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The game of predictions -- as it's New Year's Eve

I have always liked to play the game of making predictions on New Year's Eve. Everyone comes up with as many predictions as they like, in whatever category they choose -- whether personal (who'll get married, divorced, have a baby, etc.), work-related (change jobs, get acquired, expand, downsize, etc.), political, global, sports, cultural, etc. All are written down and put in a sealed envelope labeled "PREDICTIONS for 2009" -- and stored in a drawer, ready for the next New Year's Eve, when it is opened and the score is tallied -- how many right and by whom.

We never looked more than a year ahead, and you only ever got the honor of being right.

But I recently discovered a website which combines the challenge of long-range predictions with the option of making specific bets (i.e., predictions with potential rewards) -- from those clever people at the Long Now Foundation (Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand, etc.).


Here is the first bet made, back in 2002 -- between Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil (who has made a famous prediction with his Singularity -- interesting aside: his Wikipedia page is labeled as one of those currently in dispute).


What does the future hold? Here's a possible map -- from Ross Dawson at Trends in the Living Networks (where he also has links to his previous Trend Blends for 2007 and 2008):

And here's the World Future Society's top ten forecasts for 2009 and beyond:

1. Everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.

2. Bioviolence will become a greater threat as the technology becomes more accessible.

3. The car's days as king of the road will soon be over.

4. Careers, and the college majors for preparing for them, are becoming more specialized.

5. There may not be world law in the foreseeable future, but the world's legal systems will be networked.

6. The race for biomedical and genetic enhancement will -- in the twenty-first century -- be what the space race was in the previous century.

7. Professional knowledge will become obsolete almost as quickly as it's acquired.

8. Urbanization will hit 60% by 2030.

9. The Middle East will become more secular while religious influence in China will grow.

10. Access to electricity will reach 83% of the world by 2030.

Numbers 4 and 7 support the need for developing flexible learners, able to continually renew themselves as experts. And Number 1 means we might be able to resolve those arguments over who said what when ("let's replay the tape from that morning....").

Must go make my own private predictions now...

Plastic, recycling, and the future of the book

A question every school librarian must face is, to cover? or not to cover? In plastic.

For our new library, I choose to buy hardcovers whenever possible -- only adding a plastic layer to books with dust jackets where the jacket alone carries a front cover image (i.e., when the hardcover itself is plain). Any paperbacks I buy are being left as is. No sticky-back plastic -- of any kind.

It's a decision of cost -- of the plastic, of the labor spent attaching the plastic, and to the environment which must live with the plastic for its lifetime.

A similar question every school/teacher must face is, to laminate? or not to laminate? My friend Pam Duncan, a head librarian in control of the school's laminating machine, has single-handedly managed to significantly reduce her school's plastic footprint by insisting staff justify each and every act of lamination to her personally.


-- Poster by John Blyberg (CC-Attribution); hat-tip Michael Stephens and then LibraryThing;
FYI: created using Despair, Inc.'s Parody Motivator Generator


Does plastic convey authority? And does it allow users to abdicate personal responsibility? As Tim from LibraryThing comments (on the above poster):
I've wondered if lamination and similar protective techniques in libraries don't encourage the very disaster they anticipate—"Oh, the book has a plastic cover on it? I guess that means its okay if I read it while eating a meatball sub!"
I know I'm doing lots of talking with students about their responsibility to respect books, given that we're not exerting any extra effort to give books extra protection. (Responsibility and Respect are two key terms in the PYP.)


On the other hand, books may rapidly become completely recyclable so when that meatball sub falls onto it, you just pop it in the back of the "recycler/fabricator" that we'll have in our homes -- and produce a new copy (or print out a different book).

Witness the all-plastic, waterproof, completely recyclable book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking How We Make Things, a manifesto calling for ecologically intelligent design.
To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things -- products, packaging, and systems -- from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.
(p. 104, Cradle to Cradle)
Intentionally recyclable physical books aren't that prevalent yet, though we do have the ability to print and bind paperback books from scratch in minutes, via machines like the EBM (Espresso Book Machine) -- at a cost of a US$0.01 per page.

Watch these two short videos and think how far we have come:

  • 1947 video "Making Books" produced by Encyclopedia Britannica Films in collaboration with the Library of Congress -- a classic black and white informational video showing how books used to be produced -- from the author's manuscript to typesetting to lines to composed pages to copper plates, printing, binding, covering, etc. (Thanks to the graphic artist student Golden Krishna for discovering this precious piece of history -- and my apologies that I can't trace now who led me to his website...)

