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.
The Rise of Do-It-Yourself Education — from insidehighered.com by Ray Schroeder
Do it yourself is more than just a trend for crafts and home improvements — it is an ethos that has reached higher education.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
More than 50 percent of the DIY-ers are between 24 and 44 years of age, and the numbers are growing. This trend is immutable now; it is continuing to grow in numbers and expand into new fields every year.
…
The pervasive DIY mind-set has spilled over into independent learning online, as Dian Schaffhauser writes:
A do-it-yourself mindset is changing the face of education worldwide, according to new survey results. Learners are “patching together” their education from a “menu of options,” including self-teaching, short courses and bootcamps, and they believe that self-service instruction will become even more prevalent for lifelong learning. In the United States specifically, 84 percent of people said learning would become even more self-service the older they get.
Heutagogy is the study and practice of self-determined learning.
As enrollments decline nationally, so many individual universities continue to experience declines year after year. Is it not worth considering these broad societal changes that are moving students toward skilling and upskilling via DIY, rather than marketing the same degrees in the same structure that is producing losses year after year? Who is leading this initiative at your university?
‘Academic capitalism’ is reshaping faculty life. What does that mean? — from edsurge.com by Rebecca Koenig
Excerpt:
Professors have long savored their position outside of commercial systems. But these days, there’s plenty of signs of capitalism within the academy—scholars seek support from funders in hopes that the findings will lead to commercial applications, departments market their courses to students as pathways to lucrative careers and universities replace tenure-track positions with adjunct jobs to cut costs.
Last week on the latest installment of EdSurge Live, our monthly online discussion forum, we dug into the topic, often referred to as “academic capitalism.”
Meet the new era of IoT tracking technologies — from medium.com by Vasil Tarasevich
Excerpt:
IoT or Internet of things has empowered a massive change in how machines can communicate with each other and opened room for surreal technology. Today, we have billions of interconnected devices, digital machines, people, objects and even animals provided with unique identifier capable of transferring data over a scalable network without any human intervention.
This has brought a radical change in how this exceptional technology can be applied to tracking and tagging objects and how these data can be perceived to know their locations and even improve their existing routes. Whether we consider the old RFID tags or the latest NFC, we live in an era where obtaining information is never a hassle.
Top IoT tracking Technologies
While there are a lot of emerging IoT tracking technologies like BLE, Zigbee, RFID, LTE Advanced, GPS, LiFi, LPWAN, and NFC, we have enlisted the top 3 tracking technologies.
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
Welcome to the future! The future of work is… — from gettingsmart.com
Excerpt:
The future of work is here, and with it, new challenges — so what does this mean for teaching and learning? It means more contribution and young people learning how to make a difference. In our exploration of the #futureofwork, sponsored by eduInnovation and powered by Getting Smart, we dive into what’s happening, what’s coming and how schools might prepare.
Everyday Media Literacy — from routledge.com by Sue Ellen Christian
An Analog Guide for Your Digital Life, 1st Edition
Description:
In this graphic guide to media literacy, award-winning educator Sue Ellen Christian offers students an accessible, informed and lively look at how they can consume and create media intentionally and critically.
The straight-talking textbook offers timely examples and relevant activities to equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to assess all media, including news and information. Through discussion prompts, writing exercises, key terms, online links and even origami, readers are provided with a framework from which to critically consume and create media in their everyday lives. Chapters examine news literacy, online activism, digital inequality, privacy, social media and identity, global media corporations and beyond, giving readers a nuanced understanding of the key concepts and concerns at the core of media literacy.
Concise, creative and curated, this book highlights the cultural, political and economic dynamics of media in our contemporary society, and how consumers can mindfully navigate their daily media use. Everyday Media Literacy is perfect for students (and educators) of media literacy, journalism, education and media effects looking to build their understanding in an engaging way.
Drones from CVS and Walgreens are finally here—and they’re bringing Band-Aids — from fastcompany.com by Ruth Reader
With UPS and Google sister company Wing as partners, the big pharmacies are starting to deliver pills, Cheez-Its, and first-aid supplies by drone.
From DSC:
Add those drones to the following amassing armies:
What happens when employers can read your facial expressions? — from nytimes.com by Evan Selinger and Woodrow Hartzog
The benefits do not come close to outweighing the risks.
Excerpts:
The essential and unavoidable risks of deploying these tools are becoming apparent. A majority of Americans have functionally been put in a perpetual police lineup simply for getting a driver’s license: Their D.M.V. images are turned into faceprints for government tracking with few limits. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are using facial recognition technology to scan state driver’s license databases without citizens’ knowing. Detroit aspires to use facial recognition for round-the-clock monitoring. Americans are losing due-process protections, and even law-abiding citizens cannot confidently engage in free association, free movement and free speech without fear of being tracked.
“Notice and choice” has been an abysmal failure. Social media companies, airlines and retailers overhype the short-term benefits of facial recognition while using unreadable privacy policies
and vague disclaimers that make it hard to understand how the technology endangers users’ privacy and freedom.
From DSC:
This article illustrates how far behind the legal realm is in the United States when we look at where our society is at with wrestling with emerging technologies. Dealing with this relatively new *exponential* pace of change is very difficult for many of our institutions to deal with (higher education and the legal realm come to my mind here).
2019 Legal Trends Report — from clio.com
Excerpts:
Get access to the legal industry’s first longitudinal analysis on how law firms succeed—and how they struggle. You’ll also get critical insights into how today’s legal consumer shops for legal services.
This year’s report also includes results from our in-depth analysis of law firm responsiveness, where we put firms to the test with 1,000 emails and 500 phone calls.
Also see:
