One of the best side effects of this contentious election cycle is that we are seeing a huge increase in the number of registered voters, especially from groups that have been historically under-represented at the polls. Election officials are telling us that record numbers of voters are voting early in those states that permit this.

I think it is a particularly exciting opportunity to find ways to harness this energy and start a more or less permanent dialogue with these newly energized citizens about education and how we can reform our schools to perform better – and our legislatures to serve our schools better.

There is a sense, sometimes, that the problems in public education are too big, too scary, too daunting to tackle Well, the bigger the problem is, the bigger the solution must be — we need more people, not less, engaged in the conversation.

While we have heard a lot from the candidates about their ideas, we’ve heard less from voters this year on the subject of education. Change can happen without public buy-in so I think we need to hear much more from the public, which is why Education Voters created this video and quiz. You Decide: Take the Education Voters Quiz to make your voice heard.

We want to give voters agency on this issue and communicate the impact they can have on it with their vote, and with their voice. This problem is not too big, too scary, or too daunting – there are many things we as citizens can do.

We plan to follow up on this outreach efforts to voters with Listening Tours in several states, where we engage citizens in finding the solutions, and then help harness their energy to contact their legislators.

The presidential election is finally upon us. The campaign has seemed endless, and yet the voters still are struggling to understand the candidates’ positions. The one “town hall” style debate presented questions screened by the moderator. The citizens who originally submitted the questions had no opportunity to ask follow-up questions. Each party is accusing the other party of sloppy or even fraudulent voter registrations.

Signs of change, however, are emerging in this election:

• Nearly a quarter of all Americans regularly read political blogs [Harris Poll #25 2008]
• Barack Obama has radically changed political fundraising, receiving donations from more donors than any candidate in history - via the Internet [OpenSecrets.org]
• The Obama campaign allows its Internet-powered grassroots organization unprecedented freedom to act [Rolling Stone 7/10/08]
• Sarah Palin has stressed her identity as a pro-gun, pro-life frontier woman to attract voters, while Barack Obama has appealed implicitly to younger voters as a post-racial citizen of the world
• Polling responses based on the traditional identity categories of race and gender are increasingly difficult to predict

According to the forthcoming KnowledgeWorks Foundation / Institute for the Future 2009 - 2019 Map “Remaking Learning in a Global World Society,” the forces shown by these signals will only grow in importance in the coming decade. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that current minority groups will together comprise more than 50% of the U.S. population by the year 2050. The result will be that American identity, always complex in an immigrant nation, will change in ways that are still emerging. People all over the world will forge new identities around common experiences other than race and nationality. Body enhancement, a common illness, various alterations of the body, and participation in some kind of diaspora, are just a few examples of new factors in identity.

Participatory media will continue to expand its influence beyond the realm of entertainment more deeply into the world of politics. As young people grow up, more and more people will make regular use of tools to create and share politically relevant content. Political discourse will be influenced not only by the most widely read blogs, but possibly by an embarrassing video on YouTube or a telling photograph on Flickr. New forms of sharing ideas and images will continue to develop, making it much more difficult to distinguish between the trustworthy “mainstream” media and the citizen-created content on the Internet. “Educitizens” will affiliate around educational needs and claim rights as learners.

How will these developments affect education? Will education become a central, pressing issue in future elections?

Will “educitizens” create an important new identity politics, impossible for national candidates to ignore?

How will new forms of collective action sparked by digital natives using participatory media influence future elections?

No one can predict the future, but the 2009 map will increase your understanding and help you prepare for the politics of the future.

I found YouTube to be a terrific source of information for math lessons.  My Jr. High daughter is working with math that was familiar to me in late high school years over 25 years ago.  Needless to say, I was not familiar with “Permutations and Combinations”. 

As my daughter’s study time was extending past bed time, I was arriving home from work so I pitched in to help her learn. The study materials from school were inadequate in helping her or me understand the basic background information about this math assignment.

I turned to the Internet hoping to read about Permutations and Combinations and one of the first websites to pop up was YouTube.  I was delighted to find several accurate and easy lessons on YouTube for this math need. The tutorials were far better than simply reading about the math formulas.  I learned from YouTube quickly because I could see and hear the instructor explaining the concepts and formulas.

My daughter and I returned to the kitchen table and knocked out the rest of her assignment very quickly.

Tracy Techau is the director of a youth development agency in Cincinnati and the father of elementary and Jr. High students.

Tonight I had the pleasure of watching a live debate between Lisa Graham Keegan, advisor to Senator John McCain, and Linda Darling-Hammond, advisor to Senator Barack Obama. The debate was held at Teachers College and was webcast courtesy of EdWeek.org.

The debate will be available tomorrow by 12pm EST (I’ll post it here).

10/22/08 Update: The archive of the debate is hosted here; unfortunately you will need to register and you will need Real Player.