  • The Espresso Book Machine -- in action!
Which brings me to Brewster Kahle, the inventor, philanthropist and digital librarian, who is trying to bring everything ever published to anyone who wants it -- universal access to all knowledge. He's working to digitize all the texts of the world and, because he still likes the old-fashioned technology of "the book", he's experimenting with machines like the Espresso Book Machine in places like rural Uganda -- to bring books to people who need/want them. Listen to him talk about his various projects at TED in December 2007.



You can't talk about digitizing all the books in the world without mentioning the latest e-book readers, like the Kindle (thanks to John Blyberg for another photo). Kahle and others tout the $100 laptop as a great device for reading e-books. Watch Robin Ashford demonstrate it on YouTube below. (I don't think I'm going to be able to resist buying one....)



Want to read more about the future of books (and publishing and writing)? First, subscribe to if:book, the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Second, you might enjoy reading "The 21st Century Writer" and the accompanying interviews of Tim Reilly, Douglas Rushkoff, Stephen Abram, and Frank Daniels, published in The Futurist (July/August 2008 issue online).
I always thought that publishing was about, first of all, understanding what matters, figuring out how to gather information and then gathering readers who that information matters to. There’s a kind of curation process. What the Internet has done is bring us new methods of curation.

Abolish school!

I just love to read calls to abolish schools. If only we had to courage to do it.

Robert Epstein, author of the recently published The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen, openly argues for it in his article "Let's Abolish High School" in Education Week. Just as Alvin Toffler explained why we need to shut down the public education system in the Feb. 2007 issue of Edutopia.

It's what Prof. Stephen Heppell was suggesting at the IBAP conference: instead of schools, what if we could measure what people know and offer a free, global model of recognition of accomplishment? A kind of YouTube for learning outcomes, as he said.

During his talk, Heppell showed us several examples of work by "researchers" (as students are called, to distance them from traditional school language) participating his notschool.net project. These kids, excluded from traditional schools for some reason, are given a brand-new Macintosh computer, a broadband internet connection, and mentors -- and the learning begins. The program has exceeded all expectations. (See this report on the Apple Learning website.)

Heppell was also instrumental in the establishment of Ultraversity -- a degree course now offered at a UK university, where people can work full-time and study full-time -- by learning about the work they're already doing. (See this 2003 Guardian (UK) article on Ultraversity.)

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The form & content of the future

For all the virtues of virtual connections, there's nothing like a few days of face-to-face with large numbers of peers for some mental and social expansion.

Last week I had two such valuable experiences at overlapping conferences:

[The EARCOS one is listed on Hitchkr (a compendium of blog postings on different conferences) but not the IBAP one. As for handouts to download, the IB ones are listed on the conference website given above, but for the EARCOS ones you have to drill down into the sub-pages, e.g., the Workshop Presenters page, and look under each name.]

I'm writing up my notes here and here, but the focal point of both experiences was on the form and content of the future that educators, in particular, need to start acting upon -- and each conference provided an excellent guru.

Technology is obviously the form, but while anyone can get up and rant about exponential growth and the need to embrace change, not just anyone can show us workable paths and original thinking.

At the IBAP conference, Stephen Heppell (check out his bio, if you've never heard of him) pulled up example after example from his crowded Mac desktop screen showing us how he's involved in getting students and teachers to learn collaboratively using the latest technology (see notschool.net, teachers.tv, the learnometer project, the "be very afraid" film series, etc.). His presentation lived up to the tags on his website: learning, ingenuity, research, policy, design, technology, and delight. (I'll blog more about his ideas in a separate posting.)

Global issues are the content. The appearance of Jean-Francois Rischard, author of the book High Noon, at the EARCOS conference was very timely. Consensus on the pressing problem of global warming has coalesced (thanks in part to Al Gore's movie) over the past several months, so it was wonderful to hear from someone who has been thinking seriously about the problem -- and even bigger ones -- for several years.

His overall message was that we need to come up with a new methodology of global problem-solving because the problems now facing the world must be resolved by countries working together. Like Heppell, Rischard is someone who has been involved in the system he's critiquing, as he used to work for the World Bank and is very knowledgeable about the current international organizations available. (I'll blog more about his ideas in a separate posting.)

