My Interview with John Seely Brown at 2012 Maker Faire

Below is my live-audience interview with John Seely Brown at the 2012 Maker Faire in San Mateo, California, as part of the terrific EdSurge DIY Learning Pavilion. Look for more recordings from this great event to come!

Live Thursday May 31st with Khalid Smith and Nicole Tucker-Smith on Educational Entrepreneurship and Startup Weekend EDU

Join me Thursday, May 31st, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Khalid Smith to talk about Startup Weekend EDU, the potential impact of entrepreneurial activities on the education ecosystem, the new film on education he's been working on, and the recent and controversial decision to partner with Pearson. We'll also be joined by Nicole Tucker-Smith, assistant principal of a middle school in Maryland, and who with Khalid (her husband) co-founded their own educational startup called LessonCast.

Date: Thursday, May 31st, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am (next day) GMT (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is available at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-31.1659.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/khalidnicolesmith.mp3.

Khalid R. Smith is a former marketing and strategic brand management expert with an engineering background, and he leads education programming and strategy at StartupWeekend.  He brings together hackers, entrepreneurs and education experts to build teams, start companies and acquire the resources to make meaningful advances in the way people teach and learn. He also puts his expertise into practice as co-founder and chief executive of LessonCast Learning Inc. a professional development platform for leaders of professional learning communities. More short ramblings can be found @KhalidRudo and longer ones at KhalidRudo.com.

Nicole Tucker-Smith is a master teacher, educational consultant, and experienced school and central office administrator, Nicole has experience planning, implementing, and evaluating high quality teaching and professional development.  As a leader in a restructured school, Nicole developed the LessonCast content format and process in order to meet the instructional and educational leadership needs of her school learning community.  She can be found on the web at http://Lessoncast.org/author/nicole or @MsTuckerSmith.


Startup Weekend EDU is a "global network of passionate educators, entrepreneurs, developers and designers on a mission to revolutionize the education and learning markets. This is citizen-driven EDU reform." As part of the larger Startup Weekend program, they are "weekend-long, hands-on experiences where entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if startup ideas are viable. On average, half of Startup Weekend’s attendees have technical backgrounds, the other half have business backgrounds.  Beginning with open mic pitches on Friday, attendees bring their best ideas and inspire others to join their team. Over Saturday and Sunday teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product. On Sunday evening teams demo their prototypes and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts."

A Conversation with Bryan Alexander on Technology and the Liberal Arts

Join me Tuesday, May 29th, for live and interactive Future of Education conversation with Dr. Bryan Alexander, senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE). We'll discuss his focus on "emerging trends in the integration of inquiry, pedagogy, and technology and their potential application to liberal arts contexts," as well as his work on digital storytelling, learning in immersive environments, mobile devices, social reading, and the "rise of digital humanities." Bryan recently co-wrote a paper on "Open Education in the Liberal Arts" that we'll discuss, and he runs a "futures market"--a "crowd-sourced prediction game" that I'm particularly interested in.

Date: Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-29.1709.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/bryanalexander.mp3.

Dr. Bryan Alexander is author of The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media, published in April 2011 by Praeger. He is active online, combining research with communication across multiple venues. He runs the NITLE futures market, a crowd-sourced prediction game. He contributes to Techne, NITLE’s blog, and was lead author for eight years on it predecessor, Liberal Education Today (archive). He also tweets steadily at @BryanAlexander.

Born in New York City, Dr. Alexander earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan in 1997, completing a dissertation on Romantic-era Gothic literature. He taught English literature, writing, information literacy, and information technology studies at Centenary College of Louisiana from 1997 through 2002. He was a 2004 fellow of the Frye Leadership Institute. He lives on a Vermont homestead with his family, where they raise animals and crops, combining broadband with a low-tech lifestyle.

Elizabeth Merritt on Museums and the Future of Learning

Join me Thursday, May 24th, for live and interactive Future of Education conversation with Elizabeth Merritt on museums and the future of learning. With co-author with Scott Kratz, in the report "Museums and the Future of Education," she writes:

The U.S. educational system is on the cusp of transformational change. Signals that the current educational structure has been destabilized include rising dissatisfaction with the formal educational system and the proliferation of non-traditional forms of primary education. In the coming era, museums will play a key role in the new educational landscape.

