The Future of Education is Global Sourcing

OP-Ed
by Tim Rohde

I just finished reading a blog post that compares educational achievement across the globe (read it here). As an American, it initially troubled me, since the main thrust of the discussion was the U.S.’s failure in math and science education, compared to other countries. One of the points the author focused on was that textbooks in the U.S. tend to be extremely broad, but not particularly deep, in their coverage of a subject. Apparently this type of survey approach isn’t as effective as the methods used by better scoring countries (deeper dives into fewer subjects).

He then suggested a brilliant idea! Why not source textbooks from the most successful countries for a given discipline? There are, of course, plenty of problems with this approach. Textbooks exist in a wider pedagogical plan that spans years; they also are  the products of, and supporting text for, particular cultures. There are also great advantages to a broad diversity of global study that would need to be preserved. Still, the fundamental notion of globally sourcing our educational materials and methods has extreme fundamental merit.

There seem to be two approaches to drawing value from this idea. One is a top-down approach which is centered around one or more NGOs, UN committees, etc. The other, and more fun, is a bottom-up approach of looking at centers of excellence around the world and drawing their resources into an informal global collaboration. When all is said and done, each text book has to be translated one at a time, and each school or person needs to make individual choices regarding participation. This is classic crowd sourcing applied to a highly educated and effective crowd.

I wonder how you feel about this. Please comment.

Tim Rohde is Co-founder/Publisher & COO of the-future.com.

The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be

How beauteous mankind is!
O brave new world
that has such people in ‘t!
- Shakespeare’s The Tempest

In the final scene of the film Quest for Fire, after learning how to harness the power of the flame… the first futurist gazes toward the silvery glow of the moon … and then afar, to the stars in the heavens, as if to contemplate his place on Earth… and in the universe.

It was, perhaps, that first display of out-of-body awareness, that first reach beyond the self, that set humankind, relentlessly, on the path of progress.

What gave man that splinter of discontent, that compulsion to free himself from the shackles of Plato’s cave, to venture outward toward the light of better tomorrows?

It seems a singular trait of our species to always reach beyond our grasp, to consider other possibilities, to forever shatter the status quo.

What is it about us that compels our thoughts beyond today?

There are many views of the future, the most popular being that grand tomorrow we all dreamt of, as kids… that miraculous wonderland of scintillating sci-fi scenarios, that silver-mountain majesty of our wildest imaginations.

What ever happened to that future? Was it lost in the translation of dreams into reality?

Or, did we set course for a future so compelling that it would render science fiction a quaint remembrance of things past?

Could our wildest visions ignite the flames of our reality? …  divinely wild dreams that shape our ends, to paraphrase a writer ahead of his time?

There has been more technological innovation in the past 100 years, than in the previous 100,000.

Human evolution is progressing almost exponentially, paving the way for a future far more elevating than anything our electric dreams ever could have imagined.

And therein lies the mission of the-future.com… to investigate, to spotlight, to predict, to contemplate the-future’s nexus, as it heats, as it percolates, as it Becomes.

To ask questions that place tomorrow in perspective: Is there a limit to technological evolution? Is human advancement unquenchable? Why weren’t we content to remain prisoners of the cave? To simply hunt and gather? Was the thirst for progress inbred – a divinely inspired need to make things better? And better… and then, better, again? Why does humankind seem destined to change its destiny?

We are living in a time in which the dogmatic restraints of ancient histories are clashing against the intrinsic longing for the hope and freedom of tomorrow.

It is an ironic juxtaposition that allows one of the world’s newest technologies to kick the sands of time in the face of one of the world’s most primitive and repressive regimes… proving that ideological luddites, while retaining the military might of oppression, are simply no force against the indomitable human will to evolve.

So, it is with a spirit of reverence for the most exalted promises of past and present that we launch the-future.com.

Because the-future is more than pulse weapons and ion propulsion and houses floating in the clouds. The-future is the panorama of our hopes, our dreams, our fears, and…our mistakes.

The-future doesn’t begin in some distant time, separated from us by eons… or millennia … or centuries… or decades… or years/months/days/hours…or even minutes.

The-future begins at the end of this sentence… inexorably linked… to NOW.

Arthur G. Insana
Co-founder/Publisher & Editor-in-Chief

Never Underestimate the Power of Tomorrow

Bill Gates said, “People always overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10.” While I half expect a letter from some poor Xerox PARC guy challenging the provenance of that statement, the truth of its content is undeniable. In the immediate rush of the present we can sometimes lose sight of the futuristic miracles emerging right before our eyes. Those 10-year cycles are coming to fruition every day and continuing on to create the miracles of the next 10 years.

There is a spot at the Boeing Museum in Seattle where you can stand between a P51 engine from the mid ’40s (capable of pulling a P51 up to 400 miles per hour) and look across the room at an SR71 engine from the early ’60s (capable of pushing the SR71 to more than 2000 miles per hour). Young men who flew P51s in combat scratched the edge of outer space at Mach 3 before their kids were out of high school. Less than 10 years later, they watched men walk on the moon.

In 1976, a bus shaped like the Space Shuttle arrived at my school. That day I watched a lady hold one of those famous shuttle tiles in her hand while she fired a jeweler’s torch at it for three minutes. I was the kid who got to come out of the audience and touch that piece of the future and find that it was hardly warm. The heat was directly converted into light and radiated away. Today, I have a dental crown made of that same material. I watched on a screen as artificial intelligence was used to render a 3D model of my tooth and guess VERY CLOSELY at the shape of my crown. After the dentist made some adjustments within the virtual world mapped from my molar, a robotic mill the size of a laser printer carved my crown from a billet of space history.

A couple of years ago, scientists in Copenhagen “teleported” billions of atoms about 18 inches, using quantum entanglement. An array of 122 lasers in Livermore, California, might soon ignite a pellet of Deuterium and usher in the age of nuclear fusion. While you read this, an artificial intelligence-enabled robotic scientist named Adam is formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data and deciding which experiments to run next. I can’t help but anticipate the sudden roaring success of all this. I expect it all to be ready to industrialize and be delivered to my door by next fall.

Yes, I’m overestimating what can be done in one year. Are we all underestimating what can be done in 10?

Timothy Rohde

Co-founder/Publisher & COO