I thought Darling-Hammond had more comprehensive answers regarding teacher preparation and retention, especially with regard to her career ladders idea and professional development, and had a simple and better answer regarding technology. She talked more about pedagogy and alternatives to standards-based assessment (clearly she does not support NCLB) and putting money to work in the right places. And she had an international focus that plays well with globalization and flattening of the world. Her ideas overall seem to play well with the Map’s concepts of learning ecologies. Her answers to the healthcare issue really resonated with the Map driver of Sick Herd, especially Increasing Chronic Illness. Her statement that Obama will make education a “top priority” instead of the usual 3rd, 4th, or 5th priority bothered me because I doubt both parts of that statement - is education ever that high on the list?

Keegan was stronger on offering choices and I thought her focus on issues other than funding was good. Her use of vouchers and discussion of a variety of charter options seem to support a learning economy, but her boundary between federal involvement and state control was a bit confusing to me - but that’s not an area in which I have much experience. Her support of NCLB was not unexpected, but her statement that failing schools are caused by poor teachers was disappointing, and her proposal to expand Teach For America as a source of new teachers using money from Title II was disturbing. Her closing statement about centering everything around instruction and the child was very strong.

But overall, I thought both had good answers to many questions. I was
really glad that this debate happened!

Edutopia is looking for youth that represent the Millenial Generation’s affinity for personal media. Through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, Edutopia will produce 10 profiles of 8 - 18 year-olds that use digital media for learning.

KnowledgeWorks would like to nominate one of the California or Ohio students that created their visions of the future with us, and we invite you to help us select one! Check out the videos and leave a comment below with your favorite. We’ll contact the winner and help him or her create an entry.

Hello again from KnowledgeWorks Foundation. We are pleased to have you along as we rapidly approach the launch of 2009: Remaking Learning in a Global Society.

This month, with a national election in just 19 days and with tonight’s final presidential debate, we focus our attention on new forms of civic discourse, and the potential impact of “educitizens,” a newly engaged political force poised to energize education reform by their demands. Are we prepared for a transformation of the politics of education through citizen participation? Should participation be limited to people directly involved in the school system, or anyone with enough interest? How will teachers and administrators react when parents and students openly critique the system? Will they welcome the discussion, or resist outside influence? Should we protect the system and curricula created by policy experts and instructional designers from influence by anyone that has an opinion?

Imagine a world in which every member of a learning ecology can exert influence on the way its schools are run. Not all do, but many are eager to step up. Perhaps recent retirees prefer to teach civics, or a school janitor proposes that students hone their skills by helping install solar panels. Maybe parents now review each and every assessment and then besiege the teachers with questions and suggestions, or small business owners push for more sales and accounting courses. A factory foreman voices concern that the shop teacher is negligent. Students themselves protest the lack of coursework for innovation and creativity. And, politicians in the state capital receive instant feedback from principals, as legislators in Washington drop in on classes via satellite as guests and observers. Does this scenario make you jump for joy, or cringe in fear?

On the other hand, are we getting ahead of ourselves in depicting such a scenario? The EDin08 campaign just ended 5 months early, and education is not a central campaign issue this year. Contrary to the world envisioned above, do we, as a society, lack interest in remaking learning?

If you were excited and energized by the presidential and vice presidential debates, you’ll love this one! Please comment below.

Highlights From Last Month:

Did you read the guest post by Alvaro Fernandez? The brain is like any other body part: it needs care and exercise to grow strong. Read how we should train our brains to make us better learners in the future.

Did you see KnowledgeWorks’ appearance on Canadian television? TVOntario spent an entire week examining the future of education, and we contributed the knowledge you have helped us create.

This article from the New York Times describes an interesting attempt by a Harvard economist to bring scientific rigor to educational innovation. The Eli Broad Foundation is sponsoring the creation of the Educational Innovation Laboratory, which Roland G. Fryer Jr. will direct.

“We will have the willingness to try new things and be wrong — the type
of humbleness to say, ‘I have no idea whether this will work, but I’m
going to try,’ ” he said.

There are some excellent intentions behind this effort, such as the attempt to encourage evidence-based decision-making. Often the criticism leveled at school reformers is that they try to make changes that are not proven to be effective.

But the potential problem with this Laboratory is in its name. The first experiments it will conduct are continuations of ideas Dr. Fryer has implemented during his tenure as the chief equality officer of the New York City public schools - incentive programs for student performance. These ideas have had some success… but to call them innovative is wrong. Innovations introduce change. The experiments proposed by Dr. Fryer simply sustain a stagnant and increasingly irrelevant system. Hopefully they are just the beginning, and Dr. Fryer has other experiments planned.

On the other hand, EdWeek reports that the Federal government is trying to do a similar thing with a new research center called The National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, which is funded be the recent reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. The description of this Center’s projects is far more interesting:

The center will be charged with supporting research and development of new education technologies, including internet-based technologies. It will also help adapt techniques already widely used in other sectors, such as advertising and the military, to classroom instruction.

For instance, the center could work on developing educational programs that use personalization, a technique used by Web sites such as Amazon.com, to help hone consumers’ individual preferences, and simulation, which the military has used to help teach budding pilots how to fly planes.

If can get some of the developments that come from the Center to be tried and tested by the Laboratory, then we might move towards innovation!