We'll discussion educational innovation taking place in museums, how museums relate to the development of learning skill sets, and the unique ability of museums to inspire learning. As her report concludes:

The future of education may well be one characterized by self-directed, passion-based learning. Some envision a knowledge economy in which schools are supplanted by personal learning communities, teachers’ role as facilitators is as important as their status as experts, and students and faculty engage in self-directed research and accomplish real work. In this future, museums can play a crucial role in helping learners discover their passion, providing resources and opportunities to pursue this passion and training educators in the skills of experiential learning.

Date: Thursday, May 24th, 2012

Time: 5pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-24.1246.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording can be downloaded at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/elizabethmerritt.mp3.

Elizabeth Merritt is Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums (CFM), an initiative of the American Association of Museums. CFM is a think-tank and research and design lab for fostering creativity and helping museums transcend traditional boundaries to serve society in new ways. Ms. Merritt has 25 years experience working with and in museums, including administration, curation and collections management. Her areas of expertise include museum standards and best practices, ethics, collections management and planning, and assessment of nonprofit performance.

Mark Bauerlein on Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking

Join me Tuesday, May 15th, for live and interactive Future of Education conversation with Mark Bauerlein to talk about his new book, The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking, and how this reflects our perspectives on teaching and learning.

This is an incredible compilation of essays by significant thinkers--ten of whom, including Mark, have been guests on the Future of Education show--on the "perils and promise of the social- media revolution," and frames the important discussions about the development of our digital culture back to 1996! There are contributions by Mark Presnky, Steven Johnson, Maryanne Wolf, Jim Gee, Gary Small, Nicholas Carr, Don Tapscott, Douglas Rushkoff, Maggie Jackson, Clay Shirky, Sherry Turkle, Henry Jenkins, Cathy Davidson, John Palfry, Tim O'Reilly, Andrew Keen, and more. From the publisher's description:

Twitter, Facebook, e-publishing, blogs, distance-learning and other social media raise some of the most divisive cultural questions of our time. Some see the technological breakthroughs we live with as hopeful and democratic new steps in education, information gathering, and human progress. But others are deeply concerned by the eroding of civility online, declining reading habits, withering attention spans, and the treacherous effects of 24/7 peer pressure on our young. 

Date: Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-15.1018.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/markbauerleindigitaldivide.mp3.

Mark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He came on the show in January of 2010 to speak with us about his other book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30. 

Schedule of May PBS/WNET Webinars on Finding Your Roots, Starting Tonight

WNET is hosting free webinars for educators focusing on the new PBS 10-part series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which explores the family histories and genetics of famous Americans. The next session will take place today, Wednesday, May 9, from 8-9 pm Eastern Standard Time and will include highlights from Finding Your Roots Episode 7 (featuring Samuel L. Jackson, Condoleezza Rice, and Ruth Simmons) and Episode 8 (featuring Sanjay Gupta, Margaret Cho, and Martha Stewart).

This workshop will feature behind-the-scenes insights from the production team, as well as tips for using the content in the classroom. Additional Finding Your Roots webinars will take place Wednesday, May 23rd (8 pm EST) and May 30th (4 pm EST). For more details and to sign up for any of these free one-hour sessions, go to http://bit.ly/FYRWebinars.

See you online! 

Keith Devlin from Stanford: Talking Media, Math, MOOCs, and Silicon Valley Money in Education

Join me Tuesday, May 8th, for live and interactive Future of Education conversation with Stanford Mathematician Keith Devlin, co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, a Senior Researcher at CSLI, and "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio. In addition to talking about the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics, we're going to dive into some deeper conversations about the recent move toward massive(ly) open online courses (MOOCs, one of which he is starting for free this fall on math), why he thinks that "higher education as we know it just ended," the impact of the Silicon Valley and venture capital in education, and as much as we can fit into an hour!

Date: Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is available at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-08.1601.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is available at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/keithdevlin.mp3.

Dr. Keith Devlin is a co-founder and Executive Director of the university's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 31 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. In 2003, he was recognized by the California State Assembly for his "innovative work and longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and linguistics." He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio.

H-STAR, the Human-Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute, is a Stanford interdisciplinary research center focusing on people and technology — how people use technology, how to better design technology to make it more usable (and more competitive in the marketplace), how technology affects people's lives, and the innovative use of technologies in research, education, art, business, commerce, entertainment, communication, national security, and other walks of life.

Media X is Stanford's catalyst for industry and academic research partnerships on the impact of information and technology on society.

