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The Boston Globe assembled a list of “eight reasons why this is the dumbest generation.” They write:

Author Mark Bauerlein aims to provoke in his new book, “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future” (Tarcher/Penguin). Do you agree? Take a look at eight reasons the Emory University English professor gives to ”not trust anyone under 30” — see which you think is the best.

The root of the problem seems to be embedded in our culture. Given the long tradition of anti-intellectualism in the United States, I somehow doubt that digital technology is responsible for stupefying Americans, as Bauerlein suggests. Digital technologies simply make it easier for us to learn about how much more intelligent many other people might be, and how Americans are losing their knowledge-based competitive advantage. The key is in how we use these technologies. If we use them to continue our tradition of anti-intellectualism, then it only seems reasonable that we should expect the production of mediocrity to expand.

This week, Education Futures will focus on America’s unstable orbit around mediocrity. Next week, we will focus on what some people are doing about it.

A “C” average nation. From Angela Maiers’ blog:

The 2008 State Technology Grades have been released. This State Technology Report is a joint project of Education Week and the EPE Research Center. Each state was surveyed to assess the status of K-12 educational technology across the nation in the areas of access, use, and capacity. The report assigned “grades to the states” for their technology performance overall and in those three categories.

[Cross-posted from e-rgonomic]

Passport of skills for a knowledge worker:

1. Not restricted to a specific age.
2. Highly engaged, creative, innovative, collaborative and motivated.
3. Uses information and develops knowledge in changing workplaces (not tied to an office).
4. Inventive, intuitive, and able to know things and produce ideas.
5. Capable of creating socially constructed meaning and contextually reinvent meanings.
6. Rejects the role of being an information custodian and associated rigid ways of organizing information.
7. Network maker, always connecting people, ideas, organizations, etc.
8. Possesses an ability to use many tools to solve many different problems.
9. High digital literacy.
10. Competence to solve unknown problems in different contexts.
11. Learning by sharing, without geographical limitation.
12. Highly adaptable to different contexts/environments.
13. Aware of the importance to provide open access to information.
14. Interest in context and the adaptability of information to new situations.
15. Capable of unlearning quickly, and always bringing in new ideas.
16. Competence to create open and flat knowledge networks.
17. Learns continuously (formally and informally) and updates knowledge.
18. Constantly experiments new technologies (especially the collaborative ones).
19. Not afraid of failure.

Sources:

Cristóbal Cobo. [http://www.slideshare.net/cristobalcobo]
Stephen Collins. [http://www.slideshare.net/trib]
John Moravec. [http://www.slideshare.net/moravec]

The StarTribune is running an excellent story on an intellectual property crisis at the University of Minnesota that probably is contextualizable to other “Research I”/”Research Universities (RU/VH)” universities as well: Entrepreneurship is avoided. Perhaps this is a cultural thing:

The university “provides all sorts of disincentives to new technology,” John Alexander, president of Twin Cities Angels, a local investor group, recently told the state’s House Committee on Biosciences and Emerging Technology.

[...]

“It was difficult to get access to intellectual property,” said Dale Wahlstrom, a former Medtronic executive who is now chief executive of the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota. “It was a one-sided discussion. If they couldn’t get the optimal deal, they wouldn’t do anything.”

The article goes on to suggest that “the university traditionally lacked the necessary money and managerial talent to turn promising research into viable companies.” As an employee of the University of Minnesota, I feel I should avoid addressing that topic. But, still, I wonder…

• Is the drive for innovation and entrepreneurship what separates really great universities from the others?
• If world-class private universities actively support entrepreneurial activities and support the spinning-off of enterprises (i.e., Stanford and MIT), why shouldn’t land grand institutions do so as well if they are providing for the public good by releasing technologies and other intellectual property that otherwise would not impact society?
• As the rest of the world adopts new intellectual property models (i.e., Creative Commons), what will become of the research institutions that today fail to succeed in realizing opportunities from yesterday’s models?

With many folks away at SXSW, CIES and AERA, the next couple weeks are going to be quiet. What better time than now to catch-up on the mail!

First, Elaine Wooton sent a note a couple weeks ago in regard to my chart of Education 1.0/2.0/3.0:

I am part of a group starting a school outside D.C. called The Freedom School (www.freedomschoolMD.com). Modeled after the Subdury Valley School (sudval.org) and sort of Summerhill in England. Democratic. Kids do whatever they want all day (in an environment the adults try to ensure is “rich” with opportunities) as long as they follow the rules that they made. Total age-mixing, no curriculum unless they want it… We are actually a homeschool coop that looks just like a school, because Maryland is “complicated” (the complication is about building codes, not about starting a “school”). (Next year, the co-op will run 5 days/week with a paid staff person.)

Holy cow! …a school/coop that tries to embrace the creativity inherent in kids rather than beating it out is worth following!

She also wrote:

Strangely, the kids have had “school” 3x week since September, and have formulated many, many rules about computer access. As it stands right now, they made a rule that they can only use the computers for play from 10-12 (academics are fine any time), so that they are entirely available for other activities in the afternoon. There have also been rules about time on/time off. Also, in this environment, the computer is a social thing, usually functioning as a triangle – two kids/one computer. One kid as the user and one as a coach (or backseat driver). The typical computer lab situation in schools is totally different, 25 headphoned kids on 25 machines. I think the public school computers should always have 2 jacks, so there can be that triangle. But I digress…

That is a fascinating example of a self-organizing system. I’ve seen this happen in other classrooms where adults make an effort to step aside, too. Kids are much better at teaching each other about technology and “managing” technology than adults. What would happen if these kids worked with each other (and with adults) to develop new technologies to support their learning and knowledge-producing environments?

