The transcript of my 2003 presentation on emerging change and higher education, for the WFS Mexico Conference; this was also reprised to the WFS World Conference in August 2004.

1. 5/11/2003
Good morning. I want to thank the WFS for their invitation to
reprise this presentation, offered originally as a keynote at the
WFS Mexico conference in November 2003.
I am here this morning to pose some questions about possible
long-term futures for education. I shall touch only briefly on
the current crises in education -- not because I think them
unimportant, but because our role as forward thinkers, as
futurists, is to explore the boundaries of possibility at least
one generation forward.
© Infinite Futures 2003
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2. 5/11/2003
Let us briefly acknowledge current educational pressures --
some combination of which may be found in almost any
school system anywhere in the world. Either too little
infrastructure exists: it is inadequate for potential student
load, as in, for example, the Commonwealth of the Northern
Marianas, where the local high school literally lacks enough
seats for all potential students -- or the infrastructure can
accommodate the student population, but it is ageing, in
disrepair, and little or no funds exist to renovate buildings
and equipment. Third, the infrastructure may still be
functional, but it was designed for the subjects and teaching
styles of the industrial age -- creating workers with skills
appropriate to factories and mass production -- and it lacks
resources to upgrade to such information-age infrastructure
as computers and media labs. Or too few trained teachers
are available. And of course, all of these are exacerbated by
ongoing budget crises and underspending on education
generally.
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3. 5/11/2003
Given the current challenges, what possibilities exist for the
future? We have many scenarios to choose from: over fifty
years of futures studies have produced libraries of scenarios,
no few of which have focussed on education.
Even a quick Google search for education scenarios uncovers
a geographically and substantively diverse array of scenarios.
The next few slides focus on those produced for the National
Education Association, and are available in their entirety
online and by CD.
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4. 5/11/2003
Quality driven:
The National Education Association in the USA, has proposed
two basic scenarios for the future of higher education, each
of which produces several different delivery models. Their
preferred outcome is driven by shifting public values
emphasizing quality in education, that “education must be a
seamless web, that opportunities… should be available to all
residents. Higher education becomes viewed as a public
good, as an important investment in societal well being.”
Market driven:
But in many ways the outcomes that will be more
recognizable to the academics and educators in the audience
emerge from their “market-driven” scenario, which assumes
that education is no longer a government responsibility, but
the responsibility of each individual instead.
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5. 5/11/2003
In order to survive, educational institutions scramble for
strategies to handle reduced funding -- and increased
demand by the economy for workers trained in new skills.
The “MacCollege” scenario offers cheap and cheerful
education by a coordinated national network of franchised
community colleges, with educational product tie-ins -- and
the teaching, you should note, outsourced to Mexico.
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6. 5/11/2003
Emerging business and university partnerships to enhance
education for the new economy result in “educational
maintenance organizations:” higher education institutions
begin to administer education through contracts with
industries and states.
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7. 5/11/2003
The “outsourced” approach maintains the face-to-face
campus experience, but approaches the budget crisis by
adopting advanced business models, including
outsourcing all university activities to the cheapest
bidders.
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8. 5/11/2003
With shifting economic structures producing increasing
unemployment, large universities are used to “warehouse”
youth, and students actively encouraged to stay in school as
long as possible. Instruction increasingly computer-based,
with little contact with actual faculty.
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9. 5/11/2003
Some universities, in an attempt to maintain quality, focus on
the media-based delivery of “star” faculty and researchers,
leading to the “Hollywood-ization” of education, and
“edutainment,” touting the excellence of its production
values.
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10. 5/11/2003
Let’s take that last scenario and focus in on it: “wired,” online
delivery of education. What is the promise? Flexible,
asynchronous “just in time” delivery of educational resources,
fitting in to individual student schedules; make maximal
effective use of “information-age” media distributed via the
web; access to the best teachers, researchers, and instructional
materials, no matter where in the world they are, or the
students are. The University of Phoenix is one of the largest
USA-based examples of this sort of distance education.
