AssortedStuff

By way of io9, the geeky science fiction (or is that redundant? :-) blog, comes The Evil Futurists’ Guide to World Domination: How to be Successful, Famous, and Wrong.

So what advice do they offer for those who want to have a career in spouting predictive BS?

Be certain, not right.
… no matter what you do, no matter what you believe, be certain. As Tetlock put it, in this world “only the overconfident survive, and only the truly arrogant thrive.”

Sounds like advice for anyone running for public office as well.

Claim to be an expert: it makes people’s brains hurt.

And research proves it!

No expertise, no problem.
… knowing you’re not an expert should make you more confident in your work. And confidence is everything.

One simple idea may be one too many.
Having a single big theory, even if it’s totally outrageous, makes you sound more credible. Having a Great Idea also makes it easier for you to seem like a Great Visionary, capable of seeing things that others cannot.

Get prizes for being outrageous.

Does calling something “award winning” have any meaning these days?

There’s a success hiding in every failure.

Don’t remember your failures. No one else will.

Fact checking is a lost art that desperately needs to be revived.

The author claims “The citations are all real. But no, I don’t really mean a single word of it.”.

I’m not so sure. Maybe he will in the future.

Image: Future City by ILMO JOE, used under a Creative Commons license.

experts, future, prediction, satire

THE Journal, the free edtech ad-delivery system, speculates on what will be five K12 technology trends for next year.

1. eBooks Will Continue to Proliferate
2. Netbook Functionality Will Grow
3. More Teachers Will Use Interactive Whiteboards
4. Personal Devices Will Infiltrate the Classroom
5. Technology Will Enable Tailored Curricula

Four items about hardware, one related to instruction.

That pretty well illustrates one big reason why technology has had so little effect on teaching and learning inside the walls of our schools.

We keep bringing in all these cool new devices and claiming that they will “enable” change.

And at the same time we continue to use the same traditional, teacher-directed educational structure – with some technology grafted on the side when it’s convenient or for a reward when we’re done with the “real” work.

You might also notice that items 1, 2, and 4 are all items that make personal connectivity and learning possible anywhere, not just in a formal school setting.

While number 3 represents a slightly digital version of the classic classroom arrangement with the focus anchored in one spot, the one most often occupied by the teacher.

change, edtech, future, hardware, speculation

Back to the continuing budget mess here in the overly-large school district.

The superintendent and others have been holding meetings with employee groups and community members (and distributing poorly worded surveys) to get suggestions on what programs and people should be cut to make things balance financially.

However, he’s asking the wrong question.

Instead the discussion needs to be framed around what we are all willing to pay for.

Just about anywhere you go in the US, it’s pretty much a political given that no elected official would even talk about raising taxes.

And around here, they would likely also be tossed out at the next election for suggesting that schools, or anything else, are more important than adding more asphalt and concrete for people to drive on.

Given those constraints (more like a straightjacket), the larger community should, instead of talking about cuts, be addressing the very difficult question: what will you pay real money for?

Do you want full-day kindergarten? Do you really believe art and music programs are essential or are they just a frills?

Will you pay for the training and support necessary to keep “well-qualified” teachers in every classroom or is that just something we can only afford during good times?

Is technology really a priority or is all that talk about the “future” and “21st century skills” nothing more than nice sounding decorations for political speeches?

Because in many ways, this money discussion is all about the future.

And that that brings me to the title of this post, which is stolen from a recent edition of the Business Week cover story podcast.

In that program a reporter makes the observation that, during economically rotten times like we have now, corporations are “cutting the future” through drastic reductions in their research and development budgets.

We do the same thing as a society with public education.

We slice things that will make future classrooms better – teacher training and technology being prime among those – in order to make administrators and politicians look good now.

So, maybe the bottom line question that needs to be asked about the education budget is: what are you willing to cut from the future to make the status quo look better?

I wonder how all those folks who keep sending me political crap mail and want my vote tomorrow would respond.

Probably not the way I would.

21st century skills, budget, education, future

Not too long ago Amazon released the Kindle DX, a larger version of their e-book reader and the notices were pretty good with many of the reviewers speculating that this device could be the future of textbooks.

If that true then the future of education is pretty bleak.

The Kindle itself is an interesting piece technology that by all reports is excellent at it’s job. However, that job is to deliver content that is controlled by and makes money for the publisher.

That’s not an evolution of instructional materials. Hardly a revolution. It’s a very small shift in the current textbook distribution business.

Between the digital “rights” management (DRM)* that comes with the books and being chained to one source (ie. the publishers willing to work with Amazon), this “future textbook” does little more than solidify the hold of a few giant publishers.

Instead we should be developing open source textbooks created and edited by large numbers of experts of all kinds (teachers and students included) and which anyone, anywhere in the world, in a formal school setting or not, could access.

In addition to editable text, online “textbooks” (is that even a valid term anymore?) could include still images, audio, video, and animation from a variety of sources, all of which present the information using a variety of learning styles.

Fortunately, there are a growing number of very tentative experiments such as Algebra in Connecticut and HS science in Virginia. Even the governator of California wants to try it, although primarily as a way for the state to save money, not because he’s necessarily a fan of user-edited educational materials.

It’s certainly going to take the backing of some 800 pound consumers like California (or maybe a certainly overly-large school district?) if the concept of open source texts are ever going to gain any traction.

But the bottom line to all this is that moving publisher-controlled, DRM-locked printed textbooks into a digital form accessible only on proprietary portable devices is no step into the future.

It chains us to the past.

