Living For the Future – Ian Juke’s Keynote at Laptop Institute

[This is being live blogged – please ignore mispellings and awkward wording]

Talk about the issue of change.

Easier to change a cemetary than curriculum – Woodrow Wilson

Easier to change the course of history than a history course – Lou Salza

State today – pile higher and deeper

Any wonder that teachers have problems dealing with change

Business, if take someone who retired 10 years ago – different landscape, a teacher would find no changes in past 10 yests.

Hard to get a handle on what change has happened – is slippery and hard to determine.

Hard to stand back and put finger on what has changed.

Change is subtle and slippery – hard to step back and understand what is going on. Scope and speed is hard to get a handle on.

Change today, tomorrow, forever – overwhelming change.

Overnight – find it is being done differently

Four exponential trends that each and everyone needs to understand.

1. Moore’s Law – in 1963 that processing power was going to double every 24 months while halving the price. Has held for nearly 50 years.

1979 – 8k, 128k storage, 2 Mhz, cost $5000

1984 – 128 k, 400k storage, 10 Mhz, $3900 – changed law to processing power doubling every 18 months

2007 – 512oook, 80000000k storage, 200 Mhz, $800

Dealing with exponential times – what does the future hold? Wired asked Moore what the future brings. No indication that it isn’t going to continue for another 12 – 15 years. IBM and HP have talked about continuing for 50 – 100 years.

Concerned about kindergartener, class of 2019, what technology will be common to them:

208,000 GB, 40, 060 GB, 1224 Mhz, $1.38

Timeframe is shifting to a year or 6 months as it doubles.

This is the anti-long tail. Students are now taking for granted the change.

Showed pen sized cellular phone, with virtual projectable keyboard. Technology has been invented, just can’t buy it yet.

Need to read The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil.

What is common sense today is not going to be common sense in 10 years.

What implications does this trend have towards your classrooms and instruction? (Discussion time)

Bandwidth is changing

bandwidth is changing from 1200 baud to 10 Mbs. One strand of fiber optic cable can work at excess 10 trillion per second.

From Telecosm by George Gilder – bandwidth speed is tripling exponentially every 12 months upped to 6 months – four to six times the rate of Moore’s Law. Today are in stone ages of optical communication.

Not just WiFi, but WiMax and another I didn’t catch. Question for educators – where is this going to take us. The Internet is everywhere.

Required Friedman reference about Flatting of the World, students will need different sets of skills. In third revision – 50 % of the book has changed. Friedman now refers to Pink’s Whole New Mind. Need to develop creativity, etc. (Watch for blog posts comparing Pink and new Gardner, Five Minds for the Future). What are we doing to prepare our students for a world that is fundamentally different?

(Discussion time)

Two previous trend led to the third exponential trend – the Internet

1996 -48 million regular users

today – 1.2 billion users from 175 countries – 113 per minute, 4,000,000 new web pages

Last year 36 trillion emails sent.

The growth of MySpace. 5% of traffic is to MySpace. Repeating Know You Know statistics.

Move to YouTube – video replacing email, texting and blogging.

The Wikipedia movement – Scientific American report from before.

The growth of eBay – engaged in auctions. 1 million people make living on eBay.

Skype has grown to 100 million users in past two years.

Second Life – allow to interact and socialize in a virtual space. Buy and invest. How significant. IBM has purchased 31 islands. They see this as new virtual business.

Podcasting – 2004 – 11 hits, today 120 million hits.

Digital Music – Apple has sold 2.5 billion songs sold. Apple sells more music than everyone but WalMart.

What are the implications for education? iTunes University has classes available for free within 5 minutes of presentation. Maine and Alaska are trying to move to 1:1 computing.

The blogosphere. New blog every one half second. Have access to really neat tools.

Leads us to Web 2.0 – moved from passive medium to a constructive model – Richardson calls this weapons of mass communication.

Everyone is beginning to use the Internet. Right now, sometimes like sucking peanut butter through a straw.

Over 1 billion cell phones purchased in the last year. Increasingly, this is a computing device over a wireless infrastructure. Have hi-res screens, web browesers, download books. Phones will replace an ATM cards. What is the price and who is the focus market? Could they be used as a learning tool?

Using continous voice recognition. Using CVR, can speak 70 words per minute and have it translated to text. Next step, automated telephony, automatic translation of language during call. Cost – under $100.

What is going to happen to Internet usage? Go up, down, or through the roof. As bandwidth continues to grow, this will be unrecognizable. Envision a full immersion virtual reality (VR), what will draw students to school?

This is coming at us like a freight train. How can we recognize what the future is going to look like. In past, had to go to different devices, now it is converging to one device and in one place. We expect services come to us, not us going to the service. Think banks and ATMs, on-demand video.

If world is experiencing such a dramatic shift, what steps can you take to reorganize your curriculum to ensure it algins with the world of digital learning?

Trend Four – InfoWhelm

Knowledge built upon facts becomes less durable, since the foundational knowledge is changing as quickly as it has.

Live in an age of disposible information. Information has value, but is perishable as fruit.

Google has collected maps, web sites. Google is working to create an book search and get a summary and read book page by page. This is just the beginning. A transformation of what we can access – implications for libraries, textbooks. Checking a library book will move the way of using a travel agent. Using new video glasses with the iPhone – now have access to all types of information (text, music, and video).

Sony has developed an eBook reader.

Imagine where this going to go. Students will be able to carry a device with the sum total of all knowledge from the beginning of time, downloaded in less than a second.

What are the types of skills to use information change?

Richard Wurman – if take knowledge as a ball of twine, with the three trends, the ball of twine has grown over 20 times. More Did You Know statistics. Information is doubling every two weeks and moving towards every 72 hours.

For engineers half life of information is 5 years. Bio Chemists every year, Doctors every six month.

Need to invest in life long learning and develop personal learning networks (last thought mine).

If we put technology into the hands of teachers and administrators, nothing changes. It comes down to the passionate, engaging teacher who uses this technology. We have to think about what we want to accomplish. What are skills and habits of mind that we need to develop. Align learning with technology.

Question – what steps can you take to ensure the refocusing of legislative priorities from 20th century that we currently see in schools to the skills and standards that reflect the changing reality of the 21st Century?

How many are experiencing stress?

The primary focus in schools is not technology, they have to become informationally and media fluent, have to ask good questions, access both high tech and low tech, synthesis ideas, apply, and be reflexive. Has to be taught in every subject at every grade level. Role of librarian is not to work just with kids, but have to work with teachers (my addition and parents) to use these skills so that they can help guide.

Long term is no longer measure in centuries and decades, but now weekly, daily, and hourly.

Need to comprehend the acceleration of change, need to let go of view of the world,

Eric Hoffler – in the times of radical change, the learners will inherit the earth while the learned are prepared for a world that no longer exists.

Need to stretch the rubber band, break the comfort zone of the mindset. How do get a rubber band to stretched and stay stretched? Break the mold. Cut the band to keep from reverting to old models.

Where do you start? Go to ianjukes.com which has handouts including Living on the Future Edge. Also, access the committed sardine blog. Email ijukes@mindspring.com with a message “I need to be committed” and access it via RSS.

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