Mar 2 2012: The Future of Learning has put together an excellent series of videos around New Ways to Learn New Skills for New Jobs. Each presents a scenario of an individual learner of 2025: http://ipg.ict.tno.nl/wordpress/forlic/
Mar 2 2012: The Future of Learning put together an excellent series of videos on New Ways to Learn New Skills for Future Jobs which may be helpful in re-tooling teachers:
http://ipg.ict.tno.nl/wordpress/forlic/
Mar 2 2012: One institution already exists which anyone can use and get involved with today: Wikipedia. What we need now is another Wikipedia-scale collaboration around learning materials rather than reference materials. Just imagine what it will happen over the next few years when anyone will be able to learn anything anywhere. This is not science fiction. It is a straightforward application of technology we have and use every day now: presentation software, the internet, e-mail and mobile devices.
Mar 2 2012: We are all in the same boat (on the same planet), so we should all be interested in making this crazy world into a better, safer place -- if we only knew how.
Since certain people know how to make certain things better, and groups of people are good at self-organizing around improving things, you clearly want to work toward getting the people with know-how into groups with other like-minded individuals to share and implement the good ideas. This methodology is very successful in the open source software movement. Lately, with examples like Wikipedia and the easy group formation tools that Clay Shirky talks about, this approach has expanded beyond software into society in general. So to give you specific responses:
1. discover your passion within some group of people
2. do something you are the best at by doing it for a long time, always learning, getting better and better
3. help people by actively sharing what you know (and learning from others -- see point 1)
4. ask questions
5. don't give up
To facilitate learning and the sharing of knowledge, I've been developing a free and open source software system called SlideSpeech for the past two years. As Derek Sivers suggests, it needs followers (#2 leaders) like you. It can change the world by making the transfer of an idea (via a presentation that plays on a smart mobile device) as simple as sending an e-mail. Take a look at the SlideSpeech wiki at code.google.com and let's see what kind of movement we can start together. YOU can be the hero of this story.
Mar 2 2012: Thank you Mary. I really want to be able to say thank you -- in advance -- to everyone who contributes to making SlideSpeech into a global, Wikipedia-scale success. Clay Shirky tells us we can create these knowledge sharing systems together, but as Derek Sivers shows us, it takes followers, not just leaders, to make a movement happen. YOU are the real hero of this story, not me.
I've just posted some diagrams showing the workflow of the prototype SlideSpeech system on the SlideSpeech Wiki at code.google.com and welcome your feedback.
Mar 1 2012: If you are alive today, experience -- nay, your very existence -- should make you optimistic about a future of abundance. The odds of your being born from your parents, who were born from their parents, who were born from their parents, all the way back through the history of life on this planet are so astronomically small that some self-organizing phenomenon must be at work, finding and exploiting pathways to survival and growth. Otherwise we simply wouldn't be here. That force works continually. It drives successful species and ideas to become more and more successful. Of course there are problems, even extinctions. But we have made it this far and I am really quite happy about that. Aren't you?
I attended Peter and Ray's Singularity University in 2010. I lobbied hard, but unsuccessfully, to have a track devoted to education that year, specifically for educational technology. While I agree that finding solutions to problems of energy, water, waste, food and space colonization are important, the key to finding those solutions -- "how" we will find them -- is the spread of knowledge. Technology is very clearly enabling knowledge to spread much more quickly than ever before. Exponentially faster.
Consider the quantum difference between these two modes of knowledge transfer: A) a student comes to a classroom, B) learning material comes to a student's on-line or mobile device. Which is slower, A or B? Which can be updated and improved faster, A or B? Which costs less, A or B?
When I returned to my PhD studies after SU, I developed a new open source, educational software system, called SlideSpeech, which makes any presentation "self-delivering", persistent and editable on-line, and viewable on any on-line or mobile device with a web browser. This means lessons can be developed which can be shared, collaboratively improved and asynchronously viewed, for free, just like Wikipedia articles. I predict the result will be Educational Abundance. Exponentially soon.
Mar 1 2012: Unfortunately your question may be like asking, "How can we get train conductors to drive our cars?"
Some problems with current educational systems are inherent in the infrastructure of schools and classrooms. It is too bad really, but just as the days of predominantly train-based travel (with large groups of people all going from one fixed place to another at the same time) were supplanted by car-based travel (with individuals or small groups going between many different places at many different, self-determined times), education is moving (inexorably?) toward technology-driven, personalized, learning on-demand -- because this kind of self-determination is what learners (and car owners) want.
Students capable of learning solely through the use of technology (as Sugata Mitra suggests) will not be held back by teachers who cannot keep up. Even more significantly, the billions joining the on-line world in the developing world will not be held back by a lack of quality teachers in poor and rural areas. As better, cheaper, faster, widely distributed, mobile technology meets educational needs, it will be used.
