Accelerating Change Conference

I am attending this conference by a stroke of favor. I was given a volunteer position. I'm in search of inspiration for a master's project. I want to find relevant and bright thinking. Accelerating Change is the third annual pilgrimage of futurists. Futurists are people who think a lot about the future and no future we would recognize, they think about how suddenly technology will advance beyond our ability to understand this is an event called the Singularity.

I am in particular interested in how these people envision education changing in the future.

Panels of interest
Teaching innovation (Saturday, 3:50 - 4:20pm)
Why Gamers will save the world (Saturday, 10:00 - 10:15pm)
Educating our Machines (Saturday, 1:40 - 2:40pm)
Education: Rebuilding our Bypassing our Institutions? (Sunday, 10:45am 12:00pm)

Why attend a conference on Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence amplification?
The pace of technological change and human's thirst ofr power outstrip our ability to keep up. We need to design intelligent machines to help use compute and eventually fly our planes and take care of our demands. Education at its core is getting people to change and ultimately to adapt better to the world around them. There must be a connection here to amplifying human understanding and machine understanding.

Kurzweil Notes
Pretty amazing guy. Ray Kurzweil designed the synthesizer wrote books on the Age of Spiritual machines and will soon publish his latest The Singularity is Near, Human brain's power is pattern recognition by 2029 the computer will be 1000 times the computation of the human brain. We will have finished reverse engineering the human brain. We will merge with this technology it won't be the rise of the machines, we will benefit form neural implants, nano-bots in our bodies to, full immersion virtual reality withing our nervous systems, biological intelligent is essentially fixed. Our brain computing is fixed computers By the 2040s it will billions of times more powerful. Information will be pervasive. The brain, emotions, thought will be understood in mathematical terms. Math can be romantic It will be able to describe everything about us.

In Pakistan, China and Africa universities are using material from MIT teach. Currently 60% of their curriculum is online, soon 100%. Kurzweil imagines that pretty soon most learning will be available free and accessible to everyone. Virtual reality provides the ability to overcome the limits of geography. Very soon it will be full immersion, 360 visual, audio in classrooms through with one barrier of language. Kurzweil has a tool that does real time audio translation. He could speak to a woman in Germany while speaking english. So even those barriers might disappear.


Annotating the Planet by John Udell, InfoWorld
This was a presentation on new technologies like google maps that allow us to tag physical spaces in the world. Soon you will be able to go around with your cellphone and leave your memories at a lampost. You can be in anyone place and know about the other things around you. People have access to more information about their world and where they are in the world. You can have a url to your home. You can get a google map of your bike route. Interesting features: You can have a url for physical locations. You can get a pedometer between physical locations. See cell towers on a google map at cellreception.com. Dodgeball a social networking service for mobile phones and Plazes can actually tag your location.There is some controversy on making your house viewable and visible on the web. Book: The transparent Society, Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between... - talks about how technology is making our private information more public and whether all information should be publically available to everyone. Should everyone be visible to everyone?
Gem: Audio podcasting streams linking into an age old vocal tradition of sharing lessons.

My reflections: Predicting the future of Education
I've been asked to submit a quote for the Internet Predictions database. Education in the future will change with the increase of information. Information is increasing exponentially. Today people are blogging about their toys eventually our toys will start blogging about us - just increasing the data that's out there piling more information on an already burgeoning network. As such our already taxed brains, with its finite broadband we will need help filtering and finding valuable information. That value can not possibly continue to be brokered by discreet individuals or institutions. So as the next wave of information approaches it will be small groups of learners deciphering the "education." The future of the internet and the future of education will be community brokered education.

Imagine every week you attend something called a Learning Indaba where you meet with a group of people to learn about a subject. Indaba is an african word, a Zulu word, that means gathering. It's when people in the community come together to share on an issue. So these Learning indaba are a gathering of people in meatspace or virtual space where there is no single teacher present. In fact everyone is a teacher. They share on what they've grokked through the internet on that subject. Learning happens when people share what they've mastered and through that a group view of that subject emerges. That group view would be something people than return to the internet to share with other people. As other indaba's research your subject they might access and a refeference your material. The popular and better rated material will bubble to the top. It sounds a lot like wiki's, yes? We want to evolve wikis and have them used by more people. Right wikis are swimming around in single pools of The challenge today is Today what we do when we have more demand than capacity we add machines.


