often have the time, resources, but they do not always have the guidance of a mentor. Many kids are playing games designed by adults for adults. This is good and bad. Good in that the adult games have some complex problems and require some really deep thinking; bad in that they may just be provocative on their content without having very good game play. The point is, kids learn through play and our games are often cultural tools to transfer knowledge, develop skills, and get them ready to become adults. What we try to do as educators is pretty much the same. So why have we stepped away from using games?

(Read more …)