Traditional educatinoal institutions under pressure –Why?
The developmental logic is this:
(A) The communication infrastructure of the internet plus powerful end devices allows to have learning situations everywhere
(B) The motivational factor of learning can be realized with social web logic (co-learning) plus personal tutoring via a learning platform
Result: Instead of sitting rather passively in front of a teacher in a lecture format there are now learning formats available, that are much more engaging and effective. And this is not a hymn to technocentric e-learning systems, but blended, life-long, hybrid, social, deep learning processes. A first haiku diagram about the new synergies waiting to substitute some inefficient institutionalized old school learning settings.
The upwards spiral of co-learning, co-creation and co-working
Connecting this with the betasalon yesterday: First, of course I do not restrict “coworking” to coworking spaces in the institutional form. But second they are great hubs for local change, breaking boudaries between working, learning, having fun, they are fine candidates for the new learning spaces we need.
Normally I am not a live blogger … now let us have a try. I am at BETAHAUS | SALON #3 UNIVERSITY 2.0 – the reinvention of higher education in the 21st century. Listening to very interesting new perspectives about teaching and learning.
We just heard Dale J. Stephens, founder of the UnCollege movement. He questions whether university is necessary to learning and personal development, and is challenging the high costs of college. Surprise for the skeptic: There is some statistical evidence that the absence of traditional school system is not the worst thing.
Hannes Kloepper, M.P.P. is cofounder of iversity, an academic collaboration platform and educational startup near Berlin. Book upcoming in March 2012: Die Universität im 21. Jahrhundert
Dr. Stephan Breidenbach, founding Dean of Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, recognises the pressing need for universities to stay relevant, and is actively working on reforming the way in which knowledge is created and shared at the university.
Debate / learnings
Now the debate has started and my first learning is that we have to be more radical in rethinking. We have to approach the “operating system” of the whole society and economy. Some basic concepts: The need of assessment and certification in a mobile world.
Question of power arises. It is about legitimation discourses and changing them. And if an institution is a system to stabilize itself how then can we have change in the instittuions? Can we (paradoxically) institutionalize transformation?
Hey, stop, an idea: Look for this in the economy (much more evolution power, mutation rate there than in the rest of society, you know Schumpeter …).
Update …. Companies, when the reach a certain size, usually create functional units for transformation (innovation department, R&D …) – or they even do open innovation, externalizing the innovation beyond the borders of the company.
Ideas from the debate now: Why not have cinemas for TED? Inspired for action.
How we work has radically changed during history. The social wave (with social technologies for networking, new concepts and mindsets to collaborate) has reached the working sphere for some years. E.g. there are 1.200 coworking spaces around the world now. And there is a new mindset in town with that mode of working.
Worldwide global-local event: #JELLYWEEK 2012
Today a global-local event starts to connect the growing community of coworkers. Up to now there are 206 jellies from 34 countries registered, some with even a program for the whole week. Never heard of “jellies”? Find more on the event website: #JELLYWEEK 2012
Close observer and an active node
To come close to these new phenomena/movement as a researcher and to promote and foster transformation (I know well, that these are two different roles) I was very excited about the opportunity to be a part of organizing this open, self-governed and swarm-like event. Or less paradoxically: To create (hybrid/orbital?) spaces for communication and co-creation in the spirit of Open Space and Art of Hosting.
Challenge: Building a coordinative space for remote co-workers
It is a challenge to build a Social Information Architecture having no budget, no coder, no databse – and in the shortest time of some weeks. It resulted in decentral kind of swarm design (the swarm intelligence hype may be over – but this concept is no fashion, but just a principle of construction). The structure is inspired by wiki thinking, but even more light, fragile, open and with a maximum of decentrality: A cloud of etherpads is having an essential role. Other “orbital” element: Google hangouts, e.g. permanent hangouts.
We are curious, whether this will work … yep, pioneering comes with risk of total failure …. “We”, that is Anni Roolf from Wuppertal and I as the core team. Anni is the initiator and founder of the worldwide #JELLYWEEK 2012. I am very grateful for the opportunity to create something new with her as a passionate and smart person. And we only met once and did completely remote collaboration with using, google docs, facebook, skype etc., a tiny dose of project management of basecamphq.com – and plain phone calls are still in use too. To get a bit of the spirit, here is a short message from a New Zealand space.
