Richard Incorvia is a teacher at the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment’s middle school who likes video games. He decided to turn his class into a role-playing-game. I’ll leave it up to him to explain as he does so well on his website, lessonadventure.com. He has a collection going on on Kickstarter to further develop his project. Awesome stuff!
I recently posted a request here on education4site.org and other places for examples of how education/classrooms/schools have been portrayed in science fiction literature, movies, etc. I got some great responses and have included them in a comment to my original post. I’m familiar with many of the sources but don’t particularly remember all of the references to education since I wasn’t really looking for them when I read them. I hope to take a better look at them when I get the chance (most of my sci-fi library is packed away in storage in Iceland, where I am not).
Michael A. Burstein especially caught my attention. I was not at all familiar with his work. Burstein’s first published sci-fi short story, TeleAbsence (published in 1995), is an excellent example as it is entirely about schooling in the future. Not surprising, considering that, in addition to writing science fiction, Burstein has been a science teacher and editor of science textbooks.
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On the Horizon, a journal focused on the future of learning and work, has issued a call for papers for a special issue on “Borderless society: The ‘new’ work and education”. The special issue will be edited by Dr. John Moravec and will explore the educational needs for the emerging “knowmadic society”, i.e. a society of workers who are, “creative, imaginative, and innovative person who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere.” See the full call for papers here.
Due dates are:
Submissions of title and 250-word proposal due: July 1, 2012
Notice of acceptance: July 13, 2012
Papers due: December 1, 2012
Review result notification: January 15, 2013
To submit a paper:
Submissions to this special issue of On the Horizon should be sent to the guest editor at moravec@gmail.com.
I’ve written before about how science fiction shapes our visions of the future; for ex. Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and the Star Trek communicator as inspiration for the cellphone. But, how have schools and classrooms been portrayed in science fiction? Is there anything there that might give us some ideas about how we might want to shape education? I can’t remember a lot of examples of schools or classrooms in science fiction except for a meager handful that aren’t very inspiring.
I remember seeing a Star Trek episode (don’t remember which series or which show – but I’m going to guess that it was Deep Space 9) where there was some imminent danger and a bunch of children had to be confined to their classroom. I was surprised that, despite all the attention paid to the evolution of technology in Star Trek, the classroom that was shown was pretty much exactly as you would expect to see if you walked into a classroom in the US today.
I came across another reference to school in Star Trek; this time a Vulcan school. Karen Henke, on the Future of Education Network website, describes a scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Vulcan children sat alone in pods and repeated what was said to them by a disembodied voice.
Other examples that I can think of are mostly intended to be critical of schools and thus portray them as staid institutions where facts and acceptable knowledge are forced upon children. For example, Bradbury’s Farenheit 451:
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
In Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series describes a world where everyone from Earth is resurrected, except for young children. In one of the final books it is finally revealed that the young children have been resurrected on another planet, named Gardenworld, where they are raised as “Ethicals” and eventually help transform Riverworld into a suitable home for the resurrected humans.
I have vague memories of some other mentions of schools and classrooms in science fiction but, because of my habit of moving from country to country every few years, I don’t have access to my sci-fi library right now. So, I can’t leaf through the books to check.
Do you remember any interesting portrayals of schools or classrooms or other forms of education from science fiction? Post them here. Help me get a collection of examples together.
One more quote for my still non-existent quote-of-the-day series:
To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.
Tom Bissell – Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation. Via Brainpickings
Is this finally a reason for educators to join Google+ (or get active – I joined long ago but don’t use it)?
Click here to read more about Googles Education on Air conference on Google+.
Today’s youth have some very interesting things to say. Who’s listening?
Piotr Czerski says:
We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term [generation] in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.
Click here to read the rest of Piotr’s article.
Researchers at Sony’s Computer Lab in Paris have been working with a group of robots that have been programmed to develop their own shared language. There has been phenomenal progress in the development of machine learning in the past decade or two. We encounter this everyday as we use technology but don’t always realize what’s going on. For example, our cars adjust to the way we drive to maximize fuel efficiency, Google knows what we are looking for before we finish typing it into the search engine, computer games adjust to the way we play to keep the game exciting for us. In robotics, one tricky problem is finding out how best to make robots that can walk. A group of researchers at the University of Vermont demonstrated that robots that are programmed to learn to walk, rather than being fed all of the necessary instructions beforehand, perform better than the pre-programmed robots.