The popular meme that was killed for me, thanks to these conferences, was Marc Prensky's digital immigrant/digital native divide. I've been guilty of spreading it myself, but, I'm sorry -- given the rate of change, doesn't the divide continually shift? Is it meaningful? Each cohort born will be exposed to some technology at a younger age than those born a few years before. There was a "Student Perspectives on IT and Education" forum at the IBAP conference and the teens who participated (from two different international schools in Singapore) admitted they marvel at how younger kids are utilizing technology at a younger age than they did, e.g., mobile phones. The term "digital natives" did not resonate with them, though they did gripe that many of their teachers were not as digitally fluent as they were. I much prefer the idea of a digital literacy or fluency continuum, regardless of age.

A focus on an age definition of "digital natives" (e.g., born after 1973 or whatever the current year-marker is) also ignores the very real economic digital divide. To speak sweepingly of a whole digital generation, when many children have yet to touch a digital device, is misleading.

Brain research is strongly linked to this concept of "digital natives" and "digital immigrants". I must go back and review the latest reports because almost every speaker (especially that stand-up comic/evangelist preacher Ian Jukes) made it sound like kids' brains have eternal neuro-plasticity while ours are hopelessly hardwired. I'm sure I've recently read about the window of neural-plasticity staying open (longer), e.g., that the elderly can even continue to build new neural pathways if they keep mentally fit (the old 'use-it or lost-it' saying). Anyway, something to look up later.

As I've mentioned Jukes, I also want to point out something that strikes me as odd about his blog. I've clicked on at least six different postings (see, for example, Video Games Focus on Exercising Brain and The Handwriting is on the Wall) and they appear to be his comments on an article, for which he provides a link at the bottom of the posting. BUT, when you go to the article, it's word-for-word the same as his posting. So he seems to be posting whole copies of article texts on his blog with no attribution (neither publication nor author) on the blog itself -- though he does provide a link to the article (which doesn't always work though -- e.g., several link to expired articles (Students use IM Lingo in Essays and Shoes Track Children Using GPS) and one posting appears to be an image so you can't actually click on the link (1867 Nanomachine Now Reality)). My impression of him was as an energetic re-packager of ideas (I had heard them all before from other sources) and his blog makes it look like he doesn't even do that very well.

Would we really let students copy an article on their blog without indicating that it was NOT their own words in the posting, even if they did provide a link at the end to the real article? Must review online ethical etiquette sometime...

More thoughts in separate postings...

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Scanning the literate lunatic aka genius fringe

Scanning is a common cognitive exercise I focus on as a teacher-librarian, but it's also something I do as a mental magpie, so I was interested to read about scanning in the context of futurist studies.

Yes, I'd read the OCLC's Environmental Scan (re the future of libraries) a few years back, so knew what one generally consisted of, but when I checked out Dr. Wendy Schultz's website (a result of reading her recent delightful offering in the OCLC newsletter re her vision of Library 4.0 as mind gym, idea lab, art salon, and knowledge spa), I was interested to find an essay on the concept of "common, or garden variety, environmental scans", as practiced/professed by futurists like Schultz.

Schultz has her students do what she calls "360 scanning" of anything touching on STEEP (social, technological, economic, ecological, and political) environments. They start by scanning an entire set of (hardcopy) periodicals in a library, no matter what field they are in (e.g., engineers are instructed to not overlook Women's Wear Daily or Art in America), looking for patterns of themes or topics relating to change and new innovations. Then they move onto online resources (and she provides a good list), again, across a wide range of interests.

This type of scanning outside one's forte is exactly what I think all those involved in education should always be doing.

I particularly like her recommendation: "Another strategy is identifying the websites of the literate lunatic fringe -- or genius fringe -- and monitoring their blogs (weblogs)."

Yes, checking out the edge is always interesting. So what websites qualify as the literate genius fringe in the field of teaching and librarianship?? A good basic list of cutting edge mavens in the field of educational technology is on edtechnot. For social software + political philosophy there's Ideant, the blog of Ulises Ali Mejias. In terms of "the book" and adventurous speculations about its future, I love if:book. Of course, for a good collection of geniuses, you can't do better than Edge: The Third Culture.

Must go through my blog list and see who else I would include... Maybe I should make a new category in Bloglines -- "Genius fringe"...