Update (6/14): Today in his blog, Seth Godin, über marketing guru, agrees with me (although I doubt he actually read my rant :-) and offers his own ideas on why the textbook industry needs to die. He even goes so far as to accuse professors who continue to require them of “academic malpractice”.

* EFF explains why DRM on e-books will fail.

california, future, kindle, open source, textbooks, virginia

The Seattle Times endorses Obama for president.

Obama should be the next president of the United States because he is the most qualified change agent. Obama is a little young, but also brilliant. If he sometimes seems brainy and professorial, that’s OK. We need the leader of the free world to think things through, carefully. We have seen the sorry results of shooting from the hip.

Is it possible we might elect someone to lead the country who’s smart, thoughtful, and considers multiple perspectives before acting?

election, future, obama, politics

Many teachers are trying to figure out how to make good use of their interactive whiteboards. Some schools are experimenting with iPhones and iPod Touches for student use.

But a college in England is moving on to technology that combines elements of both with a little lab management software tossed in.

They look like something out of Star Trek, and they might well land in a classroom near you. They’re school desks, but not as you know them, say their Durham University designers.

The interactive multi-touch desks look and act like a large version of an Apple iPhone.

“The new desk can be both a screen and a keyboard. It can act like a multi-touch whiteboard and several students can use it at once,” said Dr Liz Burd, who led the university’s Technology-Enhanced Learning (TEL) group that developed them.

“It offers fantastic scope for participatory teaching and learning,” she said.

Excuse me for being skeptical, but that’s one of the claims I’ve heard made for the whiteboards – and have yet to see.

And the few instructional examples noted in the article are pretty much the same as some of the very superficial whiteboard lessons I’ve observed.

So what will justify the $2,000US price tag (the expected cost after mass production begins) for these units?

Ok, the technology does sound very cool and I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to try it out.

However, if I had to predict what will make the biggest impact on learning in the future, it wouldn’t be this kind of interactive replacement for the school desk.

I’ll put my money on relatively inexpensive portable devices that allow learning anywhere instead of large, expensive machines that are fixed to one classroom.

future, interative whiteboards, iphone, teaching

Greeting my friends, we are all interested in the future because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. — The Amazing Criswell (opening to Plan 9 From Outer Space)

That classic line came to mind* as I read the piece in this morning’s Post on the history of the future as forecast by the designers of Disneyland.

They have the problem of keeping the Tomorrowland section of the park out in front of real life while still making it fun, comfortable, and Disney-like (not to mention profitable).

But this is absolutely not the future in the research pipeline. No genetically modified critters here that eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline. No nanobots smaller than blood cells, cruising our bodies to zap cancer. No brain implants that expand our memory. No cellphones that translate Chinese. No dragonfly-size surveillance bots, no pills that shut off the brain’s trigger to sleep, no modified mitochondria sustaining our energy while making obesity as quaint as polio.

Apparently that tsunami of change doesn’t sell. That disturbing but dazzling future rumbling our way is distinctly different from the soothing one Disney thinks we crave.

I’ve seen a couple of iterations of Tomorrowland at Disney parks and it certainly was a clean, orderly, utopian view of the future… and very difficult to believe.

However, that was also a time when it was much easier for the general public to accept such a vision, when we only had a few media outlets like Disney filtering information and playing the role of futurist for us.

Now that we have the thousand-channel flow of information and speculation, we can see for ourselves all kinds of stuff coming at us that the Disney people never told us about, a view that is much, much scarier.

Danny Hillis, one of the smartest people I’ve ever heard or read, is probably right that “Americans feel very little connection to the future anymore.”.

We are future overwhelmed. I don’t think people try to imagine the year 2050 the way we imagined 2001 in 1960. Because they can’t imagine it. Because technology is happening so fast, we can’t extrapolate. And if they do, it’s not a very positive thing to imagine. It’s about a lot of the unwanted side effects catching up to us — like global ecological disaster. The future views are kind of negative. The most positive future-oriented stuff in the United States is around global ecology and sustainable living and that sort of stuff. It’s a counterpoint to that ecological disaster future.

“Future overwhelmed”. Excellent phrase! And a concept that I think ties directly into our problems with the American education system.

As educators, one of our traditional goals has always been to help prepare our students for the future and, a few decades back, when the Disney model of the future prevailed, it seemed pretty easy to do that.

Not any more. Many of us are now “future overwhelmed”.

We want very much to believe that the time kids spend with us will prepare them for the world after graduation. But how can we have any certainty of that when we have no clear picture to work with?

Knowing what the world will look like in 2050, much less what kinds of skills and knowledge our students will need, is not something we can discover by strolling down Main Street and taking a right turn at the circle.

[* And the fact that such crap is swirling around in my head probably says something about me. :-)]

disneyland, education, future

I have always had mixed feelings about Clifford Stoll.

While he’s an entertaining writer and speaker, I disagree with much of what he had to say in his two books excoriating computers in society and especially in the classroom.

However, in a recently posted talk from the 2006 TED Conference, Stoll makes some great observations about knowing the future.

In fact, I think if you really want to know what the future’s going to be, if you really want to know about the future, don’t ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No. Don’t ask someone who’s writing code.

No, if you want to know what society is going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher.

They know. In fact, don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one. They’re the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation, I don’t. Nor I suspect do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring.

Certainly all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there. But to me things aren’t the future. What I ask myself is “what is society going to be like when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount on screen time but have never gone bowling together?”.

I also love the fact that he outlined his talk five minutes before he was to present it. On his hand.

clifford stoll, future, ted conference