The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) has just concluded in Doha.   Policy makers, educators, politicians, academics and NGOs discussed a broad range of educational issues with a focus on how education can bridge global inequality.

The website features short interviews with leading thinkers and innovators such as Lord David Puttnam – Chairman of Futurelab UK.  Lord Puttnam makes the point that education is not simply about producing smarter graduates but innovative and responsible global citizens.

As is usual towards the end of the year – and even more so towards the end of a decade – people tend to start postulating as to what the future will hold, leading to a pre-Christmas flurry of articles and blog posts about key trends to watch going forward.

In the good old days this used to involve journalists calling-round or sending emails in early November and then collating whatever their contacts contributed into an end of year trends piece.  In an interesting sign of the times, this year social media has undoubtedly taken-over as the key way of sharing and collating thoughts on the future – with a range of crowdsourcing initiatives underway focusing on just this topic. So much so that Philanthropy 2173 blogger Lucy Bernholz is saying that this is the point at which the whole idea of crowdsourcing trends has ‘jumped the shark‘.

To illustrate what I mean by this, in just the last couple of days I’ve been sent details of two specific social media initiatives aiming to capitalise on crowdsourcing to highlight key philanthropy and fundraising trends. The first is the US-based FutureLab, which kicked-off mid-year and has now got 60 ideas and discussion questions under debate. The second is  Fundraising Scenarios, created by UK-based consultancy The Management Centre. Then, you can add to this the Twitter equivalent which is fast gathering pace under the hashtag #nonprofit2010.

With all this going-on, there’s really no need for me to add any specific 2010-2020 insights here – other than to say that I predict fundraisers going into strategic planning for the next decade with a very long list of trend-related things to try to take into account.

Creativity - a keyword coming out from last weeks’ FutureLab Conference (Seen & Heard – Young people creating digital media) on how different kinds of digital media can be used in to get learners’ voice heard. 

If we are to truly hear what our learners are experiencing and thinking, different speakers pointed out the essential steps for success: Enagagement.  Our learners are more likely to be engaged, if they find what they’re doing interesting and relevant.  Technology, without any doubts, has a key role to play here.  E.g. colleagues from imitating the dog have demostrated how simple video making and editing techniques can facilitate students’ expression of their ideas and emotions.  They even invited all participants to give it a go, so to see how “accessible” these creative technological tools can be in a school setting.

So what role does creativity play in other context?  Every so often we try to collect students’ “feedback” by methods such as survey and focus group, there is also a question of “why should I bother?” in the air!  While these methods are valid and very useful, a more communicative and ”cross-discipline” approach would be needed if we would like to shed light on what our learners really want to share with us.  By combining “consultation” with other activities (such as curriculum-based tasks), not only can learners be more naturally “engaged” in the process, they are also more likely to relate to the topic.  A good idea from Oaklands College demostrates it well - Combining learner voice activities with citizenship education. 

So is there a room to borrow this idea for ICT policy consultation?  Safety and well-being in the online environment are so crucial in our daily lives, but often learners are not well-equipped with the knowledge, or supported in reflecting their own habits and behaviours.  So why can’t we have some learning activities around these issues, so that students can acquire new skills on one hand, and we can listen to their voice on the other?  At the moment, it is not very common for currculum development, ICT professionals and student support services to work together.  Gathering effort and expertise up from all parties is definitely the way forward.  Are you ready?

Trata-se de uma empresa de consultoria londrina que os caras da CuboCC usaram como fonte para a apresentação do último post. Fui atrás dos caras e não me arrependi. Olha o naipe do twitter deles:

Embracing responsibility in the US: 82% of consumers consciously supported local businesses in 2009.

Singapore was recently found to have the highest density of millionaires in the world – 8.5% of the country’s population.

US craft beer market worth $6.3bn – sales have accelerated by 5.9% since 2008. Standard beer sales are growing at just 0.6% annually.

Urban play: More than 3.8m Americans skateboard at least 25 days a year.

Home cooking: 80% of Brits, especially in the South East, now download new recipes from the internet.

The New Normal: 34% of consumers have bought celebrity-endorsed food.

Viciante!

Futurelab, a not-for-profit UK-based organisation that develop innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning for the 21st century, has a great list of free online tools that they’ve created:

Here’s a nice presentation from FutureLab titled Change Marketing v01 that lays out some of the floors in traditional strategies and the advantages of the concept of treating customers like real people. Growing up in this new climate I find is difficult to understand how this is not obvious… but alas that is the case as so many business look to ailing methods and bad metrics to measure brand success.

Specifically mentioned:
– Relevance
– Engagement
– Reputation

Have a look over the presentation here and let me know your thoughts.

Here’s the presentation bio:

The world has changed, but marketing is still applying the principles I learned in business school. This needs to change and this presentation is an “open source” call to help achieve this change.

I have given it on April 23, 2009 in Helsinki at the F Word event. It is an unfinished piece of work in which we don’t have all the answers either. So I invite you to join us at www.futurelab.net to help make it better.

Transforming Schools for the Future is a collection of papers published by Futurelab, forming a commentary of the UK government’s Building Schools for the Future and Primary Capital Programme (investment programmes in secondary and primary school buildings).

In his foreword, Lord David Puttnam argues for a forward-thinking approach to designing not just school buildings but also new systems:

“It is no use building old schools and systems, only made from new materials. It will be a missed opportunity if we only use these programmes to address current needs and immediate solutions for our institutions and the educational stock.”

A key reference is Baroness Susan Greenfield’s quote from her book Tomorrow’s People:

“As education becomes an ongoing experience, and therefore less differentiated from everyday life, and as that experience is increasingly screen derived, perhaps not just the notion of ‘learning’ but even the traditional concepts of ‘school’ and ‘university’ will start to become meaningless.”

Professor Rosemary Luckin of London Knowledge Lab suggests that the BSF design process needs to:

“- identify the school as just one of the resources that learners will interact with, and to investigate how the school can be a key resource in fostering relationships with other resources in a learners’ ecology, such as people and other learning locations
- explore how the school can be designed in a manner that enables it to continue to evolve
- encourage people to see the school as a dynamic entity ensuring that there are mechanisms in place through which stakeholders can participate in decisions about its continuing future development
- identify the roles that need to be fulfilled by people and technologies within and beyond the school building in order to support the school as a key resource in a learners’ evolving ecology of learning resources.”

You can download a pdf copy of the full report here.