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Here are the slides from the first half of my talk with Dr. Cristóbal Cobo at CUAED (UNAM) yesterday that described the pathway toward Education 3.0:

In addition to the work I mentioned during the talk, I recommend the following resources to participants:

1. Allee, V. (2003). The future of knowledge: Increasing prosperity through value networks. Amsterdam ; Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.
2. Gibbons, M., Lomoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. London: Sage.
3. Hakken, D. (2003). The knowledge landscapes of cyberspace. New York: Routledge.
4. Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is near: When humans transcend biology. New York: Viking.
5. McElroy, M. W. (2003). The new knowledge management: Complexity, learning, and sustainable innovation. Burlington, MA: Butterworth-Heinemann.
6. Moravec, J. W. (2006). Chaordic knowledge production: A systems-based response to critical education. Theory of Science, XV/XXVIII(3), 149-162.
7. Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age. New York: Riverhead.

Update 18 April:Dr. Cobo posted more thoughts and resources from the conference at e-rgonomic.

Fernando S. posted a Spanish translation of my Education 1.0 - Education 3.0 taxonomy at gabinetedeinformatica.net last week. The table has since appeared at quite a few other blogs in the Spanish-language blogosphere:

Thanks, Fernando!

(The English version of the table appears here.)

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.

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/04/antioch

Antioch University’s announcement last week that its board had “reconfirmed” plans to shutter Antioch College at the end of this academic year has prompted a flurry of activity to prevent that from happening.

Most notably, alumni and professors are working on plans for the faculty to continue to teach students — even if that takes place without the university’s endorsement. Plans being discussed would have classes held in various locations in Yellow Springs, Ohio, so that there would be no stoppage of Antioch instruction. Alumni announced that they have raised $1 million to support such efforts, called “Non-Stop Antioch.”

Antioch College likes innovation in education, but if they had Leapfrog on their mind, they might look to the Shibuya University Network for an innovative operational model. The Shibuya model would provide a lifelong learning approach that is infused into the community Antioch serves. In effect, the entire city of Yellow Springs could become a classroom. What need would there be for a formally organized Antioch College?

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?

An editorial by Bill Gates appears in today’s Washington Post. He argues that if the U.S. continues to fail to produce the skilled talent it needs to succeed in an innovation economy, the country should import knowledge and innovation workers:

To remain competitive in the global economy, we must build on the success of such schools [as High Tech High] and commit to an ambitious national agenda for education. Government and businesses can both play a role. Companies must advocate for strong education policies and work with schools to foster interest in science and mathematics and to provide an education that is relevant to the needs of business. Government must work with educators to reform schools and improve educational excellence.

American competitiveness also requires immigration reforms that reflect the importance of highly skilled foreign-born employees. Demand for specialized technical skills has long exceeded the supply of native-born workers with advanced degrees, and scientists and engineers from other countries fill this gap.

Read the full editorial…

Today, I was asked, “what do we need to incorporate into educational programs to build innovation capital [in society]?”

Good question. Here are some quick thoughts on how education leaders can build innovation capital in society immediately:

1. Quit trying to manage education – how can we instead attend to educational experiences?

2. Permit students and teachers to break and rules that govern a “proper” education.

3. Always ask questions – inside and outside of educational contexts.

4. Be comfortable asking questions where we don’t know the correct answers.

5. Orient education toward the meaningful pursuit of new knowledge.

6. Embrace the functional expertise within everybody.

7. Start working on future problems today.

Any other thoughts out there?

A full report from last Friday’s Horizon Forum meeting (see announcement) will be posted at Education Futures by Jeffrey Schulz soon. In the meantime, here’s the slides from North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) vice president Allison Powell:

And, a picture from the event:

Bill Farren, a technology integration facilitator in the Dominican Republic, created a response to Karl Fisch’s Did you know? slides:

Farren asks:

How is preparing students to enter an economic and industrial system that is at war with itself preparing them for the future? Wouldn’t we be better off educating people so that they can improve their chances of living well on a planet with a finite biosphere? Shouldn’t the purpose of an education have to do with living well, not with supporting economies?

In other words, in an education world dominated by measurement regimes, are we missing something?

Makes me wonder…

Maya Frost has put together an interesting blog to help promote ideas she’s assembling for a book: The world is your campus: How to skip the SAT, save thousands on tuition, and get an outrageously relevant global education. Her take is that people need to balance education with creative life experiences. Why learn about the world in a classroom when there’s a world to explore nearby? Here comes do-it-yourself education!

A few interesting, recent posts:

• Dad sues Wheaton College for unfair study abroad charges: somebody’s putting up the good fight against service fees that don’t return services
• Study abroad programs at 15 universities investigated–Bring on the shakedown! …including my alma mater…
• Personal U: How to create your own university: She argues we have a responsibility to educate ourselves

Since I work in a department that trains study abroad advisors, here’s my question for the day:  In a Web 2.0 world of knowledge sharing, do students and youth need study abroad advisors?  Or, is there a better solution?