Future Forces Affecting Education

I found a really cool website called KnowledgeBase, which features a map, if you will, focusing on the the future of education, and in fact covers the years 2006-2016 . This Map of Future Forces Affecting Education, is from a company called KnowledgeWorks Foundation, and it is basically a forecast of what the coming years has in store for us in so far as education.

As you know I am deeply involved in education as reflected in my website http://www.roccobasile.org/.

Plus of course, my work on the Board of Children of the City, who started very successful grass roots localized educational programs years ago.

One of the collaborators of the Map is named Bob Johansen, who is the former president of the Institute for the Local Communities. He focused on experiments in sharing or "gift" economies, sustainable environments, and new civic processes, then wrote a book based on his theory is that local value grows economies of group connectivity, and that this combined with fears of globalism, political gridlock, and concern over dominance of big business will create a revival of localism.

In his book Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the
Present, Johansen, talks about some of the implications researchers from
the Palo Alto, California-based think tank discovered in working with the foundation to assess the future trends in education.

He said, "One of the dilemmas we identified is the tension between the marketplace for increasingly personalized learning and the social mandate of the public schools to provide foundational education to everyone — regardless of background or income."

Other thoughts covered in the book include economics, urban space expansion and the fact that society is starting to fragment into subcultures with strong belief systems. The map is being used broadly across the country to investigate what these trends could mean for education. It is definitely worth a look.