Shift to the Future

My first introduction to algorithms dates back to grade 11.  There was one computer, an APL machine , in the entire school district and it happened to be in my math classroom.  As budding mathematicians, we learned to write algorithms and program them into the APL machine.  I remember writing a black jack card game and that might have been the turning point for me to shift away from becoming a mechanic to go into computer science.  Actually I often credit that particular teacher (thank-you Jim Swift ) with changing my destiny as it was he that pointed me into the new direction.  Folks, math and algorithms, “ a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations ”, are underlying everything in our world.  I will relate this to education later in this post so hang in there… Remember back in the early days of Internet search when there was no predictive hints provided?  You had to know how to find things online (Internet quests anyone) and tha...

On Friday I had the honor of sharing my thinking with some middle school teachers about the future, the role of technology, some current education technology practices, and new possibilities.  Actually, I didn’t quite make it to the new possibilities piece as we needed to move into the workshop stage.  There was some great dialogue during my presentation.  I asked the participants to respond to some “big questions” and that opened up all sorts of conversations.  One table group was lamenting how difficult it is to embed the use of technology into teaching and learning when there isn’t equitable access to good technology for students and teachers.  It varies significantly across schools.  One teacher shared a story of how her son (in elementary school) created a “ glog ” (at home) to represent his learning and then when he tried to share it with his teacher and classmates, it failed due to the state of technology and the network for his school.  The co...

It’s Tuesday, Sep. 8, 2020, the first day in the new school year and Stephanie is excited.  Being 11 years old and having demonstrated leadership skills in her learning portfolio last year, she knows that she gets to take on more leadership roles with her peers and the younger kids. Stephanie is already waiting in her mom’s car eager to get to school.  She’s already tapped into her Communicator to update her status and check with her friends to see where they’ll meet-up.  Her mom finally gets in.  They have one of those new 2020 solar powered Hyundai Genesis coupes with the onboard self-drive navigation system.  Her mom asks her car to take them to Stephanie’s school and they’re off, the car driving itself in constant communication with the intelligent road system while Stephanie and her mom talk about the day. Arriving at the school 10 minutes later, Stephanie seeing her friends Jordon, Blake, Sophie, and Raj, jumps out and runs up to the entrance to join t...

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...

I just read an article “ The web shatters focus, rewires brains ” in the latest Wired magazine (yes, the paper-based version, not on an ipad).  One writer, Nicholas Carr, makes the case that the barrage of information and interruptions in our lives “shatters our focus and rewires our brain”.  The article ( Wired June 2010 pp. 112-118 ) is adapted from his new book, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”, to be published in June 2010.  He shares examples of research done to compare heavy to low Internet users where they fMRI’d their brain activity.  Heavy Internet users did have higher brain activity and that the brains of the low users after spending an hour a day online for a week then showed very similar brain use patterns.  Their brains were rewired!  This might sound promising whereby Internet use reroutes neural pathways but Carr argues that this is actually turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our b...