Let me first explain that “cognitive fitness” means having the brain functions - or cognitive abilities - required to function in society, in school, or at work. It is not about “IQ.” It is about skills such as attention, working memory, information processing, emotional self-regulation, planning, and inhibition.

Traditional education is too tilted towards the acquisition of specific declarative knowledge and neglects to a large extent the development of those fundamental cognitive abilities that students need to thrive at school now and in jobs in the future. It is a fact that brain functions critical for learning, such as executive functions, working memory, attention, and emotional self-regulation, can be enhanced and trained. Yet, when is the last time you came across a “brain fitness” curriculum? or even a comprehensive research study to identify how schools may best leverage the growing number of tools available?

Over the next 5-10 years, we expect to see profound changes as education takes into consideration the implications of cognitive and brain research. This will be facilitated by the emergence of widely available cognitive assessments to help learners (kids and adult alike) identify the specific cognitive abilities that act as bottlenecks for their learning and development, coupled with the curricula and the interventions that can help address those bottlenecks.

The end goal? An education system that truly prepares good citizens and knowledge workers, self-powered lifelong learners.

Allvaro Fernandez is co-founder and CEO of SharpBrains, a market research & advisory services firm that covers emerging health, education and training applications of cognitive science and neuroscience research.

Two weeks ago, TVOntario’s The Agenda with Steve Paikin was kind enough to invite me to represent KnowledgeWorks as a guest panelist.

The episode was part of a week-long examination of education called “Growing Minds”. This particular segment focused on both the neural side of learning - our increasing understanding of the way the brain works and makes new pathways, and the future of education. The main question we were trying to answer was “What will education look like in 2050?”

The other episodes during the week focused on various aspects of the education system:
Monday’s episode asked “What is School For?”
Tuesday’s episode featured Bob Compton, Director of 2 Million Minutes to discuss the competitive international landscape.
On Wednesday, the show examined the role of teachers, and also took a look at inner-city schools.
On Friday, the week wrapped up with a look at alternative schools and same-sex schools and asked “Is there one educational system?”

[Author’s Note: many of those episode pages have two tabs to examine - and do not actually show the video of the episode]

Most research projects and journalistic pieces on education scratch the surface by examining the details of a farmhouse built in the 1800s and retrofitted into a factory during the Industrial Revolution. Is test A better than test B at assessing achievement for set C of math standards? Should after-school programs be funded by method X or method Y? These questions sustain an increasingly shaky structure and outdated interior design by changing the color and trim on the curtains.

Why aren’t we asking the bigger, deeper questions about learning? We need to ask 21st Century learners what they want. We need to ask whether schools are the answer, and if so, what will be the challenges they face and the roles they play. If schools aren’t the answer, what will replace them? What new learning agents will emerge, and will teachers still be among them? We need to ask how technology can play a role.

We need to ask whether we should relocate our site and build a new center of learning that fits the world in which we want to live.

This is the second in a monthly series of open dialogs with education innovators.

What successes have we achieved with the 2006 Map of Future Forces Affecting Education? What have you been able to accomplish with it? What have we offered that has been most useful to you and other innovators? There’s always room for improvement - what suggestions do you have for how we could do more to support you and other education innovators? What ideas do you have for us as we set new goals for the upcoming map, as outlined below?

—-

Since the 2006 Map debuted publicly in October 2006, we have presented it to many organizations to provoke deep discussion of the future of learning and teaching, if not change the national conversation about teaching and learning. A small sampling of presentations includes:

- the leadership of the National Education Association (NEA,) which loved the Map and asked for several additional presentations to subgroups,
- the Annual Conference of the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF,) which has since worked closely with KnowledgeWorks to advise several states in the design of future schools,
- the Ohio 8, a council of the eight largest school districts in Ohio, which is partnering with KnowledgeWorks to discuss future development of district policies and facilities,
- 1500 members of the Delta Kappa Gamma International Sorority, a professional organization of women educators

We’ve also received some mentions in traditional and online media publications:

- Education Week listed the Map at the top of its Top Picks: Go To Sites for Educators in June 2007, with an article advising technology leaders to consult it before deciding upon strategy for districts
- Cable in the Classroom’s Threshold magazine devoted the entire Spring 2008 issue to the Map, with a beautiful fold-out reproduction of the print version
- Edutopia mentioned the Map in June of 2007

Some goals that we’ve accomplished include:

- generate plenty of discussion and debate
- inspire many people and organizations to think more broadly and more long-term about education systems and practices
- motivate administrators and teachers to experiment based upon the needs of 21st Century learners
- find existing examples of innovation and experimentation and successes that fit the vision of the Map
- offer multiple ways for audience members to engage, including a website, a blog, and a youtube channel

Some goals that we haven’t accomplished include:

- generate massive grassroots or top-down demand for change
- create a cohesive community of champions of change
- change the national conversation about education to one of innovation and entrepreneurship

If you’re reading this post, it’s most likely because you’re one of the people that believes in the future as forecasted by the Map. As we move towards the 2009 Map, we need your input and ideas. So please help us understand if our goals are good ones, why we have accomplished some and not others, and how we can all be agents of change! Leave your comments below.