Victor Yu (Udemy) interviewed John Moravec, editor of Education Futures. He argues that technologies need to be used to help students learn how to think … not tell them what to think:

“I believe we need to engineer new technologies to help them HOW to learn, not WHAT to learn. Our school systems have focused on WHAT for centuries. Likewise, we see too many educational technologies focus on the WHAT as well (i.e., pushing content rather than new idea generation). WHAT technologies are great for producing factory workers, but for creatives and innovators, we need to focus more on HOW to learn. The rapidly changing world demands no less. Students need to build capacities for continuous learning, unlearning, and relearning to be competitive globally. So, I believe that the technologies that address the HOW question will become the key for educational success in the remainder of the 21st century.”

Read the full interview at Udemy.

Next Monday, June 7, the Invisible Learning project invites you to participate in an open webinar with our invited guests: Knowmads (Amsterdam, Netherlands), a creative, entrepreneurial school for developing entrepreneurs who want to make a difference in this world.

This is not a conference, but an opportunity to converse, exchange ideas and viewpoints among cyber-participants. Participation is open to all.

If you have questions and ideas in the upcoming days before the webinar, you can send them through the Invisible Learning website to @john or @cristobalcobo — or by Twitter (@moravec or @cristobalcobo).

• The link to join the webinar will be posted at the www.invisiblelearning.com portal
• Please spread the word about this event by sharing this invitation (i.e., feel free to copy it into your blog)
• On Twitter, we use the #invislearning hashtag for tracking Invisible Learning conversations.

We will use Adobe Connect Pro to broadcast the webinar, and a recording of the encounter will be posted online immediately after the meeting.

If you would like to know the corresponding hour for this activity in your country, we recommend you use this tool: http://www.timedial.net/world-time-difference-calculator/

We look forward to seeing you at the webinar!
John Moravec
Cristóbal Cobo

From TED.com:

In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.

Project Dream School starts with a simple question:

If you could build a dream school, what would you do?

Furthermore:

What would the building look like? The methods? The teachers? Technology? The mission? …does it need to be a school, or should it be a bootcamp for designing futures… life… the perfect job?

Last Thursday, many great minds assembled to discuss just this… and how to make it happen. Sir Ken Robinson, Jeff Jarvis and I joined the discussion by Skype with Peter de Visser (principal), Marcel Kampman (creative organizer), Ellen Mashhaupt, Bianca Geerts, Fons van den Berg, Rob van der Ploeg, Bram Verhave (Architecture historian STEK, advisor to Chief government Architect), Peter de Visser, Ton Dohle, Bjorn Eerkes, Maurice Mikkers, Lex Hupe, Arjan Dingsté, Hartger Meihuizen (staff Stad&Esch), Roel Fleurke (staff Stad&Esch), Koene Kisjes (student Stad&Esch), Christian Paauwe (student Stad&Esch), Bart Hoekstra (student Stad&Esch), Jan Albert Westenbrink, and Annette Stekelenburg.

The project will have a website up-and-running soon at projectdreamschool.org, and also in Dutch at: projectdroomschool.org. As a Skype (distant) participant, I really cannot report on how the entire discussion went, so make sure to follow the project sites for their take on the meeting and their next actions as they work to transform their dreams into reality.

Stay tuned… more soon!

Postscript: Here is my Dream School (as shared on Thursday):

• The organization abandons the word “school” — in reinventing education, it becomes a bootcamp for design where youth and collaborating community members apply their creativity toward innovative applications.
• The traditional classroom is abandoned in favor of space that favors multidirectional collaboration. Moreover, building that houses the organization is designed to be more than just a box. Rather, it is designed to be easily transformed and reconfigured as quickly as our ideas regarding teaching and learning evolve and transform.
• An infrastructure is created to support technologies, but the technologies themselves are not deeply embeded (because they will likely change by the time they’re institutionalized). Students are responsible for bringing in and supporting their own technology, perhaps by providing them with a technology grant/budget. (Update: Kraft Foods is trying out this approach.)
• The school is not just a tool for youth, but is a resource for the entire community it serves: Provides co-working and incubator resources for people with ideas that want to involve youth, and facilitates innovative, non-formal, informal and “invisible” learning opportunities.
• A new breed of teacher/facilitators are trained and recruited to do away with download-style pedagogy, and rather serve as curators of ideas and enablers of creativity and innovation.

That’s my dream… which is easier said than done. But, it is what it is: A dream.

