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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.

Contrary to the closed access environments University of Iowa graduate students advocate, I believe that “intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.” Therefore, before the giant hairball of a banana that is my doctoral dissertation over-ripens beyond its useful life expectancy, I am releasing the document as a free download.

More information on my study, “A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education,” is available at http://www.educationfutures.com/dissertation.

One of the participants in the upcoming knowledge co-seminar, Ismael Peña-López, wrote on the visit of John Seely Brown at UOC as part of the institution’s Innovation Forums. He pondered, “is there anything more in ‘open’ and learning than Open Educational Resources?”

From Ismael’s notes:

Tinkering — enjoy fixing, experimenting — as a learning platform. We have to legitimate tinkering.

In the Digital Age, there is a culture of participation: tinkering, building, remixing, sharing. To create meaning by what one produces and others build upon. And sometimes this meaning creation happens without the original author of the work used as a basis for further meaning creation.

The Long Tail in Learning: leveraging and supporting each segment differently, supporting the rise of an ecology of learning/doing niches.

Cristóbal Cobo responds:

I love the challenge of John Seely Brown, who defends the idea that real learning is basically a social event, and therefore the value is within the group learning process (either in person or virtual). Brown adds other qualifiers as chaotic learning, distributed, interactive tools like facebook or where secondlife applications become a substantive value. In addition, he uses as a successful example for the education of tomorrow through “communities of practice,” underpinned by open source (Firefox, Linux, Apache, etc..). This makes me think of the gamble initiated by Yasuaki Sakyo at the Shibuya University in Japan, whose model is community education, open and absolutely horizontal [via educationfutures].

In the world of cut-and-paste learning and creative, new knowledge production, we need to look at how new social tools and environments create new meanings. In this new society, how can institutions that resist communities of practice built on social technologies (i.e., nearly every school) remain legitimate nodes of teaching and learning?

A couple more interesting articles by Seely Brown:

• Growing up digital: How the Web changes work, education, and the ways people learn
• Screen language: The new currency for learning (HBS Working Knowledge)
• Learning, working & playing in the Digital Age
• The university in the Digital Age (with Paul Duguid)

Here’s my presentation from this morning’s La Universidad en México en el año 2030: imaginando futuros conference at UNAM in Mexico City.

(Click here for the Spanish version.)

This paper introduces how the convergence of globalization, emergence of the knowledge society and accelerating change contribute to what might be best termed a New Paradigm of knowledge production in higher education. The New Paradigm reflects the emerging shifts in thought, beliefs, priorities and practice in regard to education in society. These new patterns of thought and belief are forming to harness and manage the chaos, indeterminacy, and complex relationships of the postmodern.
(Read more …)

An element missing from media coverage of the One Laptop per Child XO is the ramifications of using mesh networking. This scheme allows for data to be passed through individual machines acting as nodes, where data hops from machine-to-machine until its destination on the network –or on a foreign network is reached. This allows for instantly reconfigurable and self-healing networks that can self-adapt to a variety of network accessibility environments.

This networking model has also been recontextualized into the interface and software design of the device which encourages as much co-teaching and co-learning as possible. Working with teams from Pentagram Design and Red Hat, OLPC created SUGAR, a graphic user interface that captures the students’ world of fellow learners and teachers as collaborators, emphasizing connectivity between people and activities. From OLPC:

Everyone has the potential for being both a learner and a teacher. We have chosen to put collaboration at the core of the user experience in order to realize this potential. The presence of other members of the learning community will encourage children to take responsibility for others’ learning as well as their own. The exchange of ideas amongst peers can both make the learning process more engaging and stimulate critical thinking skills. We hope to encourage these types of social interaction with the laptops.

[...]

As most software developers would agree, the best way to learn how to write a program is to write one, or perhaps teach someone else how to do so; studying the syntax of the language might be useful, but it doesn’t teach one how to code. We hope to apply this principle of “learn through doing” to all types of creation, e.g., we emphasize composing music over downloading music. We also encourage the children to engage in the process of collaborative critique of their expressions and to iterate upon this expression as well.

While the developed world is using new technologies to teach the same old stuff its been pushing since the 19th century, the co-constructivism allowed by OLPC could allow children in less developed countries leapfrog their peers in new knowledge production. Is this purposeful orientation toward the use of technologies the start of a new revolution in education?

My doctoral dissertation, A New Paradigm of Knowledge Production in Minnesota Higher Education: A Delphi Study, is available for purchase online or for online preview:

• Click here to preview the first chapter
• Or, purchase a PDF download or hardcover copy of this document online at the Education Futures store

SPECIAL:

Download now and save! For the month of September, the PDF edition is available for download at the discounted price of $30.00 $15.00 (50% off)!
(Read more …)

Today’s list discusses how to move beyond the failures of U.S. education and transform our schools, communities, and families into centers of knowledge production and innovation.