So, when you ask about the best way for teachers to learn, the most promising approach may be a system offering an unlimited amount of collaboratively produced, self-guided, professional development material on-line. Students will soon have as much available through their on-line and mobile computing devices. Think: Wikipedia of lessons.
I demonstrated a small-scale proof of concept of this system just this evening. Called SlideSpeech, the system requires a teacher to have enough technological skill to do two things: 1) make and upload an educational presentation, 2) forward an email to students. The email includes a link to the presentation which, via text-to-speech technology, presents itself. Stored on-line, it can be collaboratively improved. The system thus simultaneously solves the issues of access, quality and cost. The result: Educational Abundance.
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A reply on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
A comment on Conversation: What is the best way to accelerate the education of our teachers to create people capable of constant innovation in the classroom?
http://ipg.ict.tno.nl/wordpress/forlic/
A reply on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
A comment on Conversation: What makes you think you can change the world? & How?
Since certain people know how to make certain things better, and groups of people are good at self-organizing around improving things, you clearly want to work toward getting the people with know-how into groups with other like-minded individuals to share and implement the good ideas. This methodology is very successful in the open source software movement. Lately, with examples like Wikipedia and the easy group formation tools that Clay Shirky talks about, this approach has expanded beyond software into society in general. So to give you specific responses:
1. discover your passion within some group of people
2. do something you are the best at by doing it for a long time, always learning, getting better and better
3. help people by actively sharing what you know (and learning from others -- see point 1)
4. ask questions
5. don't give up
To facilitate learning and the sharing of knowledge, I've been developing a free and open source software system called SlideSpeech for the past two years. As Derek Sivers suggests, it needs followers (#2 leaders) like you. It can change the world by making the transfer of an idea (via a presentation that plays on a smart mobile device) as simple as sending an e-mail. Take a look at the SlideSpeech wiki at code.google.com and let's see what kind of movement we can start together. YOU can be the hero of this story.
A reply on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
I've just posted some diagrams showing the workflow of the prototype SlideSpeech system on the SlideSpeech Wiki at code.google.com and welcome your feedback.
A comment on Talk: Peter Diamandis: Abundance is our future
I attended Peter and Ray's Singularity University in 2010. I lobbied hard, but unsuccessfully, to have a track devoted to education that year, specifically for educational technology. While I agree that finding solutions to problems of energy, water, waste, food and space colonization are important, the key to finding those solutions -- "how" we will find them -- is the spread of knowledge. Technology is very clearly enabling knowledge to spread much more quickly than ever before. Exponentially faster.
Consider the quantum difference between these two modes of knowledge transfer: A) a student comes to a classroom, B) learning material comes to a student's on-line or mobile device. Which is slower, A or B? Which can be updated and improved faster, A or B? Which costs less, A or B?
When I returned to my PhD studies after SU, I developed a new open source, educational software system, called SlideSpeech, which makes any presentation "self-delivering", persistent and editable on-line, and viewable on any on-line or mobile device with a web browser. This means lessons can be developed which can be shared, collaboratively improved and asynchronously viewed, for free, just like Wikipedia articles. I predict the result will be Educational Abundance. Exponentially soon.
A comment on Conversation: What is the best way to accelerate the education of our teachers to create people capable of constant innovation in the classroom?
Some problems with current educational systems are inherent in the infrastructure of schools and classrooms. It is too bad really, but just as the days of predominantly train-based travel (with large groups of people all going from one fixed place to another at the same time) were supplanted by car-based travel (with individuals or small groups going between many different places at many different, self-determined times), education is moving (inexorably?) toward technology-driven, personalized, learning on-demand -- because this kind of self-determination is what learners (and car owners) want.
Students capable of learning solely through the use of technology (as Sugata Mitra suggests) will not be held back by teachers who cannot keep up. Even more significantly, the billions joining the on-line world in the developing world will not be held back by a lack of quality teachers in poor and rural areas. As better, cheaper, faster, widely distributed, mobile technology meets educational needs, it will be used.
So, when you ask about the best way for teachers to learn, the most promising approach may be a system offering an unlimited amount of collaboratively produced, self-guided, professional development material on-line. Students will soon have as much available through their on-line and mobile computing devices. Think: Wikipedia of lessons.
I demonstrated a small-scale proof of concept of this system just this evening. Called SlideSpeech, the system requires a teacher to have enough technological skill to do two things: 1) make and upload an educational presentation, 2) forward an email to students. The email includes a link to the presentation which, via text-to-speech technology, presents itself. Stored on-line, it can be collaboratively improved. The system thus simultaneously solves the issues of access, quality and cost. The result: Educational Abundance.