Tuesday 29th May 2007 6:39 pm
The Future of Institutions
How (if at all) should institutions change as a result of digital media?
Will public schools look the same in 50 years as they do now? What about public libraries—will they look same? Will they serve the same function? And what is to be learned from the recent activity in virtual worlds?
In the next few weeks we will exploring these and other questions related to the future of institutions on the Spotlight. You will be hearing from Dale Fahnstrom and Patrick Whitney, designers at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, who are looking at the future of libraries and schools. You will also hear from HASTAC, a consortium of humanists, artists, scientists, social scientists and engineers from universities and other civic institutions across the U.S. and internationally. HASTAC recently hosted a conference—the International Conference on Electronic Techtonics—to discuss the future of learning in the digital age. They have written a paper on the future of networked institutions—a draft of the paper is available for comment at The Institute for the Future of the Book.
Category: Civic-Engagement, Credibility, Ecology-of-Games, Identity, Race-Ethnicity, Unexpected
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Comments
UMUC, UF, Chimera
http://www.chimeraplanet.net
Posted on May 31 2007 4:54 AM
I believe that education will and should change drastically in the next 50 years. As an educator with a doctorate from UCLA, I have worked very hard, obviously, at understanding educational systems, learning, cognition, teaching and how in the world we have it so wrong for so many kids. I was one of those kids. Gifted, bright, curious, engaged and then BOOM! middle school hit and by high school I didn’t care if I became a Nobel Prize laureate or not.
My life was over. I longed to be normal. Ha! Fat chance. I was only a kid. I didn’t understand that being gifted and highly gifted at that meant you would never fit in anywhere. How did I know that I would spend the rest of my life making a full circle of understanding that it was NOT me, but the school that was backwards. IMHO we are throwing away the best minds in our country. We are doing that because we are threatened by change in education. Why are we threatened. Beats me! Education should be creative, fun, engaging, transformational, and consistently fulfilling. There is absolutely nothing more important than knowledge except love. Instead, in the USA we have 25% across the board drop out rates which means that we have some urban schools with very high drop out rates and some other schools with less than 25%. Also, the documentation of drop outs is rather strange sometimes because we don’t always know which student dropped out and which student just moved. Essentially, I believe drop outs indicate a failure of a school system. Just look at our Native American educational experience: wow. Really awful. I don’t think these problems can be fixed with a little multiculturalism or some integrated math. These problems go right to the core of who we are as humans. One size fits all is not how schooling needs to be produced. It is not a garden or a factory either. It is a human experience and relationship with knowledge: it is about knowledge production and coproduction. Yes, a teacher and a student have a relationship, but so do the students with one another. NOW we are learning virtually. Look at Web 2.0 technologies—who is using YouTube and MySpace and all that social network stuff on the internet? Not the over 50 group. It is the teens, the young adults. They are making a new world for themselves that doesn’t have all the commercial TV or even TV sometimes and certainly doesn’t include books in print. Very sad. Did you hear about that guy in the central states that burned his books instead of facing that no one wanted to buy them much less read them? He had a used book store with over 20,000 books. Sometimes I feel like that guy, but with my students I have always used books a lot to demonstrate and teach. Yes, 50 years from now I will be dead, but I could live on in virtual learning. One never knows...Certainly this post is more about the future of learning than my ego. I welcome change. Bring it on!
Posted on June 1 2007 8:57 PM
Here’s the draft paper: http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/about/
DK
http://mediasnackers.com
Posted on May 30 2007 6:41 PM
We’ve been discussing similar topics on the MediaSnackers and DesignShare podcasts - the impact digital natives have on education/learning and vice versa…
Just go to our search page (http://www.mediasnackers.com/report/search/) and cut and paste this in: ‘MediaSnackers/DesignShare’ - three already live and another two to go up
Looking forward to your discussions though.
Peace
DK