Learning and Education

At the moment I write this, a creeping group think has saturated both higher education (The Chronicle of Higher Education), and popular media (New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.). It's that moment when public debate constricts to a terrifying one-dimensionality--when all manner of unwarranted assumptions attain hegemony and become the scaffolding for etiolated prognostications.

Recent developments suggest that wearable computing may finally be gaining traction. Intel evangelist Manny Vara believes that comfortable and convenient wearable computers may be just two to five years away.

originally posted to the Trends & Foresight blog

The Future - Six Drivers of Global Change, former Vice President Al Gore replied, "Random House came up with that title." It's not an auspicious beginning to a talk about the perils of the Global Megacrisis, when you more or less say your title was chosen because the marketing team liked it best.

Last week I went through the process of analyzing how much of what I learned in college that I’m still using today. This ends up being a difficult thing to assess. Looking over my classes, the three least useful courses were – how to use slide rules, Fortran programming (taught with punch card machines), and calculus, which I have never used. I certainly can’t say these courses were worth zero, but they hold very little value in my world today.

As I put down my eBook reader to write this blog it has become apparent that we are seeing a dramatic change in the way we publicly share knowledge. I download eBooks from my library as well as from online eBook stores. But I don't take out an eBook reader and return it after two weeks.

Welcome to our second weekly headlines for 2013. This week's stories include:

• A Science Rendezvous to Inspire the Next Generation
  
• Next Steps for the Mars One Project
• Feeding the Planet Would Be Easier if We Didn't Waste Half of What We Produce
  

Welcome to 2013 and our first headlines posting of the year. This week's stories include:

• Mars Rover Approaches Ninth Anniversary on the Planet and is Still Ticking
• Study Correlates Climate Change with Increased Episodes of Volcanism

The age of the textbook as I remember it is truly coming to an end. Educational publishers can feel the heat if they are not already out of business. That's because educational publishers have never adapted to the way learning has changed because knowledge delivered is no longer the way young people learn.