In an era of globalization and “flattening” of our relatiohships around the Earth, how can we learn better? What happened to learning as we moved from the stable structures of the 20th century to fluid and amorphic structures of the 21st century? What roles do schools and colleges play when you can learn in any context and at any time? Do we continue with formal learning or do we formalize informal learning?

This is an open invitation to explore some of the best ideas emerging around the planet that are contributing to a new ecology of learning.

More info: www.invisiblelearning.com

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.

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.

The Education Futures timeline of education

1657 – 2045

By John Moravec (Updated May 30, 2010)

This timeline of the history of modern education provides not only a glimpse into the past and present, 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.

Although this timeline is largely U.S.-centric, the trends impacting it are global, especially as we look to the future. Please consult the glossary, below, for additional information regarding many of the themes presented. As always, we invite your feedback and suggestions for further development!

To share this timeline in your blog or website, insert the following code:

<div><iframe src="http://www.educationfutures.com/flashtimeline/index.html" width="610" height="310" scrolling="no"
frameborder="0"></iframe><p>Source: <a href="http://www.educationfutures.com/resources/timeline">
Education Futures</a></p></div>

Or, to insert a smaller version (500px wide), click here for the code.

We haven’t had an opportunity to screen Ray Kurzweil‘s the film, Transcendent Man, yet, but The Futurist magazine published a preview:

Scene: A movie theater on the west side of Manhattan during the Tribeca Film Festival. The audience teems with hip New York film students eager to see the world premiere of a new documentary. They’re joined, unexpectedly, by computer scientists, geneticists, and futurists from Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. The lights dim. After a brief opening, inventor Ray Kurzweil appears on the screen, looks squarely into the camera, and says, “I’m never going to die.”

So began the world premiere of Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man, a feature-length film that chronicles Kurzweil’s ideas on the future of technological innovation. Chief among his forecasts: In the next 30 years, humans will use genomics, nanotechnology, and even artificial intelligence to escape death.

The film is in limited release and we will post more about the film and its implications for education as soon as we have an opportunity to view it. In the meantime, Read more at The Futurist or visit the film’s website.

By changing the name to Syfy, which remains phonetically identical, the new brand broadens perceptions and embraces a wider range of current and future imagination-based entertainment beyond just the traditional sci-fi genre, including fantasy, supernatural, paranormal, reality, mystery, action and adventure. It also positions the brand for future growth by creating an ownable trademark that can travel easily with consumers across new media and nonlinear digital platforms, new international channels and extend into new business ventures.

This change highlights a key problem: it’s getting hard to imagine the future.

Science fiction literature of the previous two centuries predicted amazing things (i.e., artificial satellites, undersea exploration, teleconferencing) that have become common elements of our lives. This worked well when the pace of change was much slower. But, over the past few decades, the rate of social and technological change has started to take off, and the genre is grinding to a halt as people hit the limits of their imagination and foresight. The moment where change occurs so rapidly that we cannot imagine what will happen next is the Technological Singularity.

Perhaps SciFi’s move away from science fiction is a sign the Singularity is nearer than we think?

The Star Tribune’s Karen Youso interviewed me for what I thought would be a short sidebar article on accelerating change, but it wound up taking the full front page of the Variety section in today’s paper. I’m absolutely delighted to see mainstream media discuss the Technological Singularity! … especially since the article contains questions for human capital development and our education systems!

Read the article here.
My favorite part:

“We send kids to school, they move grade by grade, using the 18th-century model, and during that time, the whole world has changed so much. How relevant is that education?” asked Moravec. “We’re training them for jobs that existed 20 years ago, not for those that’ll exist when they finish school.”

Want more? Here are online resources for learning more, gathered by the StarTribune.

This past week…

A shockwave passed through the singularity community today with the public launch of Singularity University at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley.  Singularity University aims to assemble a world class community of thought leaders, academics, and entreprenuers across the many fields of exponentially advancing technologies (nanotechnology, genetics, medicine, artificial intelligence, etc.) in order to address humanity’s grand challenges.

With significant backing from Google and NASA, and with the participation of a renowned cast of faculty and advisors, Singularity University is poised to literally overnight become a world class institution for the innovation, collaboration, and leadership that will allow the world to capitalize on the great promise of technology to solve the world’s greatest problems…

Founded by Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis (X Prize Foundation), and Larry Page (Google), the Singularity University focus its curriculum on technologies surrounding:

• Future Studies & Forecasting
• Networks & Computing Systems
• Biotechnology & Bioinformatics
• Nanotechnology
• Medicine, Neuroscience & Human Enhancement
• AI, Robotics, & Cognitive Computing
• Energy & Ecological Systems
• Space & Physical Sciences
• Policy, Law & Ethics
• Finance & Entrepreneurship

What’s missing, however, is a human capital development focus.  As the world approaches the Technological Singularity, how can we design better human capital futures?  Moreover, what are the social, cultural, and educational elements we need to start studying and working on today to ensure our success? …our survival?

Career and Technical Education is poised at the inflection point of a technological and social change process identified as the “J” Curve. Just like the letter J, the “J” Curve describes a sharp upward turn in the exponentially accelerating rate of change. The effects of the “J” Curve will be felt -indeed, are already being felt- by every institution, company, government, and school in all societies. This presentation centers on the leadership that can be exerted by Career and Technical Education in the context of the “J” Curve’s increasing impacts.

To view the slides in a larger format, click here.

First, Jamais Cascio writes on a Metaverse Roadmap Overview:

In this work, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf, I sketch out four scenarios of how a combination of forces driving the development of immersive, richly connected information technologies may play out over the next decade. But what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but — more importantly — in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.

The scenarios explored are:

1. Virtual Worlds: the combination of simulation and intimate (highly personalized) technologie
2. Mirror Worlds: the intersection of simulation and externally-focused technologies
3. Augmented Reality: the collision of augmentation and external technologies
4. Lifelogging: brings together augmentation and intimate technologies to record the experiences and histories of objects and users (what Cascio refers to as “participatory panopticon“)

Read more at Open the Future…

Second, Bryan Gardiner writes on the Wired blog that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, multi-millionaire Facebook backer, and the president of Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund, is devising a Singularity-aware investment strategy based on two, polarized scenarios in a near-future world where machines will become smarter than humans:

1. Negative scenario: where machines won’t need us and humans become expendable
2. Positive scenario: where humans would still have a positive outlook

Regardless of the two scenarios, Gardiner points out that the volatile booms and busts over recent years are indicative of the market’s attempts to align itself with near-Singularity transformations:

In essence, he argues that each of these booms represent different bets on the singularity, or at least on various things that are proxies for it, like globalization. What’s more, we’ve been seeing them now for over 30 years.

The markets are catching on to accelerating change. Why not bet on the Singularity in our schools as well?