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Change is the theme of this week, and we open with a reminder from Ray Kurzweil that change is accelerating. Last week, the New York Times’ John Tierney published an interview with 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.

Kurzweil has a track record of being correct with his projections of technological advancement. What does this mean for education? What changes would take place in our schools within the next 12-22 years as technology transforms the human mind and human potential? This week, we will consider these questions, and look at both U.S. presidential candidates’ proposals for changing education for a better future.

Speaking of Kurzweil, he is busy adapting his book, The Singularity is Near, into a movie of the same title. Originally planned for release this spring, it’s now slated to surface sometime later in 2008.

At the OLPC’s Global Country Workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts last week, Nicholas Negroponte revealed mockups of the next generation One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) device: XO-2.

The dual touch screen design can be used as either a laptop, a book, or a tablet. Since it relies on the touch screens to provide key entry, it can be reconfigured for younger and older audiences. It also can be reconfigured for application-specific layouts. And, in an interview with Laptop Magazine, XO-2 designer Mary Lou Jepsen suggests the new machine will incorporate haptic technologies.

The XO-2 is scheduled for release in 2010.

Forbes is running a special report on “The Future.” From the opening comments:

The truth is that people simply aren’t very good at predicting the future. It was only two centuries ago that we began to think we could do it at all, and we’re still learning. Hindsight may be 20/20, but foresight remains largely blind.

And so begins an odyssey of the blind leading the blind…

The section lightly critiques the futures field, and interviews a few futurists and couple future-oriented business leaders. It also points to some key literature in science fiction, and touches on a few “hot” areas in futures studies. Alas, the topics discussed all short-term and short on imagination. Case in point: The article entitled with the borrowed Yogi Berra quote, “the future isn’t what it used to be.”

Is there room for creativity in the future?

Education Futures contributor Brock Dubbels was interviewed in the National Education Association’s October 2007 issue of NEA Today on the use of games in the classroom. Make sure to read the article, and bookmark Brock’s list of video game resources for educators!

Also, click here to read Education Futures posts by Brock on games in the classroom.

In an interview with Silicon.com, William Gibson declares that he’s given up on envisioning futures:

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

[...]

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.

This helps to explain why recent “science fiction” has shifted toward “science fantasy.” It must be said, however, that the corporate futurism that he refers to is a really bad way of looking at the future. Rather than picking out a preferred future scenario, we should look at multiple futures and prepare for each of them. There’s no reason why any given set of futures cannot co-exist.

That’s why this site is called “Education Futures” and not “Education Future.”

Maybe a new genre of literature and thought will develop, with multiple futures, presents and pasts. More on this later…

Reason Magazine published a rather interesting interview with Vernor Vinge, touching on issues that interest libertarians. In regard to government control, or efforts to slow the Technological Singularity, he states:

There is a national interest, and not just in America, in providing the illusion of freedom for the millions of people who need to be happy and creative to make the economy go. Those people are more diverse and distributed and resourceful and even coordinated than any government.

That’s a power we already have in free markets. Computer networks, supporting data and social networks, give this trend an enormous boost. In the end that illusion of freedom may have to be more like the real thing than any society has ever achieved in the past, something that could satisfy a new kind of populism, a populism powered by deep knowledge, self-interest so broad as to reasonably be called tolerance, and an automatic, preternatural vigilance.

Short of physical disasters or failures in technology, Vinge believes the Singularity is inevitable. Barry Mahfood argues that it’s happening gradually…