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11. 5/11/2003
But does this really represent a new paradigm in teaching, a
model created entirely for the information age and the
emerging information economy? In daily practice, classes are
often structured in lock-step -- if the student falls behind,
they are lost. Content is often simply a transfer of the print-
based materials of the face-to-face classroom to the
hypertext environment of the web, with little recourse to
richer arrays of media. Granted, this is usually due to lack of
budget to prepare a media-rich environment, or buy server /
bandwidth resources to deliver it well. Teaching this way is
time-intensive, and often outsourced to part-time faculty.
Are we simply saying that the future of education will be a lot
like today, only on-line -- and equally under-resourced and
pressured to produce income? Commodifying knowledge
transfer, and applying industrial economic models to what
should be a quintessentially information economy activity.
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12. 5/11/2003
Twentieth century education was designed to mass produce
an educated workforce which would fit into the environment
of the factory production line.
A production line increasingly populated by robots controlled
by expert systems. The information age economy demands
something much more like the individual worker as self-
employed entrepreneur.
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13. 5/11/2003
What new models are available? One example resource is
offered by Vos and Dryden, in the research they present in
The Learning Revolution. They have collected best practice
case studies describing education innovations around the
world, presenting a myriad of models that are alike in one
respect: they apply our emerging knowledge of learning
styles, multiple intelligence, group process dynamics, and
human brain function to optimize learning conditions and
processes -- but in ways suited to different cultures. I will not
describe each of these models: I refer you to their book --
which is available in its entirety free online.
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14. 5/11/2003
But one model is to make educational resources available
free: it is a model which the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology has implemented in their “Open Course Ware”
initiative. This specifically challenges industrial-age
economic notions of commodification, and creating value for
goods by limiting access. Making all of MIT’s curriculum
resources available online and open to anyone with web
access, follows one of Kevin Kelly’s dicta from New Rules for
a New Economy: in the information economy, you can,
paradoxically, enhance product value by giving part of it
away for free.
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15. 5/11/2003
This takes education at least one step out of the industrial
age and into the information age. But the next step might
well be completely open source, self-designed,
asynchronously delivered information and learning, supported
by a globally self-organizing community of education.
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16. 5/11/2003
The precursors of which may well be the self-organizing
global communities of the Open Directory Project (ODP) and
Wikipedia. Both are voluntary efforts to identify, document,
annotate, and organize knowledge, in many different
languages, involving people from all over the world.
The ODP, for example, is an global community of over
50,000 people that creates an annotated taxonomy of
websites. This database provides core data to GOOGLE,
Lycos, and many other of the commercial web search
engines.
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17. 5/11/2003
Perhaps a more useful way to innovate in education is to
consider the customers of the future -- age cohort analysts
refer to the transitions of experience and expectations
between generations.
Millennials will be accustomed to choosing and manipulating
their own experiences -- that is, creating their own CDs and
DVDs, and designing their own websites. They will be used
to participation, collaboration, and having more control over
their activities and their information environment. In
designing programs for them, we must involve them to gain
their interest and commitment.
What exactly does this mean? Let’s consider how they play:
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18. 5/11/2003
Briefly, they expect fun to be when they want it, how they
want it, where they want it, immersive and high-speed,
participatory, and providing a platform for individual
creativity -- and they want it to challenge them.
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19. 5/11/2003
And they will use technology to create their own media and
languages to share these experiences: the rudimentary
examples today are texting and gaming.
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20. 5/11/2003
Based on these trends away from print-based media, another
possible outcome often extrapolated by futurists is the end of
literacy. Personally, I think a world without books would be a
poorer place -- and as many obsolete but elegant skills have
been maintained through history (for example, fencing) -- I
believe there will always be some core group of eccentrics
who love to read, even in the next millennium.
But I do think emerging new media will change the
landscape for learning, communicating, and thinking.
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21. 5/11/2003
Reading online is very different from reading a book, of
course: it is potentially non-linear, given the capability for
annotation linking any given paragraph, sentence, or word to
databases, case studies, bibliographies AS well as other
authors’ works; multi-sensory, allowing viewers to switch
seamlessly from print to music to art to movies -- and
eventually to sculpture and scents; and enables
multidimensional structuring of narratives and logical
arguments.
An vivid illustration of this is offered by David Brin in the
novel Earth.
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22. 5/11/2003
MIT research has generated several commercial spin-offs
racing to create “electronic ink” -- an infinitely reusable book
composed of pages in which are embedded molecules which
spin to display different colored faces as they receive minute
electrical charges. Thus each page could be reprogrammed
endlessly to be any page, in any book…or even a video
screen.
