Shift to the Future

I am attending the World Future Society ’s annual conference here in beautiful Vancouver, BC, Canada.  I spent the last two days immersed in an Education Summit focused on education and the future.  Last night at the opening plenary session, we heard from leadership teacher, Lance Secretan , author of The Spark, the Flame and the Torch: Inspire Self. Inspire Others. Inspire the World.   Lance spoke to us about topics such as “Destiny: Why am I here?” or higher purpose, “Character: How will I Be?” or how do I want to be known, and “Calling: What will I Do? or what difference will I make”.  He refers to this as Why – Be – Do.  We need to be learners who use the energies of explore, excite, examine, and execute to interact with our world and the people around us.  He says to abandon mission statements – they basically all say the same thing – take them all, scramble them up, pick one and it will look like yours.  Mission statements are boring, uninspiring...

There seems to a buzz building around Personalized Learning in British Columbia (BC).  We’ve heard bits and pieces here and there  and that there are “secret” meetings in Victoria about this and the coming education agenda.  Intriguing isn’t it.  I’m looking forward to hearing more and to being a participant. Our Superintendent recently shared a video from New Brunswick at our Welcome Back meeting.  It’s a pretty exciting vision of 21st century education.  Technology is certainly a key lever to these changes. From Wikipedia “ Personalized Learning is the tailoring of pedagogy , curriculum and learning support to meet the needs and aspirations of individual learners”.  The article goes on to suggest that personalized learning gives the learner more choice about what is learned and how and when it is learned.  In other words, it is learner focused, not teacher focused.  Alberta Education has produced an Inspiring Education resource to shar...

A few months ago I read an article “Roadmap to the Electric Car Economy” (by Michael Horn) in March-April 2010 issue of The Futurist .  Essentially the writer advocates for shifting to an electric vehicle (EV) economy away from one powered by gas (and oil).  He lays out a roadmap and suggests how it might be accomplished.  If you believe the writing about peak oil (2020-2030) and think about how much money is invested in obtaining oil, processing it, protecting it (wars), dealing with the environmental fallout, it runs in the trillions of dollars.  Our education system had better be ready to prepare millions of young people to tackle problems like this – our future success as a society depends on it.  In the July-August 2010 issue of The Futurist, I read an article “Sustaining Urban Mobility in 2010” (by Ryan Chin, PhD student in Smart Cities group at MIT Media Lab) that talks about how cities and cars should be redesigned to minimize the impact of transporta...

It’s Sunday, the day after the intense 2010 World Future Society conference and it’s time to reflect.  I bumped into Ken Shepard this morning whom I met on Thursday in Holacracy class and we debriefed for about an hour.  I’ve got to admit, there’s a lot of disturbing aspects to what I heard this week in presentations and conversations.  I am an optimist but am finding the views of others about possible futures to be challenging to accept.  To start off, here’s the titles of the sessions I attended and what has struck me most about this week: Organizing at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy Keynote: Navigating the Future: Moral Machines, Techno Saplens, and the Singularity Sustainable Innovation: A Strategic Road Map to the Future 2010 Humans in 2020: The Next 10 Years of Personal Biotechnology Oceans and Our Global Future Internet Evolution: Where Hyperconnectivity and Ambient Intimacy Take Use Keynote: Building the Human Mind Levers of Change in High...

Day 1 at the World Future Society has come to a close.  Today I attended an all day workshop “Organizing at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy”.  The speaker was Brian Robertson from Holacracy One with the motto, “Liberating the soul of organizations”. You know how after lunch during a full day workshop the afternoon seems to drag on, you get sleepy,…  well that didn’t happen today.  The entire group (12 of us) were totally engaged past 5pm the scheduled end time.  It was really that good. So what is Holacracy.  Disclaimer: my one day exposure to this “movement” doesn’t qualify me to speak intelligently about it but I’ll give you my take on it.  Brian Robertson talks about it using a software engineering metaphor: it is a new operating system for organizations or a fundamental upgrade to the core organization.  The organization gains new capabilities and capacity that all processes can leverage.  It is a practice, not just a model ...

Four or five years ago I used the phrase “just like oxygen” in the context of talking about a vision for wireless connectivity in our schools.  Since then I’ve often used this same phrase in conversations about how students and teachers entering our schools shouldn’t have to think to connect just like they don’t have to think to breath.  Well, let me tell you a short story of my journey today to Boston, MA… I got up early (2:30am) to be on the road by 3:30 to YVR (Vancouver Airport).  I got through security – was randomly picked for extra checks – had a choice of full body scan (aka digital strip search) or a pat down check, I opted for the pat down.  Anyway, got seated in the waiting area, popped open my laptop, and connected instantly to free YVR wireless to do so work. Sidebar: last night I got my wife Shelley hooked up for Skype so that we can video talk while I’m in Boston.  We did some trial runs so that she’d be comfortable with IM, Calls, Video calls,...