Import Test : Summer Reading

Visions of the Future

Matt Scales — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:30:00 GMT

What knowledge or skills will students need most to be effective citizens of our world in the future?
(This entry has been reposted with the addition of new content)

Our Educational Question of the Year makes the assumption that we have a sense or vision of what the future holds and what knowledge and skills will be necessary to function effectively in the world. But do we? Many of our students will still be alive 50 or more years from now. What will our world look like in the year 2055? Can we provide an educational foundation that will still serve them well as time passes and the world changes?

Fortunately, to assist us in this process, there are a number of individuals that have used their knowledge, experience, and imagination to provide us with a glimpse of a possible future. While their predictions might vary, they all seem to agree on one issue – spurred by rapidly developing technology, particularly in the area of biotechnology, we’re in for enormous changes ahead. We may redefine what it is to be alive, to be uniquely human, to possess intelligence, and to modify ourselves and our surroundings. How will our students be able to cope with these significant changes?

In coming weeks, the Blog will list several sources and books by leading futurists and provide links to reviews of their work. The list will be added to this entry in the area below. If you have suggested readings you would like to add to the list, simply use our “comments” function to respond. It’s possible that by exploring the ideas of one or more of these authors, your view of the future may change and your role in preparing students for what lies ahead may also be transformed.

Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, is a provocative futurist whose ideas challenge commonly held views of what lies ahead. A scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur, Kurzweil has a good record of anticipating the development of technology and its impact on society (The Age of Intelligent Machines). A common reaction to reading his work or hearing him speak is to suddenly view the current world and its issues in a very different light. Agree with him or not, his ideas will likely challenge and stretch your view of what our future may hold.

The Next Fifty Years

The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century is a collection of essays written by scientists from a variety of disciplines. Edited by John Brockman, the authors project trends and developments that are anticipated during the first half of this century. Aside from general interest, it can be intriguing to those of us working or teaching in the disciplines covered (biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and computer science among others) to read predictions from thought leaders in our respective fields. Of particular interest to all educators are some of the provocative ideas offered by Roger Schank, formerly of Northwestern University and now at Carnegie Mellon University. The following excerpt, which came from a review of the book that appeared in the March-April 2003 edition of The Futurist, captures some of Shank’s ideas.

…a major paradigm shift in education will make learning the right answers secondary to learning the right questions, says leading artificial-intelligence researcher Roger C. Schank.

New technologies will enable household machines to answer questions about countless topics, in effect diminishing the value of an individual's repository of information. "Anything obtained easily is devalued in society, and it will be the same with knowledge," Schank explains.

Sooner or later, however, the avatar on the living room wall will be stumped, the software's limits reached. These too-difficult questions will have to be sent to humans for an answer. Schank predicts that in 2050 the smartest students will be judged by their ability to stump the software. And, he adds, it won't necessarily happen in a classroom.

"Why go to school to learn facts, when virtual experiences are readily available and the world's best teachers are virtually available at any moment?" Schank asks. In his view, schools in the next 50 years will atrophy from dwindling use. Instead of conventional classes, education from the age of two will take place in virtual worlds with intelligent guides that can answer questions and pose new ones.
To read the review in its entirety click on this link

Juan Enriquez

Author of As the Future Catches You, Juan Enriquez is the director of the Life Sciences Project at Harvard Business school. Dubbed "Mr. Gene" by Fortune Magazine, he is well known for his writing on the impact of genetics and biotechnology (Genomics) on our future. As the former CEO of Mexico City's Urban Development Corporation, he takes a world view in analyzing the future ramifications of emerging technologies on our economies, health, power, and lifestyles.

On the first page of his book he states "You and your children are about to face a series of unprecedented moral, ethical, economic, and financial issues." If his predictions have some accuracy, we once again are challenged to think through the approach we take when educating our students and preparing them for the future.

