Learning and Education

For colleges and universities, the great age of experimentation is now upon us. Harvard and MIT recently announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

The Minerva Project recently announced it will become the first elite American University to be launched in over a century, at the same time, transforming every aspect of the university-student relationship. The Ronin Institute is promising to reinvent academia, but without the academy.

Question (to me): What was the most amazing session you saw at SXSW this year?
I only managed to catch two of the four keynote presentations this year, but both of them were huge highlights for me and many other attendees at SXSW 2012.

Question: As physical books go away, and computers and smart devices take their place, at what point does a library stop being a library, and start becoming something else?

Somewhere in the middle of this question lies the nagging fear and anxiety that we see brimming to the top among library insiders.

People who think libraries are going away simply because books are going digital are missing the true tectonic shifts taking place in the world of information.

Almost any teacher will agree that technology is changing how students learn, but is it changing how student think?

The idea of leisure and “play” for children in America has evolved from an experience cemented in timeless, staple games and toys to one that is increasingly tied to the evolving digital experience of their parents. Consider these trends:

In college I studied psychology and absolutely loved its theories. The field is so new and unknown that simply being able to describe how people behave is an accomplishment. Freud, the most famous psychologist, was really just a creative writer with a bit of fact.

Enjoy forecasting? Seeking a community you can discuss predictions with? Enjoy arguing, en masse, about the course of humanity? Welcome to Facebook.

Futurists may be regarded ethical as far as their conducts are in conformity with the standards of professional moralities, but how do they define their professional ethics and to what extent do they remain really faithful to those ethics?

If we consider "thinking" as a cognitive process dealing with awareness, attention and process of factual, emotive and conative types of information, then we may characterize "collective thinking" (CT) as an interrelated cognitive process of such functions occurring among several individuals.