I was in a place where people can say upload my brain to the matrix and no one blinks. These people are in a different world than the average golden arch's french fry munching Walmart shopper. They believe in a world where combining your brain with computers and being migrating from a single brain to a multibrained organism is a significant evoltionary step as moving from a single cell to multicelled organism. I'm not so impressed with our ability to handle this power. I over heard one guy describe a scene in the men's bathroom the crux of it was the We better start evolving fast otherwise he worries about the advent of all of this technology. We are just not all that evolved and apparently some guy's aim wasn't either.


Teaching Innovation Terry Winograd
Teaching design is teaching a way of thinking. Relevant book/article "Problem Solving" Simon, Science of the Artificial. Design thinking should be inspired by the people who are using it. It is characterized "enlightened trial and error is better than a flawless intellect" is a statement that speaks to iterative design. Good design is innovative, user centered, iterative, integrative (multiple views) and reflective.


Why Gamers will save the world by Cory Ondrejka
Information is increasing , a lot of what goes into winning games looks like a science, Thinking in terms of scientific method that would be characterizing the problem. Exploration, strategizing, experimentation, and challenges are all involved in science method. Real life educators are applying methods to teach people to build games from real gamers. Apolyton University designed by gamers to teach new people.

Vocabs
TC - creating a new game
Mod - changing features
Skin - audio, visuals

Gatto was number one teachers for three years in NY and then quit. He is writing a documentary called the Fourth Purpose which say the schools used to have three purposes now there is four: be a good citizen, good person, bring out something unique from the child. But now there is a fourth purpose world School is teaching people how to be consumers. See: Six Lessons of Teaching by Jon Taylor Gatto See: NYLF Good to Know Blog
Believes that school shouldn't be forced. Fab Labs with Neil Gershenfeld at MIT. Creates these labs in the inner city of Boston that allows students to create 3-D models just created her name sketched into plastic.


Rebuilding our Bypassing our Institutions? - Panel
Ruzena Bajcszy, Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society, UC Berkeley
Alan Kay, Squeak, Croquet
Shows a Squeak that combines the croquet platform and allows you to drop in pictures and annotate them. It is based on the work of Alan Kay. Also showed a 3D imaging technology that can capture movement for import into any 3D environment. Educational applications: students learn better from 3D movement vs video, you can use 3D video capture to superimpose the learners movements onto the teachers. Also useful for creating immersive.

Spiritual
Traditional learning is based on external data, input limited to the five senses, disregards intuition, association, memory, inspiration, subjective analysis, influence by prevailing ideas. Intelligent learning is based on educational learning theories, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, incorporates social and emotional intelligence. Meditation alters the quality and the process of thought by looking at thought patterns and empowering the person generating the thoughts, you to change them. Meditation gets you to experience the information becoming a part of your knowledge bank because you acquire the knowledge at the level of consciousness. Teaches you to stabilize before acquiring new thoughts. The ability to focus and discipline your mind enables you to learn better and in every stage of your life. To incorporate it into learning: start them with clearing exercises, incorporate meditation, encourage reflection.

Recommended reading: The Diamond Age : Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book) (Paperback)

Croquet
A 3D space
Croquet is an open source tool for 3D collaborative development. Features: create and manipulate 3D objects, share and manipulate 3D objects in a shared virtual space, import flash . Spaces determine how you interact and what you look like, draw in 3D space. It is based on open GL and written in SmallTalk. Not written in java and is cross platform working on both Mac and PC. Can look at data in a spreadsheet in 3-D. Essential to the collaboration is seeing the person there and manipulating thing.

Books: Accelerando by Charles Stross - a fiction story about the coming of the Singularity