One of the key points we make in Invisible Learning is that new technologies and new possibilities for social configurations are expanding the ecology of options we have for learning. “Schooling” is no longer limited to just schools. Rather, we can now learn in formal environments, online, informally, and serendipitously. Moreover, we can leverage technologies to remix these modes together — so, for example, it is now possible to have a meaningful and recognized learning experience at coffee shops, city parks, bowling alleys, etc.

Just as wise investors diversify their investment portfolio, so should we build diverse portfolios of our schools. This means that we should not invest too heavily in any one strategy. If we do not know with any precision what the future will be, we cannot have one-size-fits-all schools. We need to expand our ecologies of options.

Many times we find something that works. Perhaps a new pedagogical technique …or, maybe a new type of school. One of the first things we often ask ourselves when evaluating an innovation is: How do we scale it up?

FORGET SCALING UP.

WE NEED TO SCALE SIDEWAYS IN EDUCATION.

Scaling up is how we industrialize ideas, and employ them within a top-down managed system. This works in an educational monoculture, but not in a diverse ecology. Rather than industrializing our best ideas, why not share them horizontally? That is, let’s invite people and schools to adopt them if they work for them?

Scaling sideways invites co-creation. It is dialogical.

The question we need to ask is, how can we facilitate broader horizontalized communications and sharing of best practices, etc., between schools in a diverse ecology of options? Perhaps this means that top educational leaders, governments and other interest groups need to focus less on managing; and focus more on attending to the chaos and uncertainty of a more dynamic educational ecology.

And, let’s make sure to invite the kids into the horizontalized co-creation. We are all white belts when it comes to understanding and acting on our futures. We do not have any role models to draw from. We have never been to the future before.

We must engage kids in this conversation now. Knowmad Society is their’s, but it is up to us to build it together.

Note: Adapted from my plenary talk at the Onderwijs en ondernemen “op expeditie” conference in The Hague, Netherlands on October 6, 2011.

The pot of gold at the end of the tenure review process is still job security, even though powerful forces are working against the continuity of tenure as a higher education fixture. The conventional justification for tenure is dramatized through the Usual Circumstances and Suspects that prey on faculty: Budgets, administrators, unhappy students, and political, religious, or otherwise inspired off-campus harpies, such as present and former writers for the Wall Street Journal.

Naomi Riley is conventionally adequate at disparaging the academic serfdom associated with assignments to introductory classes during the tenure review process. Yes, assistant professors are often sacrificed on the altar of tuition streaming to help finance smaller classes and their ranking faculty. Yes, serfdom in the service of tuition streaming is matched by subject matter serfdom, in which entry level faculty are expected to demonstrate fealty to traditional knowledge production and delivery. And yes, undergraduates are often taught by graduate students, most of whom lust after the pot of gold.

Riley ticks off a laundry list of these and other tenure-related problems, none of which are new and nearly all of which are undocumented. Charges of shallowness are conveniently moot in her case, however, because she is neither an academic nor intellectually oriented in her writing. It goes without saying that she did not undergo the rigors of tenure evaluation. Riley appears to have acquired much of her largely intuitive opinions about higher education through contact with her parents, both academics, and by going to college. Her voice is flat; her style doggedly Wall Street Journal editorial/op-ed.

As former academic guilds speciate into “businesses”, and as business models and associated cultures virally infect otherwise healthy academic hosts, we may indeed find pressing reasons to protect faculty, not only from the Usual Circumstances and Suspects, but from colleagues who have mutated from guild members into competitive, intrapreneurial corporate personnel.

Sporting her largely unexamined defense of the virtues and inevitability of an Academic Rapture based on business values and models, Riley is an ideal flack for the Elimination of Tenure. The CEOs (aka the presidents) of more and more campuses will certainly pay her and others like her increasing heed.

Bottom line (as we say), Naomi Riley should be given kudos for a Contribution by Omission: A prominent, powerful, and evolving justification for tenure lies in the protection of faculty from shape-shifted corporate colleagues. This capability is one that should be taken up as a serious –even a top-drawer– justification for the continuation of tenure.

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.

Philip Zimbardo’s talk on the Secret Powers of Time wonderfully illustrated in pseudo-realtime by RSA animate.

The deadline to submit papers or other materials to the Invisible Learning project has been extended to August 31, 2010.  This is due to an overwhelming response to enhance the discussions on Invisible Learning.  Therefore, we are launching a new website, using the Ning platform, which will allow for greater collaboration and sharing of ideas and projects. Please visit us at www.invisiblelearning.com for more details or contact us at invisible@flacso.edu.mx to share your ideas.

About Invisible Learning

The Invisible Learning (Aprendizaje Invisible) project is collaborative book (in English and Spanish) and an online repository of bold ideas for designing cultures of sustainable innovation.  Through the development of 1) a collaborative, printed book; 2) an e-book; and 3) a repository of innovative ideas at www.invisiblelearning.com, we seek to:

• Share experiences and innovative perspectives, focused on rethinking strategies and innovative approaches to learn and unlearn continuously
• Promote critical thinking of the role of formal, informal and non-formal education at alleducational levels.
• Contribute to the creation of a sustainable (and continuous) process of learning, innovating and designing new cultures for the global society.

