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John Seely Brown Keynote at NITLE Summit 2011

Go to around 18:30 in the video to skip to his talk. I think he’s pretty good at putting his ideas forth and I agree (in general) with his conclusions and queries.

Some interesting points:

  • The nature and use of knowledge and information are changing and, thus, educational needs are changing.
  • We need to get credit (as academics) for social media creation.  How many tenure committees are going to consider even a high-quality blog?  Very few to be sure.
  • Content captured without context makes less sense.  How much of the context do we need to capture?
  • Major challenges require a socio-technical, interdisciplinary approach.  The interdisciplinary part is probably the most difficult.  Getting out of our established groupings to collaborate with others outside is difficult.
  • Need to “cultivate a resilient mindset in our students – an ability to change, adapt, re-conceptualize, and engage in deep listening with humility in an act-reflect, provisional loop.”

Scientists at work on rewiring human brains | Marketplace From American Public Media

Scientists at work on rewiring human brains

Brain scans to detect cancer

Scientists in the Midwest are researching ways to rewire the brains of people who’ve suffered traumatic brain injuries. We speak with Pedram Mohseni and Randolph J. Nudo about their work, which has recently been given a $1.44 million grant by the Defense Department.

The Department of Defense has granted $1.44 million to a program run by Pedram Mohseni at Case Western Reserve University and Randolph J. Nudo at Kansas University Medical Center. The two have been working for three years already on a method of essentially rewiring the human brain to bypass the parts that have been damaged.

via marketplace.publicradio.org

You’ve got to listen to this. You get the main idea by reading the headline, but the interview and report at a little extra.

Can you imagine this a few years down the road. Aside for tremendous uses for victims of injuries and disease (think Alzheimer’s), this is the next designer surgery in 20 years. Imagine repurposing sections of your brain to carry more load. This is brain optimization down the road.

Yes. I could be reading too much into this, but I think that this assumption isn’t far off. Even beyond storage implants, this is making best use of the matter we already have. Fascinating.

The coming melt-down in higher education – I think he underestimates the culture of prestige

The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer)

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I’m afraid that’s about to crash and burn. Here’s how I’m looking at it.

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.

Pick up any college brochure or catalog. Delete the brand names and the map. Can you tell which school it is? While there are outliers (like St. Johns, Deep Springs or Full Sail) most schools aren’t really outliers. They are mass marketers.

2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.

As a result, there are millions of people in very serious debt, debt so big it might take decades to repay. Word gets around. Won’t get fooled again…

3. The definition of ‘best’ is under siege.

4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.

5. Accreditation isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

A lot of these ills are the result of uniform accreditation programs that have pushed high-cost, low-reward policies on institutions and rewarded schools that churn out young wanna-be professors instead of experiences that turn out leaders and problem-solvers.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

I’m one of the first to say that the next 20 years won’t look like the last 20 years in higher education when asked about the future of education. I even share many of the same sentiments as Godin. I differ in my estimate of the direct of this change.

Prestige will always skew the market and many of these universities sell prestige. Not just the Ivy League schools, but most of the large state schools do this as well. Prestige has both local and global effects. That big State U. generally has a lot of prestige in the local/regional context, whereas the Ivy League schools (not to mention the other more well-known schools) have it on a more global scale. This prestige factor isn’t going to disappear quickly. There is too much invested in it.

Prestige doesn’t just benefit the student and job-seeker. Prestige benefits the alumni all the way to the board room (and into the community). Their educational background is the foundation for this prestige in many cases. It makes them part of a larger, loose network. Prestige is by it’s very nature an illusion propped up by the schools, applicants, alumni, and their interactions with society at large. Change in this dynamic runs deep and the holders of power in this dynamic will struggle to maintain power.

With that said, I agree with Godin when it comes to the fate of those schools lacking the prestige factor (or even those at the lower rungs). They are the ones who will either change or perish. These schools have to offer more for less. The growing education markets both within the country and abroad are beginning to eat their lunch.

DICE 2010: “Design Outside the Box” Presentation Videos

Interesting view of the future. Common objects and activities from a gaming perspective. You can hate it or love it, but this is a likely future, at least in some respects.

I particularly like his comment near the very end. He wonders whether this is going to just be a marketers utopia or whether (in addition) it will cause people to try to be better people. You often don’t hear the latter, but I think this is equally important and even more so for educators.

15 Hot New Technologies That Will Change Everything

15 Hot New Technologies That Will Change Everything

I love it when others do the work for me. Here are some of the technologies that PC World thinks will change “everything.” Not sure if I agree that these will change everything, but they are evolutionary steps that are not too far off: smaller, faster, and less restrictive.

Six “Key Emerging Technologies” for Higher Ed Profiled in the 2008 Horizon Report | nmc

Six “Key Emerging Technologies” for Higher Ed Profiled in the 2008 Horizon Report | nmc:

Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher) bookmarked this today. Thought that it was good fodder for discussion.

The 2008 Horizon Report marked these 6 “technologies” (some are really just concepts) as THE emerging technologies to watch in higher ed (don’t know why they just chose higher ed):
1. grassroots video
2. collaboration webs
3. mobile broadband
4. data mashups
5. collective intelligence and
6. social operating systems

These are certainly some smart bets in the technology realm. I’d have to say that many were emerging technologies to watch in 2007. Grassroots video was certainly a player in 2007, which more and more options for both UCC (user-created content) and small film projects. If they had said interactive video streaming sites, I would have been on board. With Ustream.tv and Y! Live hitting bit time in the last couple months, video networking is taking off. With video cameras embedded in most new laptops and the cost of plug-in cameras coming down drastically, we are going to see an explosion of video interaction online.

Collaboration webs were also on the rise in 2007. Though, I have a feeling that this report means what will hit the mainstream. If that’s the case, I see that happening more this year. There are many different options for collaborative webs. There are sites that mix many collaborative options like Ning (http://ning.com) or others that specialize on types of media, like Google Docs, SlideShare, and Scribd. These are moving from beta-geeks to classroom teachers this year.

Mobile broadband isn’t going to make a splash this year in America. I think that it will in many other countries, but the US doesn’t have it yet. Not enough people with the equipment and the service isn’t nearly good enough to get mainstream buy-in. This won’t happen until people on different providers can easily collaborate with people on other providers. Verizon, pushed by Google, is making the move for openness that could make the market. That’s going to take more than a year for buy-in though. I’d say that 2009 or 2010 is really the year of mobile computing in the US.

I’m going to stop there (out of time) and say that the other ideas are right on track. I think that each idea and relevant technologies will gain traction this year and discussions will move in the direction of using the Internet as more than just a delivery platform, but as a networking platform.

Dan

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