Second, Mark Surman posted a critique of my critique of the Cape Town Declaration, where I “worry” that “open course materials will do little to change education.” I had asked: Is there something else that we should focus on where we can use new technological and social models to develop innovative tools for education? Mark responds:

The answer is: of course! There are dozens of things that pop to mind immediately: Tools that capture, share and evolve the tacit knowledge involved in teaching practices (LAMS). Peer-to-peer learning platforms where students support each other and teachers become more like facilitators (Kusasa). Sites that connect ‘amateur’ teachers with interested learners (The School of Everything). For-credit classes that embed students in the real time, hands on learning environment of an open source software community (Seneca College). Or simply DIY learning by doing, which is the point of the web and open source in the first place (Wikipedia). While most of these are nascent examples yet to scale or even prove themselves, they hint at where things are going.

It surprises me how many people jump to the conclusion that the Cape Town Declaration ignores all this. The people who wrote the Declaration — and I suspect most people who signed it — totally get how education can and is changing.

The problem is that the Cape Town Declaration doesn’t say any of that. Maybe a new declaration is needed?

Finally, Guy Kawasaki dropped me a line to alert me that Education Futures is listed on his feed aggregator, Alltop, located at: http://education.alltop.com

Alltop is organized as a dashboard with not only education news, but also: autos, career, design, food, gadgets, humor, journalism, religion, social media, sports, venture capital, and much, much more…

At last Thursday’s UMN-FLACSO co-seminar, several Latin American students posed questions regarding inequities in education that might emerge due to limited access to cutting-edge technologies:

1. How do you deal with (social) exclusion, when you talk about partnering with technology?
2. How do you counterweight lack of creativity among slow adopters of technology?

Slow adopters or those with limited access to technologies have no option but to use existing technologies in new and creative ways. The creative use of technologies in new contexts –even if the technologies are obsolete—can help create new social situations and opportunities. An example of a creative use of old technologies occurred during our conversation on this topic last week when the computer that interfaced with the Polycom VoiceStation 500 that was supposed to provide for an outstanding conferencing experience in the co-seminar refused to boot. We instead had to rely on a single computer and a small webcam with an even smaller microphone to facilitate our conference. The technology that held it all in place: a paper cup.

In this experience, our Latin American partners had vastly superior conferencing technologies available to them for the co-seminar. With a small webcam and a paper cup, we were able to approximately level the playing field.

OK – perhaps this isn’t the best example, but you get my point, right?

A while back, I promised to share more on what co-seminars look like and how they operate. I promise to show a little bit tomorrow, with sample videos and a link to a co-seminar in progress. But, before I get to that, let me supply some background.

Co-seminars exhibit the following main characteristics:

• international;
• multilingual;
• embraces the use of Web 2.0 technologies (i.e., blogs, wikis, SlideShare, YouTube) to share ideas and promote learning;
• designed to enhance learning methodologies based on the principles of collective intelligence
• problem solving in complex environments;;
• purposive and intelligent use of information technology; and,
• use freely-available or open source technologies to limit expenses.

The co-seminar model was designed by collaborating faculty at FLACSO-México (mainly Cristóbal Cobo) and the Leapfrog Institutes at University of Minnesota (Arthur Harkins and John Moravec). In a pilot of the co-seminar model in summer of 2008, we built a course that integrated internally-focused content on innovation, knowledge management, and a forward-looking analysis of education in the 21st and 22nd centuries. The project included training instructors from multiple countries, and the participation of specialists from around the world (through virtual and in-person participation).

The co-seminar experience involves a new academic approach –particularly in regard to innovative teaching—that moves away from “download”/banking pedagogies toward “upload and download”/co-constructivist pedagogies that thrive in interdisciplinary environments. This means that both students and their instructors both learn and create new, meaningful knowledge.

A taste of a co-seminar in progress is coming tomorrow…

From this morning’s MACTA keynote address: Co-constructing Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century

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.

“Tomorrow is yesterday,” Skyped an attendee at today’s Networks & Neighborhoods in Cyberspace conference at the University of Minnesota today. “Even worse - yesterday is tomorrow.” The irony is that this conference is supposed to be related to a Minnesota Futures grant project.

This conference is highlighting a key problem at the University of Minnesota that I am sure is endemic elsewhere: higher education is full of technology followers, but few leaders. In this conference on the virtues of innovative technologies in education, one panelist admitted to not using Web 2.0 in his work. Others complained of the obstructions and limitations presented by WebCT and Moodle. A few others admitted they have no idea what Facebook is, but feel obliged to promote it because their students use it.

At a Research I university, you think we would discuss the new technologies that we will create rather than try to describe the technologies that already exist that we don’t know how to use … or would prefer to not use. Instead of forming a Facebook or Moodle support group, can we start to talk about what we will create next?

Minnesota: 1998 called.  They want their educational technologies back.

To be held in Barcelona from July 15 - 17, 2008:

The Free Knowledge & Free Technology (FKFT) Conference, organised by the Open University of Catalonia and the SELF Consortium, is the first international event focused on the production and sharing of free educational and lifelong learning materials on free software and open standards.

The organizers invite papers on the following topics:

• Introduction to Free Software and Open Standards, Operating systems, Office tools, Educational tools, ERP, VoIP, and others
• Technological aspects of e-learning
• Legal aspects of free technologies and open standards
• Quality assessment in collaborative authoring systems
• Business models based on free software
• Learning standards
• Free software in society