“The Fab Lab program has strong connections with the technical outreach activities of a number of partner organizations, around the emerging possibility for ordinary people to not just learn about science and engineering but actually design machines and make measurements that are relevant to improving the quality of their lives.” [MIT Center for Bits and [...]

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, [...]

By John Moravec (Updated December 20, 2009)
Education Futures celebrates its first five years of exploring new futures in human capital development with a timeline of the history of modern education. This timeline provides not only a glimpse into the past and present, but plots out a plausible future history for human capital development. The future [...]

Note: This article is a part of the Designing Education 3.0 series at Education Futures.
Little evidence suggests that new technologies in the classroom are being used to transform educational paradigms. At last year’s ASOMEX technology conference, ISTE’s Don Knezek pointed out that student graduation rates — and their rates of interest in schools — have [...]

Knowledge powers the 21st century
Dan Wallace (@ideafood) forwarded a link to this short essay by TED curator, Ted Anderson. Networking technologies are transforming the potential of teachers:
There are many scary things about today’s world. But one that is truly thrilling is that the means of spreading both knowledge and inspiration have never been greater. Five [...]

Cristóbal Cobo sent me this link to the Ung Kommunikation [Young Communication] project. The project examines the convergence of new technologies, youth culture and learning. And, by looking at the influence of youth culture on digital communication, the project might be able to identify a bridge between the divide of formal and non-formal [...]

Here’s another look at accelerating change. On Friday, the New York Times published an excellent review of Dalton Conley’s book, Elsewhere U.S.A.:
“A new breed of American has arrived on the scene,” Conley, a professor at New York University, declares in “Elsewhere, U.S.A.,” his compact guidebook to our nervous new world. Instead of individuals searching for [...]

Dan Sutch at Futurelab (UK) alerted me to their new project, Beyond Current Horizons:
Beyond Current Horizons looks at the future of education, beyond 2025. The aim is to help our education system prepare for and respond to the challenges it faces as society and technology rapidly evolve. What skills will children need for [...]

Remember nomads?

In the pre-industrial age, nomads were people that moved with their livelihood (usually animal herding) instead of settling at a single location. Industrialization forced the settlement of many nomadic peoples…
…but, something new is emerging in the 21st century: Knowmads.

A knowmad is what I term a nomadic knowledge worker –that is, a creative, imaginative, and [...]

Canada’s undergraduate university students have given the country’s smallest universities higher ratings than the large institutions for overall satisfaction and quality of education.   This is one of the findings of The Globe and Mail’s Canadian University Report available in today’s newspaper and online at www.globecampus.ca. The Report is presented in association with The Strategic Counsel [...]