If you’re new here and like what you read, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.
Thank you for visiting!

Several U.S. states plan future prison build-outs based on second or third-grade reading scores. But now this trend of tracking young children for a career in crime is spreading to other nations? The Guardian reports that Scotland Yard’s most senior forensics expert, Gary Pugh, want elementary school kids to be “eligible for the [national] DNA database if they exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life, according to Britain’s most senior police forensics expert.” From the article:

‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’

[…]

Chris Davis, of the National Primary Headteachers’ Association, said most teachers and parents would find the suggestion an ‘anathema’ and potentially very dangerous. ‘It could be seen as a step towards a police state,’ he said. ‘It is condemning them at a very young age to something they have not yet done. They may have the potential to do something, but we all have the potential to do things. To label children at that stage and put them on a register is going too far.’

What’s next? Requiring DNA samples from second graders who underperform in a reading test so they can be easily identified by future forensic criminologists?

These trends seem like a variation of a theme derived from the dystopias of Minority Report’s pre-crime and Gattaca’s eugenics and genetic discrimination, with an added element of the growing omniscience of the state. Because of the threat of discrimination, any embrace of genetic determinism by the state could have tremendous negative impacts. What would it take to expand GINA to protect U.S. students in educational settings?

In response to my post on what Education 3.0 might/ought to look like, Eric Grant posted a link to a Flash-enabled map of trends in education and other potential futures.

I like the idea of mapping education futures out with a slick interface. Can we build a Web 2.0-enabled version of something like this that harnesses the “wisdom of crowds?”

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 …)

The University of Manitoba is hosting a free, virtual Future of Education Online Conference that will end June 8.  Live presentations will be archived, and discussion is encouraged via the “U of M” Learning Technologies Centre Moodle site:

http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/moodle/course/view.php?id=12

From the organizers’ description of the conference:

Tumultuous change is creating new opportunities for schools, colleges, universities, and corporations to rethink their approaches to teaching and learning. Many buzzwords are used to describe the change: globalization, web 2.0, the world is flat, the wisdom of crowds, and the long tail.

What exists beyond the hype? What is happening to education? What will be the shape of education in the future? Answering these questions is no easy task – the change drivers have not yet settled sufficiently to reveal a clear path forward. For academics, researchers, and leaders, it is important to begin exploring the trends emerging and potential implications and directions forward. The Future of Education is a free online conference exploring trends impacting education - K-12, higher education, and corporation training.

This could be great!

A collaborative work by Kevin Boyack, Dick Klavans and W. Bradford Paley maps the relationships among scientific paradigms through an analysis of published works in 2003. Seed Magazine has a link to a much larger JPEG (5.3MB) as well as a description of how the image was constructed.

Prints of the image are also being “given away.” See Information Esthetics for more details…

Google hosts a “Gapminder” tool that uses Flash technology to turn otherwise tedious or boring data into readable, interactive animations. Gapminder is a foundation based in Stockholm, Sweden. Funding has been mainly by grants from Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, Sida, and the data presented are gathered in collaboration with the United Nations Statistic Division. More details (and charts and graphs!) are available at www.gapminder.org.

Also graphically interesting is the geographically-based economic data site, hosted by Yale: gecon.yale.edu

The Sloan Consortium of online education institutions released its fourth annual report on the state of online learning in the United States. The report series asks key questions in regard to the extent of adoption and acceptance of online education.

Among the findings:

• Online enrollment continues to grow, climbing to 3.2 million learners in 2006 (about a 40% increase)
• Most online learners are undergraduates, and are more likely to be students at Associates institutions (two-year colleges)
• Doctoral/Research institutions lead in online offerings
• 62% of academic leaders believe online learning is on par with or better than face-to-face learning
• Online student discipline, faculty acceptance, and faculty time commitments are seen as barriers to the widespread adoption of online education

Update: Inside Higher Ed and the State of Higher Education also have recaps of the report.

Recognizing natural human evolution is likely over, Popular Mecanics is carrying a story on technological trends and advancements that will build better humans.

Update – New Scientist is running a similar article.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports their take of the top ten trends affecting education in 2005:

1. The browser-based application
2. Firefox
3. Wikipedia’s news reporting
4. The $100 laptop
5. Podcasting
6. A renewed debate on what students are doing on the Internet
7. OpenOffice.org 2.0
8. Web 2.0
9. Moodle
10. Blackboard’s takeover of WebCT

Read the original article.