A worthy reminder of what we’re really up to… or what we should really be doing…

Just took a few minutes to watch “Did You Know?,” an interesting powerpoint presentation by Karl Fisch. The powerpoint really puts a few things into perspective, namely how much the world is in the process of shifting more rapidly than we realize. For teachers and professors, as Karl points out, we’re actually in the process of giving the students the tools they will use (I hope) to solve problems that don’t yet exist, with technology that people have not even dreamed of yet.

Darren Kuropatwa did a great “Winnipeg Remix” of the powerpoint and put it up on his blog as a movie file, which is much easier way to see it than downloading the powerpoint. I see that his daughter, like my own, started Grade One (or First Grade as they call it here in the States) this week. Thinking about that in the context of the facts Fisch reminds us of really blows me away.

This also brings up the question of how my kids will be learning in the future. My father Jerome Martin‘s ebook Cappucino U (a free download from Spotted Cow Press) talks about learning in third spaces and the huge shift already underway in the ways that we learn and work. This post from Christopher D. Sessums’ blog really opened my eyes as well about the ways in which “information and communications technologies (ICT)” have the potential to completely move us away from the model we’re desperately clinging to today where Universities are the holders and bestowers of academic capital (i.e. a degree) to one where people might be just as well off to get their credentials from a variety of sources. As Sessums writes:

And the locus of control should be ours to negotiate as long as accreditors provide the opportunity to do so. Accreditation can be more than what’s issued by universities. It could be issued by Microsoft, the BBC, Apple, Oracle, Hewlett Packard, Toyota, etc. A person’s c.v. could be more organic, assembled from courses taken in a variety of settings, from a variety of providers. The university’s monopoly on accreditation will soon be a thing of the past as other players enter the tertiary education market and offer the skills and training that meets the needs of employers globally.

This takes me back to something I read over the summer in Peter Elbow’s book Writing Without Teachers. Elbow writes of how his perspective shifted when he came to “notice a fundamental asymmetry: students can learn without teachers even though teachers cannot teach without students. The deepest dependency is not of students upon teachers, but of teachers upon students.”