Update 2012-02-07-A:
The #JELLYWEEK 2012 was a great success
… and it was a huge experience and learning space to understand the phenomena, dynamics and the advantages of the diverse “connection and collaboration tools”. I will report on the learnings in a future blog post. For now I want to complete the post above with a link to the (quick and dirty) introduction video, an introduction into the light-weight “social information architecture” for the decentral global-local event.
"Seeing Red: Millennials Are Cooler With Socialism Than Capitalism" (good.is)
US millennials dreaming of socialist utopia (bad news)
“According to a new study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 49 percent of Obama’s biggest fans—Millennials age 18 to 29—view socialism in a favorable light, compared to 43 percent who view it unfavorably.” …
The free, connection-empowered, empathic individual – with self-responsibility and social responsibility
The mythology for decades has been: “Capitalism is best – for all and for all the world”. This mythology is still crumbling rapidly as the multiple crisis are not really solved. The fatal global ecological crisis is even in the shadow of the global ecological crisis. Worse: If world economy is “back on track” this means more destruction of the planet, as long as we have future-blind growth politics instead of economics following the social and ecological rationality, a system with inbuilt “sustainability and wellbeing loops” instead of the now dominating “short profit loops”.
In reaction to this destruction of faith the old collectivist “(blood) red” mythologies raise their head again. Neosocialist collectivist systems would be an awfully bad alternative. But: The ubiquitous internet connectivity holds a disruptive potential to redesign the political economy in a quite different manner than the ideological camps of the 19th century – capitalism and socialism – could ever conceive of. And: Smart green technologies are maturing and pave the way to a viable post-fossil society.
A genuine new system, with the co-existence of individual freedom, mass-collaboration and new “headless” value streams (eventually with nearly no banks and bosses) might be a possibility to develop. We have reasons for optimism. If anyone is locked into false alternatives – liberate!
2011 has seen the Arab Spring and the global Occupy Movement. Maybe it is time to progress from protest to process and from process to production, new answers for the challenges ahead. I want to invite you to an opportunity to find companion and exchange in the diversity of the “social wave”. In the last years coworking places around the world have emerged as new spaces to probe new forms to work and collaborate.
Coworking – and beyond coworking
Coworking is a style of work which involves a shared working environment, sometimes an office, yet independent activity. Unlike in a typical office environment, those coworking are usually not employed by the same organization.Wikipedia - Today we find a growing number of cowo places around the world (May 2011: 820). For more: Global Coworking Survey (deskmag).
Coworking means not just to have a new kind of work place, but it is part of a different work culture, it is connected with the “spirit of co“, communication, connectedness, collaboration.
JellyWeek January 16 to 22 2012
“Let’s discover the sense of global coworking in the upcoming WORLDWIDE #JELLYWEEK 2012. Which important needs can be fulfilled by coworking? For which local and global problems coworking can be a part of the solution? How can coworkers use the global coworking infrastructure to foster their businesses and projects?” jellyweek.tumblr.com
This is a great opportunity to show your project and to connect with likeminded people, exchange ideas, find advice.
Never visited a coworking space? Bring your project and ideas into that orbital community around the planet! Keep upated with JellyWeek on facebook.com. Are you a coworking space and want to connect? Get on the map!
Is there a battle? Was there a battle? Is it over? However, it is time to reflect a bit on a phenomenon, which is at least symptomatic and symbolic of our times. I will try that reflection with the social foresight and the involved tech/social clash in mind. Maybe later I try to sketch some scenarios.