1. Schools of the agricultural and industrial ages produced graduates suitable for their economies and societies. Change is accelerating, and students that are being prepared for old society jobs cannot be expected to succeed in a rapidly evolving socioeconomic environment. Today’s schools must reorient themselves toward producing graduates that will adapt and lead in societies that do not yet exist.
2. Knowledge is meaning, and meaning is knowledge. A new emphasis on the production of knowledge/meaning in formal education will mean students should not be viewed merely as vessels to into whom knowledge is downloaded, but should be vigorously involved in new knowledge co-creation. A good starting point toward creating new meanings is to bring dialogue and dialogical approaches to education back into the classroom.
3. No Child Left Behind undercuts the quest for meaning that is part of every intelligent human life. To reverse this damage, the schools must leave behind NCLB and psychometric-centric school cultures behind.
4. Many new ways of attending formal education are now available in a number of societies. The major implication of this is that families have greater choices in determining blends of educational contexts, and can contribute to the further development of new knowledge-producing contexts
5. Innovation is derived from the timely and effective use of knowledge. To help produce both knowledge/meaning and innovation, the schools will have to routinely seek out new contexts, problems, and experiences to bring into each classroom.
6. Schools routinely firewall the Internet. The simplest ways to minimize the losses to imagination and creativity generated by this practice are to stop fighting information and open access to the net; and develop improved ICT tools to help students harness their creative potential.
7. Generally, families are sources of educational conservatism. Such squeamishness about potential changes of school missions from download education to the production of knowledge/meaning and innovation can be abated by engaging parents in future-oriented storytelling conversations, such as StoryTech.
8. Schools in America tend to ignore or even denigrate creative, imaginative students. A quick fix for this problem is to remove creative students immediately, and place them in supportive contexts where they can build upon their individual knowledge and begin to innovate immediately.
9. Production of knowledge/meaning and innovation in the schools can vastly increase the choices available to society. The problem with this is that the choices quickly may quickly become overwhelming. New technologies must be developed and embraced to help support and mediate personal and social decision-making.
10. To further overcome the problem of “knowledge and innovation overload,” a minority of students may have to partner with adaptive technologies to maintain cognitive competitiveness with their more choice-comfortable peers.

It’s not enough to question if China is on the verge of leapfrogging the world in education. Is China poised to leapfrog the world in the knowledge economy, or are they simply catching up? Perhaps the knowledge economy isn’t what matters, but the emerging innovation economy does. For the time being, however, consider China’s advances in the knowledge realm:

1. As Karl Fisch astutely points out, there are more Chinese honor students than the United States has students. China outnumbers all other nations in terms of talent potential.
2. Adoption of handheld/mobile learning devices (m-learning) in schools: See our comments on this form of “legalized cheating” in the classroom.
3. Thousands of units of software and courseware for m-learning devices are being developed rapidly using new Chinese cultural and thought models. Much of the software is designed for the two learning devices previously reviewed at Education Futures.
4. Chinese are eager to dispense with Confucian education traditions. The Chinese education system is opening itself to the rest of the world to learn global “best practices” and adopt them on a mass scale.
5. Western companies are looking to outsource their creative work to China, creating ripe conditions for Chinese education to leapfrog toward the production of creative workers.
6. Similarly, China is the new global favorite for R&D spending among global businesses. This will require the rapid transformation of Chinese education and the development of knowledge workers to meet market demands.
7. There is no sign of a significant cooling down in China’s rate of change in the near future. Despite the central government’s best efforts, it is unable to control or adequately measure the amount of economic growth, infrastructure development, or social change.
8. China is rapidly adopting open source development philosophies. In addition to developing indigenous Linux flavors to meet local needs, the nation is the top participant in the OpenCourseWare consortium.
9. Chinese leaders understand that education is the foundation for the nation’s future economic success: They are willing to reorient education to meet future needs.
10. The “brain drain” is transforming into a “brain bank.” Returning overseas students are starting new enterprises and ventures; and, the government is recruiting foreign talent to fill in gaps as it moves into the knowledge economy and knowledge society.

What is needed for China to stop playing “catch up” in the knowledge economy to ascending to a position of leadership in an innovation-based world?

The Online Education Database published their list of “Top 100 open courseware projects.” This list demonstrates that there is a lot of content available, encompassing in the fields of agriculture, arts, architecture, archeology, audio & video, biology, botany, chemistry, civil engineering, economics, electronic engineering, general engineering, Earth sciences, geography & geology, history, languages & linguistics, law, literature, mechanical engineering, paleontology, physics, political Science, psychology, and the social sciences.

Quality among open courses vary significantly, and most open courseware do not plug into the Web 2.0 “wisdom of crowds” that can enhance quality and provide avenues for new knowledge production. Furthermore, most faculty distance themselves from online publishing and knowledge dissemination. Even worse, few faculty (at the undergraduate level, at least) as concerned about generating new knowledge with students.

My question is, how can open courseware and academics/professionals be retooled jointly to create open, new knowledge-producing spaces for students and life-long learners?

Folks, when you use new technologies to teach the same old garbage, you’re not going to get the results that you want. The NY Times started to touch on this in their article, Seeing no progress, some schools drop laptops:

…the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

[...]

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

Michele at the Bamboo Project has it figured out. She quotes Mark Warschauer at UC Irvine:

Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research. …If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.

So, the lesson learned is that if you want to create kids that will perform well in a non-ICT-oriented society, then don’t provide them with technological tools. If you want them, however, to develop creative and innovative uses to succeed in knowledge and innovation-based societies that demand the use of ICT, then you must embrace the tools. And, when you do so, you cannot use them to teach the same old garbage (usually rote, “download”-style learning). Pedagogies that embrace ICT must leapfrog conventional paradigms and support students’ pervasive creativity, knowledge production, invention, and innovation.