The extrapolation of this idea is vividly described by
Stephenson in his novel, The Diamond Age.
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23. 5/11/2003
Ian Pearson of BT Labs wowed a previous WFS conference
with his description of lab experiments with “thought
activated” computers, and just last month a research team
described their success with chimps activating game joysticks
merely via chips implanted in their brains.
Of course, sci-fi authors Niven and Pournelle have already
worked out that such chips, wi-fi’d into a network, would
create, in essence, techno-telepathy.
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24. 5/11/2003
E.g., the successive generations of “smart-its,” which their
designers describe as “small context-aware computers that
can be attached to everyday objects. If you need a coffee-
cup that knows if it is full or empty, a table that tracks the
objects on it, or a wine bottle that can tell if it has been
stored correctly, attach a Smart-It!”
We will be able to query every surface in our future
environments for updates on conditions anywhere this
ambient intelligence has permeated.
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25. 5/11/2003
The Navihedron, developed by the late Roy Stringer of
AMAZE (Liverpool, UK), arranges a Web site's information as
points on a globe. On a globe with 12 points, each point
would be no more than three clicks away from any other. And
you could see the whole thing by rotating the globe on-
screen. He called this structure a "navihedron.”
More recent examples of commercial software enabling
intuitive, non-linear organization and access of information
are TheBrain’s PersonalBrain, and PlumbDesign’s Visual
Thesaurus, using ThinkMap software.
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26. 5/11/2003
So what *does* happen when an entire generation grows up
in layered, multidimensional, multi-directional information
environments?
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27. 5/11/2003
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28. 5/11/2003
Note: it is not possible to accurately reproduce a navihedron
without loading Java software, as navihedra are movable
three-dimensional geometric objects.
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29. 5/11/2003
So perhaps we need to re-write that provocative possibility of
the future: maybe the next century will see not the end of
literacy, but the end of linear thinking.
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30. 5/11/2003
Our grandchildren and greatgrandchildren will not simply
dress differently, dance differently, drink and eat differently --
not to mention behave and talk differently -- they will think
differently as well. Can we rise to the challenge of imagining
what they might need in terms of skills, discipline, creativity,
information, and knowledge?
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31. 5/11/2003
For those of you familiar with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter
series, you will see immediately the contrast: between the
students of Ravenclaw -- studious, single-minded, disciplined
readers and essayists -- and Gryffindor: risk-takers,
immersing themselves in their surroundings and learning by
crisis, failure, and experiment; creating their own curriculum
when traditional curricula fail them.
Or, to quote McLuhan, shifting from hot learning media,
offering high-definition data absorbed primarily by one sense
(reading / sight) to cool learning media, presenting shallower
datasets over a wider array of senses such that the student is
compelled to participate and add more data, and create their
own organizational structure.
My nephew reads instructions; my niece plays with new
technology until she understands it -- or it breaks.
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32. 5/11/2003
So, what if all these changes lead not merely to a simple
transition from one primary medium of communication to
another, but to a complete shift in mental structures? How
will the generation after the millennials think?
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33. 5/11/2003
Are we, thinkers educated in the transition from the industrial
to the information age, trained in paradigms that are almost
purely industrial age, asking the correct questions about what
education infrastructure will best serve students in the
decades beyond the information age, in a future where our
rapidly evolving exploration and understanding of our own
brains, and the mind-body -- and mind-machine! -- interface
transforms our understanding not only of modes of
communication, but of human consciousness itself?
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34. 5/11/2003
Each of these successive forms of educational delivery does
not replace its predecessor; rather, each new model
subsumes the previous one. I do not pretend to know, nor
would I presume to predict, what the education delivery
systems of the future may be -- but I do know that our open
dialogue about educational improvement must acknowledge
advances in understanding the human brain and how
consciousness is produced and structured. And it is currently
one of the most rapidly advancing areas of scientific inquiry.
So we must begin to pose questions about educational
models for the age of conscious technology, and the
technologies of consciousness.
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35. 5/11/2003
[We are generation zero of spacekind.
How will generation one think?]
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36. 5/11/2003
[As the slide says.]
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37. 5/11/2003
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