Live Thursday, May 3rd - School Libraries: What’s Now, What’s Next, What’s Yet to Come

Join me Thursday, May 3rd, for live and interactive Future of Education conversation with  Buffy Hamilton and Kristin Fontichiaro, editors of School Libraries: What’s Now, What’s Next, What’s Yet to Come. Their crowdsourced eBook, which is available for free download, is a collection of over 100 essays from around the world about trends in school libraries written by librarians, teachers, publishers, and library vendors.

In the book's foreward, Dr. R. David Lankes laments that the "future of school libraries and school librarians hangs in the balance," and that even with all of the research supporting the important effects of the school librarian, "communities are presented with a false choice: reduce the number of teachers in the classroom or lay off the librarian." This, he says, is a "false choice because school librarians are teachers – their classrooms beyond the four walls of the library and extending into every classroom; indeed into every student’s home with resources and assistance."

Hamilton and Fontichiaro recognize the additional and huge historical context of a world moving from print to digital, and by bringing diverse library voices together, wanted to ask questions that would "help us gain strength and inspiration from one another, even as our roles and duties expand and our job security and salaries decrease."

What is the future of school libraries? More particularly, what is the future of school librarians? ...For those of us still working in schools, what are we working toward? ...Those are some of the question we posed to the extended school librarian community. What is the future going to be like? What do you see? What can you hold up from your own practice as a lantern to illuminate the way for others? These questions are too big to be answered by any single librarian, district, organization, or task force. They take collective thinking. And so we made an unusual overture: all voices would be heard, regardless of experience, reputation, or perpsective.

Date: Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8 pm Eastern (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Blackboard Collaborate (formerly Elluminate). Log in at http://futureofed.info. The Blackboard Collaborate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Blackboard Collaborate, please visit the support and configuration page.
Recordings: The full Blackboard Collaborate recording is at https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2012-05-03.1714.M.9E9FE58134BE68C3B413F24B3586CF.vcr&sid=2008350 and a portable .mp3 audio recording is at http://audio.edtechlive.com/foe/schoollibraries.mp3.

Buffy Hamilton is a school librarian at Creekview High School’s “Unquiet Library” in Canton, GA.  Buffy is a 2011 Library Journal Mover and Shaker ; she is also the  2011 winner of the Salem Press Blog Award in the “School Library” division, Salem Press Blog Award,  School Library Blog Winner 2011 as well as the 2010-11 GLMA/GAIT Georgia Library Media Association/Georgia Association for Instructional Technology School Library Media Specialist of the Year.  Her Media 21 program (http://theunquietlibrary.libguides.com/media21) was a winner of the American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) Cutting Edge Library Service Award.  In addition, she has been honored as one of the National School Boards Association Technology Leadership Network “20 to Watch” 2010, Tech and Learning’s 100@30: Future Leader;  her library program was also honored as the 2010 Georgia Exemplary High School Media Program.   Buffy is also the author of the recently published Embedded Librarianship: Tools and Practices from ALA TechSource.

Kristin Fontichiaro is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, where she coordinates the school library media program.  In addition, she co-teaches Teaching with Technology in the UM School of Education. Formerly, she was an elementary school librarian, professional development facilitator, and secondary English teacher.

In 2011, she edited two eBooks: School Libraries: What's Now, What's Next, What's Yet to Come (co-edited with Buffy Hamilton) and Information Literacy in the Wild, a compilation of graduate student essays.

Earlier professional books include 21st-Century Learning in School Libraries; Active Learning Through Drama, Podcasting, and Puppetry; and Podcasting at School. With Sandy Buczynski, she is co-author of Story Starters and Science Notebooking: Developing Student Thinking Through Literacy and Inquiry. She also writes informational texts for middle grade readers and has written for Principal Leadership, ASCD Express, Teacher Librarian, Synergy, and other publications.

Coming in June are two new books: are Navigating the Information Tsunami: Engaging Research Projects that Meet the Common Core State Standards, K-5 (Cherry Lake) and Growing Schools: Librarians as Professional Developers (with former Future of Education guest Debbie Abilock and Violet H. Harada, 2012).

Named an Emerging Leader by the American Library Association, Distinguished Alumna by the Wayne State University Library and Information Science Program, and a 2012 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, she blogs at http://blog.schoollibrarymonthly.com and writes the “Nudging Toward Inquiry” column for School Library Monthly.