FuturePod gathers voices from the international field of Futures and Foresight. Through a series of podcast interviews, the founders of the field and emerging leaders share their stories, tools and experiences. The Futures and Foresight community comprises a remarkable and diverse group of individuals who span, academic, commercial and social interests.
Think you could learn Mandarin? This Kansas kindergarten classroom is Chinese-only — from by Robert Smith
Excerpts:
In a Wolf Springs Elementary School classroom with “Chinese Only Zone” signs taped to the walls, kindergarteners are learning their core subjects in the primary language of a global economic superpower located across the world.
This language-immersion class of kindergarteners is part of a new Blue Valley School District initiative to graduate high school seniors fluent in a second language, an asset school officials believe will give students a leg up as they pursue academics and careers and prepare students to participate in a global workforce.
…
Chinese Mandarin, a group of dialects spoken by more than 800 million people, is a tonal language in which the meaning of words can be reflected by voice pitch. Though its grammar is similar to English, words or phrases are represented by Chinese characters.
Besides the usual educational stresses, parents who put their children in the program would need to be committed to the program. Because these kindergarteners are expected to remain together in a Mandarin-speaking classroom all the way through high school, new immersion students can only enter the program in kindergarten.
…
While other elementary-aged students spend roughly 60 minutes studying Spanish per week, this group of kindergartens spends half of their school time each day with Pan learning math, science and social studies in Mandarin. The groups studies reading and literacy with teacher Haley Watkins in English.
“In under a minute we filled all of the slots. That afternoon we had hundreds of people on the waiting list.”
From DSC:
Wow! This is quite the K-12 cohort/immersion! Add to that type of setup tools like Cisco Webex, Blackboard Collaborate, Adobe Connect, etc. — and not to mention what happens with virtual reality in the next decade — and this type of cohort/immersion will likely be highly effective over time.
So what will the future classrooms of the world look like? My guess is that with 5G and virtual reality on the way, there will be a lot more “connections” being made in the future…with many nations/classrooms being involved.
[From my purchase of iStock #1154674846.]
FTI 2020 Trend Report for Entertainment, Media, & Technology — from futuretodayinstitute.com
Our 3rd annual industry report on emerging entertainment, media and technology trends is now available.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The rise of the lawyer — from law21.ca by Jordan Furlong
Per Jordan:
Earlier this year, I received an invitation to write the epilogue for a book called New Suits: Appetite for Disruption in the Legal World, by Michele DeStefano (founder of the groundbreaking Law Without Walls program based at the University of Miami Law School) and Guenther Dobrauz-Saldapenna (partner and leader of PwC Legal Switzerland and leader of PwC’s global legal tech efforts). New Suits is an enormously ambitious and illuminating exploration of the frontiers of technology-powered legal practice, especially for large enterprise clients and their outside counsel, and I highly recommend that you read it.
Of course, I’m no technology expert, and I felt supremely unqualified to say anything useful about the impact of blockchain, AI, RegTech, and so on. But I thought that lawyers who read New Suits, especially newly called lawyers or law students, might reach the end of the book feeling a little overwhelmed by the scale of change facing them, and wondering whether the legal world of the future would in any way resemble the one they had already entered — and if that world would need, want, or even welcome lawyers.
So I wrote what was essentially a message to those lawyers, to explain what all the forthcoming changes would mean for them, what the new legal world was going to demand of them, and what they should feel both empowered and required to demand in return. With the kind permission of the authors, and with a few small edits, here is that lengthy but heartfelt message.
So here’s what I’d very much like you to remember: What you do matters. Who you are matters. When you speak out, it has an impact. When you fall silent, that has an impact too. Do not let yourself get lost in the noise and complexity of the machine; do not lose sight of the primacy and power of true service; do not lose who you are, and who you could be, amid the upheaval and disruption to come. Out of this chaos, you can forge new meaning and greater purpose. Out of the end of one era in the legal profession’s history, you can launch the start of another.
Also see:
Per Jane Hart on LinkedIn:
Top 200 Tools for Learning 2019 is now published, together with:
PLUS analysis of how these tools are being used in different context, new graphics, and updated comments on the tools’ pages that show how people are using the tools.
The Global Landscape of Online Program Companies — from by Doug Lederman
New trove of data suggests a bigger, more complex, more varied ecosystem of companies that work with colleges to take their academic programs online.
Excerpt:
A new dataset promises to give college leaders, company officials and others involved in the online learning landscape much more information about who offers what programs, how they manage them and where the money is flowing, among other factors.
And the company behind the new data, Holon IQ, published a report today that gives a new name to the large and diversifying category of providers that are working with colleges to take their programs online: OPX, instead of OPM, for online program management companies. (More on that later.)
Also see:
Also see:
Take a tour of Google Earth with speakers of 50 different indigenous languages — from fastcompany.com by Melissa Locker
Excerpt:
After the United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages, Google decided to help draw attention to the indigenous languages spoken around the globe and perhaps help preserve some of the endangered ones too. To that end, the company recently launched its first audio-driven collection, a new Google Earth tour complete with audio recordings from more than 50 indigenous language speakers from around the world.
Excerpts:
From DSC:
That last one reminded me of why I think the Living from the Living [Class] Room vision is so powerful…
10 things we should all demand from Big Tech right now — from vox.com by Sigal Samuel
We need an algorithmic bill of rights. AI experts helped us write one.
Excerpts:
This raises the question: Who should be tasked with enforcing these norms? Government regulators? The tech companies themselves?
The moral issue here — from law21.ca by Jordan Furlong
Excerpt:
“I’m not worried about the moral issue here,” said Gordon Caplan, the co-chair of AmLaw 100 law firm Wilkie Farr, according to transcripts of wiretaps in the college admission scandal that you’re already starting to forget about. Mr. Caplan was concerned that if his daughter “was caught …she’d be finished,” and that her faked ACT score should not be set “too high” and therefore not be credible. Beyond that, all we know from the transcripts about Mr. Caplan’s ethical qualms is that “to be honest, it feels a little weird. But.”
That’s the line that stays with me, right through the “But” at the end. I want to tell you why, and I especially want to tell you if you’re a law student or a new lawyer, because it is extraordinarily important that you understand what’s going on here.
…
So why does any of this matter to lawyers, especially to young lawyers? Because of that one line I quoted.
“I mean this is, to be honest, it feels a little weird. But.”
Do you recognize that sound? That’s the sound of a person’s conscience, a lawyer’s conscience, struggling to make its voice heard.
This one apparently can’t muster much more than a twinge of doubt, a feeling of discomfort, a nagging sense of this isn’t right and I shouldn’t be doing it. It lasts for only a second, though, because the next word fatally undermines it. But. Yeah, I know, at some fundamental level, this is wrong. But.
It doesn’t matter what rationalization or justification follows the But, because at this point, it’s all over. The battle has been abandoned. If the next word out of his mouth had been So or Therefore, Mr. Caplan’s life would have gone in a very different direction.
Acts 10:34-35 New International Version (NIV) — from biblegateway.com
34 Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism 35 but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.