The project aims to facilitate the creation of a globally distributed community of thinkers interested in building new futures for the education. Sustainable innovation, invisible learning (informal learning and non-formal learning) and the development of 21st century skills are some of the core issues that are analyzed and addressed in this project.  Participation at www.invisiblelearning.com is not limited to project partners and collaborators, but is open to everybody interested in innovating in learning.

Professional futurists continue to make outstanding contributions toward the development of understandings of the future, but is futures thought limited to this select group? Definitely not! With a do-it-yourself attitude, and leverage of the right resources, anybody can become an effective futurist. Here’s why:

1. Nobody knows the future – don’t trust anybody who says otherwise. The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and it’s simply getting harder and harder to imagine what will happen next, let alone 20 years from now. We are all white belts when it comes to approaching the future. We have never been there before, and it is hard to model a world that does not exist yet. What futurists provide is their “best guess” — hopefully supported by quality research and trends analyses.
2. Futuring is easier than you think. While some futures research methodologies, such as the Delphi method, require an element of professional experience and expertise, many others are easily done — and should be done — by just about anybody. Environmental scanning, for example, involves simply exposing yourself to as much data and information on a broad range as possible (i.e., reading as many newspapers as you can, daily). The futures wheel is related to mindmapping, and can be easily done within individual or group settings. Jerome Glenn and Theodore Gordon wrote an excellent volume on methodologies used by futurists, Futures Research Methodology Version 3.0 (Available at Amazon.com). For do-it-yourself futurists or those wishing to explore the field, it is an excellent resource that will get you going.
3. We are all futurists. Few activities are as natural and universal among humans and human cultures are storytelling. We use stories to share our memories and imaginations of events that have happened or will happen. We use stories to share histories, fables and myths of the past. We also use stories to share visions of and for the future — including goal setting, promises of change, narratives of how we improve ourselves, and even apocalyptic nightmares. Even in our sleep, we often dream about future scenarios. Futurists explicitly tap into our stories and the power of storytelling to share their visions and dreams. So can everybody else.
4. You can access the same information as professional futurists can. Unless if you’re divining knowledge from an isolated and highly controlled information source, the ubiquitous availability of data and information in today’s networked society mean that you can easily and cost-effectively build up your knowledge base of future trends. Moreover, you are welcome to join the same professional societies that professional futurists participate in, such as the World Future Society, providing you with the same connections and access to professional society-level knowledge they have.
5. We all create the future. Futurists do not create the future, everybody does. Time may move forward, but the future does not just “happen.” Rather we share a responsibility to ensure that the futures we create are positive (ideal outcomes for humanity, the world, etc.). Moreover, in our interconnected world, we cannot disconnect from our futures. We cannot “futureproof” an organization. Nor can we find ways to fight it as individuals. Rather we can harness our inner futurists and lead in the creation of futures of our own design.

More at www.invisiblelearning.com…

Cristóbal Cobo and I are pleased to announce the Invisible Learning (Aprendizaje Invisible) project –and we invite your participation!

Invisible Learning // Aprendizaje Invisible is collaborative book (in English and Spanish) and an online repository of bold ideas for designing cultures of sustainable innovation.

Through the development of 1) a collaborative, printed book; 2) an e-book; and 3) a repository of innovative ideas at www.invisiblelearning.com, we seek to:

• Share experiences and innovative perspectives, focused on rethinking strategies and innovative approaches to learn and unlearn continuously.
• Promote critical thinking of the role of formal, informal and non-formal education at alleducational levels.
• Contribute to the creation of a sustainable (and continuous) process of learning, innovating and designing new cultures for the global society.

This project aims to facilitate the creation of a globally distributed community of thinkers interested on the creation of new futures for the education. Sustainable innovation, invisible learning (informal learning and non-formal learning) and the development of 21st century skills are some of the core issues that will be analyzed and addressed in this project.

Moreover, we want to connect project participants with:

• The best ideas in transforming informal and non-formal learning
• The people doing amazing things in innovative education
• Resources to help them get started on their own initiatives

We welcome you to join the conversation at www.invisiblelearning.com!

Project Topics and Keywords: New theories and ideas in education; Sharing of best practices; Exchange of innovation; 21st century educational institutions Open and distribute learning initiatives; Recommendation for public policies; Training teachers; Non-formal education; Informal education; Building innovative societies; Sustainable innovation.

…and others contributed by you, the authors.

Share your ideas and links using Twitter: #invislearning

We are in the midst of a digital revolution. A multitude of new media is heaped upon us every day, and today’s generation of young people plays a central part in this development. Young peoples’ frequent use of digital tools such as computers, cellular phones, digital cameras, mp3 players and Internet communication, provide a new, and changed social landscape. Never before have youth cultures influenced society’s means of communication the way they do today.

Not So Global: Share of US public elementary schools teaching foreign language classes drops by 40% in last decade http://tinyurl.com/ak4at9

From the linked article (via Public School Insights):

The share of U.S. public elementary schools teaching foreign language has fallen by almost 40% over the last decade. You know–the decade when 9/11, globalization, and growing diversity at home fueled calls for greater knowledge of other languages and cultures.

Education Week published these disheartening preliminary results of a new survey by the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL). The full results will be available in autumn.

My fear is that is a part of a widening trend where the U.S. education system is failing to meet the needs of the workforce. If graduates from U.S. public institutions cannot function in a global, intercultural environment, what employment hopes do they have? A low level role at McDonald’s?

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?