Another sticky problem in robotics and computing, is developing robots that can talk naturally. Natural language has proven so complex that we can’t program machines to do it because we don’t entirely understand how it works ourselves. One thing that I’ve suggested in casual conversations is that perhaps the best way to get machines to talk would be to have them develop and learn their own language and then teach them to translate to our languages.
As it goes, whenever you come up with an idea, there’s most likely someone working on the same somewhere in the world. And such is the case at Sony’s Computer Lab in Paris. Their robots perform various actions with their bodies in front of a mirror and give new actions a name. They then interact with the other robots, 20 of them in all, to discover that they have named the same actions. The robots adjust their vocabulary until they reach agreement on specific terms. They have proven remarkably adept at doing this and have even developed relatively complex concepts such as “left” and “right”. Also, they develop their language so rapidly that the researchers have had trouble keeping up often needing up to a week to decipher the robots language. Now we just wait and see if the robots can figure out how to translate their language to ours…
Bonus ill-structured problem: Pedagogy – robots – language?
Sometimes it makes no sense to us why certain technologies take hold when they do and even less sense when we learn that “new” technologies turn out to be rediscovered “old” technologies. Consider cement, perhaps one of the best known examples of a technology that was developed, widely used, virtually disappeared, and then re-emerged as a novel technology centuries later. Cement was used extensively throughout the Roman Empire and then seems to have been almost forgotten (i.e. there are almost no written historical references to its use) until mid-European engineers started recording formulas and directions for its use in the 18th century.
As an ardent follower of the development of information technology for nearly two decades, I’ve seen similar emergences/disappearances/re-emergence of several technologies. In the late 1990s and early 2000s some colleagues and I were tracking and developing technologies for collaborative writing. We were positive that these technologies were about to break through. It made perfect sense to us; we had the tools to do it, and we felt that the incentive to adopt the technology was there. It turned out we were wrong. Collaborative writing tools didn’t really start to take off until the end of the 2000s. Around the same time that we were playing around with collaborative writing, Netscape was developing interesting tools that looked set to transform web browsing into a significantly more social experience than it was at the time. Well, we all know what happened to Netscape, and the web didn’t really start getting social to any notable extent until the mid 2000s.
A lot has been written about factors that affect technology adoption – turns out it’s a strange and constantly changing mixture of context, society, economy and serendipity. ‘Nuff said. But, what affects technology abandonment and why does it seem that we sometimes abandon technologies in a way that either immediately or eventually seems to work against our interests? Well, here’s an interesting article that discusses exactly that in a very interesting and relevant context – the Hunger Games books. Apparently, some readers have been questioning why a future society with various technologies that seemingly surpass our current technological capability, don’t have some technologies that we consider basic today; such as the Internet. The authors and specialists that they spoke with make an important point; that one technology is not inherently better than another. When the nature of our problems change, our requirements for tools change and we go off looking for something new and shedding the old.
The following is a somewhat quick & dirty reflection on the symposium on the future of education that I participated in in Iceland last week.
I was on a panel at a symposium on the future of education held at the University of Iceland (UI) last Tuesday (March 20, 2012). The key speaker was my advisor, Dr. Arthur Harkins, and with me on the panel were Dr. Svanborg R. Jónsdóttir, lecturer at UI, and Dr. Jón Torfi Jónasson, Dean of the School of Education, UI.
There has been little discourse on the futures studies, and in particular the future of education, in Iceland. Consequently, the Icelandic language lacks many of the concepts used in futures discourse (for ex. Icelandic philosopher Gunnar Dal suggests in his book published in 2005, Stórar Spurningar (transl. Big Questions) that perhaps there may at some time be a field of study referred to as “futures studies” – I guess he didn’t notice that there has been such a field since the 1950-60s developing increasingly rigorous methodologies). The symposium, along with a growing interest in the future of education in Iceland, provided a great opportunity to expand Icelandic discourse on education to include discussions about futures. Continue reading