From his notes:

One more from him: “It’s easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel.” Google sprung from seeing the novel. Is our educational system preparing students to work for or create Googles? Googles don’t come from lectures.

So if not the lecture hall, what’s the model? I mentioned one: the distributed Oxford: lectures here, teaching there.

Once you’re distributed, then one has to ask, why have a university? Why have a school? Why have a newspaper? Why have a place or a thing? Perhaps, like a new news organization, the tasks shift from creating and controlling content and managing scarcity to curating people and content and enabling an abundance of students and teachers and of knowledge: a world whether anyone can teach and everyone will learn. We must stop selling scarce chairs in lecture halls and thinking that is our value.

And:

We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

(My apologies for deviating from convention and cutting-and-pasting so much from Mr. Jarvis, but his message is THAT good.)

Thanks to Marcel Kampman for spotting the video!

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.

The Texas State Board of Education reminded us of the phenomenon this month, rewriting textbook guidelines to match their conservative, theological worldviews. Not since the Kansas Board of Education voted to restrict the teaching of evolution has an entire state backlashed so strongly against science and reason.

In an editorial on the board’s actions, the Houston Chronicle wrote:

In its revamp of the state’s social studies curriculum, a majority of the board has consistently voted to reshape our history. Instead of the messy, complicated past, the extremist members prefer a simple story of triumphant Christian soldiers.

Last week the board voted to remove Thomas Jefferson — Thomas Jefferson! — from a list of Enlightenment thinkers who changed the world. The Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason over tradition, doesn’t sit well with the board.

From the Wall Street Journal:

As Don McLeroy, one of the leaders of the board’s conservative faction, put it in last year’s debate over evolution, “somebody’s got to stand up to experts.”

Indeed, outrage against the conspiracy of intellectuals seemed to lurk just below the surface during last week’s deliberations, breaking into the open during moments of rancor. “I see no need, frankly, to compromise with liberal professors from academia,” railed board member Terri Leo when someone challenged the move to nix the word “capitalism.” “That’s part of the problem of how we end up with distorted and liberal biased textbooks is because that’s who’s writing them.”

Are the actions of Texas and Kansas anomalies, or is there a larger movement at play?

Mostly white, undereducated, and underemployed, the Tea Party movement has become the poster child for American anti-intellectualism. Whereas the group’s members fared well in the industrial era, they find themselves unable to compete in a global economy powered by ideas. Simply put, they have few new skills to offer, and nobody wants to hire them.

The world is changing around them, and they are frightened. They do not understand the changes, and they do not want to change themselves. Worse yet, they do not want to understand what is going on. We see this in the surge in popularity of radical commentators (i.e., Glenn Beck) who provide simplistic narratives of the world that often have little or no connection to reality. They redirect their fear of what they do not know or understand and transform it into anger.

In January, the conservative columnist David Brooks lamented American anti-intellectualism and the backlash against educated people:

The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.

The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.

What will you do when anti-intellectual politics comes to your school?

January 27, 2010

11:30am – 1:30pm

At the next Horizon Forum, you are invited to join the discussion, moderated by Arthur Harkins and John Moravec, with special guests, as we probe into the deep future of education.

The New York Times’ John Tierney published an interview with Ray Kurzweil on accelerating change:

Now, [Kurzweil] sees biology, medicine, energy and other fields being revolutionized by information technology. His graphs [of accelerating technological change] already show the beginning of exponential progress in nanotechnology, in the ease of gene sequencing, in the resolution of brain scans. With these new tools, he says, by the 2020s we’ll be adding computers to our brains and building machines as smart as ourselves.

What does this mean for schools today? Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity is criticized for being technologically deterministic. But, are there relevant social and cultural aspects related to the human experience? At the Horizon Forum’s next open roundtable, will explore what changes could take place in our schools and learning institutions within the next 35 years as technology transforms the human mind and human potential… and what we can start doing today!

Lunch and validated parking will be provided. Please RSVP your attendance by 10am on January 25 to Carole MacLean at cmaclean@umn.edu or call 612-625-5060.

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The Horizon Forum is sponsored by the Preparation to Practice Group in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. For for information about the Horizon Forum, contact John Moravec at moravec@umn.edu or call 612-625-3517.

This video was contributed to the Invisible Learning project. Do you have a video to share? If so, simply upload it to YouTube and assign it the tag invisiblelearning.

Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of education from 1657-2045. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into modern education, 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.

As always, we invite your feedback and suggestions for further development! We expect many enhancements and updates to this resource in the near future.