It’s hard to believe both Minding the Future and OpenVA are less than a week away now. I’ve finally gotten the titles and abstracts of the 10-minute talks happening in the afternoon along with a sneak preview of some of the issues to be discussed in the closing panel discussion. This should be a pretty amazing day, and I think we should be able to stream it all live at http://ds106.tv. Stay tuned for more on that front. In the meantime, feast your eyes on this, a conference about the future of education that can actually resist the popular urge to advocate systemically dismantling and defunding higher ed
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2:30-3:00 Alan Levine’s “Memorable/Unmemorable”
If asked whether they would like to be remembered, almost no one would answer “No”. But multiple choice questions can be trickier than they seem. The education future some are painting for us is a path focused on a destination, reached via an unmemorable journey.

3:00 -3:30 Kin Lane’s “Access, Interoperability, Privacy and Security Of Technology Will Set The Stage For The Future of Education”
The future of education will be fueled by the access and interoperability introduced by common, everyday web and mobile applications that our children use in school and at home, and we depend on as adults in our workplaces and personal lives. By providing proper access and interoperability in applications, bundled with the healthy education of end-users around these features, and fully respecting user’s privacy and security, technologists can help define the future of education and evolve the next generation of citizens who are web literate by default, and never stop learning, creating and sharing.

3:30 – 4:00: Audrey Watters’s “A Future with Only 10 Universities”
Sebastian Thrun’s claims that in 50 years, we’ll only have 10 institutions “delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them.” What (horror) has to happen in order to get us to “ten.”

4:00 – 4:30 David Wiley’s “Implications of the Open Content Infrastructure”
Open infrastructures radically decrease the cost (and therefore risk) of experimentation, which consequently increases the pace of innovation. For example, the open communications infrastructure known as the internet radically reduced the cost of experimenting with new services and business models dealing in information (c.f. the costs and risks of experimenting with pre-internet “publication” business models for disseminating information or enabling communication). Over the last decade, individuals, foundations, and governments have built an open content infrastructure (OER) on top of the open communications infrastructure (internet). This open content infrastructure has enabled a second wave of low cost / low risk experimentation in a range of content-related fields including education and research.

4:30 – 5:00:  Jon Udell’s “Observable work and the reinvention of apprenticeship”
For most of human history the work of the world was directly observable. A young person saw, and often participated in, the farming and the hunting and the building. Then the adults vanished from the scene. They had all gone to the factory or the office. Work became opaque to the young.

Now work is again becoming observable. Increasingly both the processes and products of work are represented digitally, in ways that can enable learners and practitioners to connect. Will universities nurture those connections?

5:00 – 6:00 Break/Food and Refreshments

6:00 – 7:30 Panel on the Future of Higher Ed moderated by Jeff McCLurken 

This panel will include all of the day’s speakers responding to a wide variety of questions—a sampling of whcih can be found below:

• What have been the most exciting developments in higher education over the last 5 years?
• What will be the most exciting developments in higher education in the next 5 years?What developments concern you?
• Who are the major players (people, institutions, businesses, foundations) in the digitally enabled higher education landscape?  What are their goals?  Who pays for this transformation?
• What role does the defunding of higher education, especially at the state level, have to do with these changes?
• What is the role of the state and federal government in these conversations?  What is it likely to be, going forward?
• Business and technology leaders have been telling those of us in higher education that we have our heads in the sand, that MOOCS in particular are going to wash over us and we will be out of business. So, do public institutions of higher education have their collective heads in the sand when it comes to MOOCs, online learning, and “electronic delivery revolution”? If so, what are we missing and why?