The following series of statements (from the book's back cover) help capture the author's frame of reference :

The world's most powerful and compact information processing system is a genome
The gap between the richest and poorest countries is now 390:1 and getting bigger
Wealth is based on knowledge and lone individuals can generate more wealth than entire countries
A company with 32,000 employees is worth more than ten times the value of the exports of a country with a population of 170,000,000
Countries with a lot of land and natural resources are at a disadvantage
The cost of sequencing a single gene has collapsed from $150,000,000 to $50
Nanotechnology will enable the Encyclopedia Britannica to be written on the head of a pin
Maintaining current U.S. leadership in technology depends on increasing immigration, not cutting back
IBM generated more patents alone than 139 countries did together.

Human Dynamics

Matt Scales — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:55:00 GMT

The following entry was previously posted on June 19, 2004. It is being republished here with additional links by request. A video (The Children's Park Design) based on the Human Dynamics theory was used in a recent presentation at the MCC Carnegie retreat and a link to this resource has been added.

Human Dynamics Home Page: http://www.humandynamics.com/index.html

"Children's Park Design" video site: http://www.humandynamics.com/pages/parkdesign.html

Human Dynamics: A New Framework for Understanding People and Realizing the Potential in Our Organizations by Sandra Seagal & David Horne (1997, Pegasus) proposes a model of personality styles with a focus on their interplay in group experiences. The ideas are relevant to our work as communities of practice, and apply to other group experiences such as committee work, and the classroom.

The basic theory focuses on what kinds of information we take in, and how we then process that information. The channels and processing revolve around the mental, emotional, and physical domains. There are implications for how we interact with others, solve problems, and can offer unique contributions to enhance the functioning of a group.

While examples are taken primarily from the corporate world, the ideas presented here are relevant to education, and any human endeavor involving group interaction.

The "COP" in COPPER

Matt Scales — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 20:44:47 GMT

COP refers to communities of practice. According to Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William Snyder (2002, Harvard Business School Press), "communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interaction on an ongoing basis." In that spirit we are a collection of campus-based COPS joined together to form a larger COP. Wenger, McDermott, and Snyder have written what is perhaps the key work in the study of communities of practice, describing their attributes, stages of development, and challenges. While their primary focus is on communities in the business world, the basic concepts and strategies apply to educational settings as well. This is an excellent book to add to your summer reading list if you have an interest in deepening your knowledge of a concept that has been the subject of great attention in organizational literature. It's also a great aid in understanding and facilitating the process we are experiencing in our Carnegie SoTL work. We are pleased that one of the book's authors, Bill Snyder, will be the keynote speaker at the Middlesex Carnegie Summer Institute, June 24-26.

Supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Matt Scales — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 15:28:50 GMT

Thanks to Barbara Cambridge for offering the following suggestion for summer reading: Campus Progress: Supporting the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning offers a look at the infrastructures, collaborations, policies, impacts, and lessons of over 40 campuses that are working to foster the scholarship of teaching and learning. Chapter authors, who are faculty members and administrators, focus on what they think others would want to know about their experiences. The chapters are short and to-the-point, with analytic essays beginning each section of the book and beginning and concluding essays that situate all the work in theories of change and ideas about what is next. The book is available on the American Association for Higher Education website at www.aahe.org.

Summer Reading

Matt Scales — Tue, 25 May 2004 17:30:00 GMT

Be it for knowledge or pleasure, summer is a good time for many of us to catch up on our reading. Our Blog can serve as clearing house for suggested readings. Feel free to add your ideas for articles or books that you want to recommend to others by commenting below. You can also forward your suggestions to me at margulisd@middlesex.mass.edu (I'll add your recommendations as a featured post). While reading that relates to teaching and learning is certainly of interest, we're open to all sorts of recommendations (both fiction and nonfiction) as a way to expand our knowledge and perspective. You can simply list the reading(s), or add some commentary to give us a sense of the appeal of the article or book. These can be sources you are currently reading, have read, or are looking forward to reading.