For sure it is about the future. And it is about the individual and societal intersts. Photo: OccupyTogetherAllTheWorld https://www.facebook.com/OccupyTogetherAllTheWorld
The mood to occupy
In my perspective the Arab spring and the “political occupying” of public
places – like the Tahir Square – is probably the precondition of that, what then was called the world wide “occupy movement”. What is the mood of the people doing that, however specific their context (as in Egypt, Greece or in US)? “Enough is enough!” and “Despite we might have not the solution to the problems, as a first step we say ‘No’”. This is my subjective verdict. And I have to to stress, how subjective this stance has to be, since the pheonomenon is very diverse and complex. And I have read and seen much, but only a subset of the media deluge. So I am trying to be careful, since I have only watched the movement from a distance, more an ethnographer than a participant.
In this rare clip from 1972, legendary psychiatrist and Holocaust-survivor Viktor Frankl delivers his powerful message about the human search for meaning — and the most important gift we can give others. TED.com ted.com/talks/…
I just unfolded some thoughts in a forum debate, provoked by some statement of Jón Þór Olafsson from Iceland. Thank you Gabriel Shalom (http://ks12.net/) for your mindfulness and work!
Jón Þór says, that in the context of arab spring etc. the observation is: Facebook makes possible that everybody knows, that everybody knows, that everybody is discontent. Great! Some points come to mind:
a) power history as media history
The printing press brought an explosion in the delivery of knowledge – with literacy as a condition.
The blogs and wikis brought an explosion in the delivery of more fine-grained knowledge plus opinion, i.e. evaluative communication
Social network activity streams deliver even more finegrained information (including noise). This socially granular informations are implicitely or explicitely evaluative. They can be conceived as implicitely political, insofar as politics is the engagement with the res publica, i.e. shared spaces, practices, social objects. QED
b) Technological connectivity results in the emergence of political connectivity
And this makes Jón Þór’s statement so dramatic – the technological connectivity induces a first order emergent property – social connectivity; the latter then induces political connectivity (aka tele(em)pathy, if you like).
So the transparancy tools make the political buildings and machinations transparent, WikiLeaks or not … The Emperor’s new clothes … This is the catalyst of change we see day by day now.
“The term social capital is still not widely understood outside of academic or political circles, however there are many organisations delivering social, economic and environmental benefit as an outcome of their work, without using the term. The SCWF believes that greater knowledge of social capital, the terminology and the structures, can help demonstrate the value of such work and facilitate progress in our communities socially, environmentally and economically to bring about a more sustainable and prosperous society.”
SCWF 2011 in Dornbirn/Austria
The 3rd Social Capital World Forum took place on 23-24 September 2011 in Dornbirn, Austria. The event has been organised by Assist Social Capital, Buro fur Zukunkftsfragen and the University of Applied Science in Dornbirn, in collaboration with the Austrian Government’s Department for Life and Evangelisches Tagungs- und Studienzentrum in Boldern, Switzerland.
The international forum in discussions about theory and practice of Social Capital
Insights
It was great to meet these great folks from different countries with very specific perspectives and multi-disciplinary insights. I realized that Social Capital has to be a central aspect in the “social wave observatory” of social foresight. Think about e.g. the riots in London in this year to understand the destructive power of negative Social Capital. And understand the role of trust and relation building in the Arab spring dynamics resulting in political transformation. The interesting question is to understand the complex dynamics of Social Capital in different contexts and settings. How to wisely create, modulate, “curate” or gardening it.
Drawing about process analogies emerging during a workshop. Neologism: "pracademics" - between practitioners and academics
It was great pleasure to attend the BETTER BETA | Design Thinking @ HSG in Lüneburg (some time ago, yes). I learned to know new people, passions and methods. Have to add an update later, for now only the hint to the fusion of design thinking and foresight in the Foresight Thinking approach. This method is very important for the social foresight toolbox I want to build here step by step.
Social Access • Social Business • Social Capital • Social Causes • Social Consumption • Social Design • Social Ecology • Social Global Change • Social Impact • Social Innovation • Social Media • Social Networks • Social Objects • Social Production • Social Ressources • Social Technology • Social Virtuality • Social Zettabytes
Blog gestartet von Willi Schroll (Foresight, strategische Zukunftsforschung, Berlin). Aktivitäten für Network-Building seit April 2011. Kontakt/Connect: xing.com/profile/Willi_Schroll, linkedin.com/in/willischroll, twitter.com/wschroll
