Last week I was at the Horizon New Media Consortium 10 Year Retreat – The Future of Education. It was a fascinating glimpse into the world of bright-eyed educators and a few museum people who want the future of education to be something far better than it is now. If that sounds a little utopian, it should.
The Horizon Reports have always made for good reading. I contributed to some of the Horizon.Au reports in and have had a fair number of my projects included over the years as ‘examples’. These reports have more-or-less predicted most of the technology trends over the last decade, even if their timeframes are too optimistic. Their methodology – a wiki-made document compiled by hand selected specialists works especially well and avoids a lot of the traps of most futurist predictions. What is especially useful is that these wikis remain available after the reports are published – so it is possible to read the internal discussions that informed the creation of the report.
Summing up the predictions of the Horizon reports over the past decade was this great chart from Ruben Puentedura. You’ll notice recurring themes and the emergence of the social web, then mobile, then open content in the reports over the last decade.
The retreat, set outside of a stormy Austin, Texas, locked 100 people from several continents in a room with huge sheets of butcher’s paper and some great facilitation. Over two days meta-trends were identified and ideas shared. Thousands of tweets were tweeted on the #NMCHz hashtag, and many productive discussions were had.
Ed Rodley sums up the event nicely – day one and day two – over on his blog. Ed and I spent a fair bit of time throwing around ideas around the role of science museums in the modern world (from his experience at Boston and mine at Powerhouse) which should become the topic of a future blogpost.
But gnawing away at me during the Horizon Retreat was this article from the New York Times on Apple and its supply chains, and a broader follow up opinion piece in The Economist.
For all the talk of digital literacy, educating for megatrends, and the role that museums can play in fostering creativity – all this talk of open content and collaborative learning – these words continue to concern me.
The most valuable aspects of an iPhone, for instance, are its initial design and engineering, which are done in America. Now, one problem with this dynamic is that as one scales up production of Apple products, there are vastly different employment needs across the supply chain. So, it doesn’t take lots more designers and programmers to sell 50m iPhones than it does to sell 10m. You have roughly the same number of brains involved, and much more profit per brain. On the manufacturing side, by contrast, employment soars as scale grows. So as the iPhone becomes more popular, you get huge returns to the ideas produced in Cupertino, and small returns but hundreds of thousands of jobs in China.
Maybe it is just pessimism brought about by having two consecutive winters creeping in.
You can grab the summary ‘communique’ from the Retreat from the Horizon site.
2 replies on “Back to reality. Returning from the Horizon Retreat.”
The economic implications harken back (at least) to Baudrillard’s simulacrum, where information is traded instead of tangible goods, and power relationships solidify because trading information is only lucrative for those trusted to inform. Jaron Lanier thinks that we should institute a system of micropayments for producers of information, where I would pay you a cent or two for this blog post (something I’d be happy to do) by clicking over here…but the foundation of Internet would shift from Wall Street-style to Farmer’s Market-style.
Educational megatrends and the picture discussing how the Internet is changing our thoughts on education make me think about Udacity, the initiative by (formerly) Stanford’s Sebastian Thrun to educate hundreds of thousands of people in online courses. If learning requires a community, how can community happen in a digital space with 500,000 people doing independent worksheets?
I like that many museums have gone participatory, but there still seems to be a disconnect between the real museum space and the virtual. A good virtual museum should also be an augmented reality, where it enhances a real visit rather than replaces it. Otherwise, we’re going to get so far from the gallery that patrons won’t care about the real space (and the real artifacts in it) at all.
It
may be true that many museums have upgraded their notions of
participation but I agree
there does still seem to be ‘… a disconnect between the real museum
space and the virtual.’ Rather than wondering about
whether face to face interaction was competing with technology
interaction in the museum I was thinking perhaps there is a way to
just by-pass the question.
—
what if the question is not about competition between
old and new, or people and technology, virtual or real space – it’s
about the fact that museums and their resources are so
exhibition focused.
–
exhibitions have always been the tactic museums use to minimise
engagement between staff and collections rather than maximise it –
set up an self contained, entry/exit, experience call it an exhibiton
about ..fill in title here… and then manage the visitors.
Given
all the things museums do, the size of their collections, the number
of people they employ, the scale of their buildings, their
integration with educational goals, the trust the public invests in
them surely we can do something better than endlessly recycling
exhibition models –
Perhaps
changing the concept of museums as a place of exhibitions, even
getting rid of exhibitions altogether may result in some really
modern museum thinking?