Future of Education

An HR Manager Learns About World of Warcraft

F. Kuehmayer — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:45:33 +0000

I had a discussion with an HR manager the other day and he told me a story about a 19 yr old job applicant.

They went through his CV, discussed all the usual interview questions, until, finally, the HR manager asked the young man he does in his spare time.

The applicant responded “Well, I play World of Warcraft” (which is an online computer game), and he said, I am head of a guild of people from around the world, we play in teams and we set ourselves the targets that we want to reach in the game. And then we go and plan our strategies to reach these objectives.

So the HR manager realized, here was a 19 year old who remote-manages a virtual team, distributed around the globe, who he has never met. He drives the team to work together to complete projects, online. Needless to say he got the job.

This is not to say we should use WoW for educational purposes. But it is to say that in the light of the digital lifestyle we have to ask if our education systems cope with the realities of our youth.

Two Paradoxes

F. Kuehmayer — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 10:28:44 +0000

The paradox of the knowledge society is that it does not ask students to acquire more knowledge.

It would be an impossible task to keep up with the speed of new knowledge:
Per day, 3.000 new books are published.
The amount of technical information is doubling every 2 years.

Image you start a 4 year graduate program in any technical field: Half of what you learned during the first year may be outdated by the time you get your degree.

And it is not only the amount of information that is growing so rapidly, it is also the accessibility.

The largest search engines on the internet combined receive about 9 billion search requests per month. Microsoft, Yahoo, Google have changed to way we can access information forever.

And mind you, in its current form, the Internet is only about 10 years old. Think about what will happen during the next 2 or 3 decades.

So the knowledge economy does not necessarily ask for acquiring new knowledge, but it requires to learn how to create, to find, to combine, to use knowledge in new ways and in better ways.

These are deeply human competencies. What this means: In a paradox way the amount of technology surrounding us emphasizes our focus on our own human strengths, such as creativity and social skills.

The Hardest Thing

F. Kuehmayer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:56:12 +0000

“The hardest thing about education is to be ambitious enough.”

Prof. Stephen Heppel

IT Businesses Dwarf Europe’s R&D Spendings

F. Kuehmayer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:50:08 +0000

If you take the research spending of Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM and HP combined, they are spending more on R&D than Sweden, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands do. And this is not meant relative, but in absolute numbers (US$).

In fact, if you take Microsoft alone, their R&D budget exceeds the R&D spending of Belgium as a country, in absolute numbers.

Europe Cannot Win The Fast-Food-Battle

F. Kuehmayer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:42:29 +0000

Europe has been hit by the worldwide economic crises, and many companies now focus on reducing their cost, lowering their cost structure to survive. A lot of this is true and right.

But we must be clear that Europe can never win the global cost competition. Europe can only win if it climbs up the ladder, higher up in the value chain.

Consequently, productivity is to be defined differently. No longer is it a question of amount of output, but it is a question of value of output, of quality of output. To put differently: If you want to play in “Haute cusine”, it is not about the size of the servings, but about the quality of the recipe.

Without reducing our standard of living, Europe cannot win the low-cost fast food battle, we can only win if we focus on the top. We need better recipes and we need better chefs. And not just in restaurants but in all job areas in every industry.

This is why we need to drive innovation and creativity.

The Future Is The Undiscovered Land.

F. Kuehmayer — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 19:31:57 +0000

Education is the window through which we see this land.

Children who are born today will retire in around 2075. The economic, social and technical developments of the last 50 years provide a projection screen for the society of the future and reveal how much – or better, how little – success we can have in making accurate statements about the world 50 years from now. Nonetheless, we are aware that this is the world which we are preparing our children for by means of today’s education system.

If there is one thing we know for sure: We don’t live in times of gradual change anymore, rather we live in exponential times. This is why gradual improvements in the education system will not be sufficient anymore.

It is necessary to deeply rethink our education system – this is why we have launched “The Future of Education”, a research project to understand what needs to be done and to formulate a vision for a future-oriented education system.

We are not under the illusion that changing the education system is a simple task. Nevertheless, we want to reveal opportunities and chances, even if they may appear utopian from the current perspective, because it is the education sector which should be the spearhead of society in a sustainable future. With our project we would like to contribute to a spirit of optimism which at its core always poses the question of how to facilitate and develop potential.

However, we don’t think about our project as being an answer – it should be a starting point. We want to start the dialogue: your opinions and reactions are important and valuable to us.