Future tense

Day two of the ICL 2008 Conference in Villach has been underway now for a few hours. We have sat through three more keynotes, and a full breakout session, and now it's time for lunch. The morning plenary session was again, mixed in it's content and appeal. Nikitas Kastis (Lambrakis Foundation, Greece - pictured above in conversation with another conference delegate) was for me, the outstanding contribution of the morning. His Wordle tagcloud and link is below, showing the key components of his speech, but just as a quick summary: He asked how we can define the future of education and presented some scenarios from his recent project Foresight. Knowledge, he said, is no longer formed by one person but by communities, groups, etc. We can all be creators as well as consumers of knowledge. The current education system does not support or address these challenges, he declared. Learning now is about knowledge creation and how this can be applied in real settings.

Class quote of the day, (from a mad professor video he showed): 'Don't ask a technologist or a scientist, or even a futurologist about the future - ask a kindergarten teacher. They know what society will be like in the next generation. Things are not the future - the kids are!'