Join our May 2015 Summit
Edcast — Future Learning 20/20
Future Learning Lab´s Spring 2015 conference in Silicon Valley is set for May 30th. It will be a collaboration between Future Learning Lab, H Star Institute at Stanford University, the recently established Zephyr Institute in Palo Alto and Edcast — a recent addition to the world of on-line learning providers, with a home base in Palo Alto.
Edcast is the main sponsor behind the conference — under the banner “Edcast – Future Learning 20/20”. We first met up with EdCast in October 2014, at our Stanford-based workshop Imagine Classrooms of Tomorrow. Since then we have been pursuing several ways to collaborate.
In October 2015, Edcast was invited to a Future Learning Lab workshop, which was the beginning of several promising talks on future collaboration.
Future Learning Lab is a network of entrepreneurs, educators and academics who share an interest in the future of education and the future of life-long learning. We come from a range of countries, and a range of disciplines. All of conferences and meeting points include a practical “maker” aspect. This particular workshop entailed perspectives on European challenges, and the potential for a collaboration on sustainable development — one of our project areas.
We learned from Edcast about exciting plans to promote international conversations on the future of learning in a globalized world. We, on the other hand, also found a receptive ear to our efforts at creating an international meeting space that actively promotes global collaboration on a practical level. We are concerned with students worldwide, with teacher and with learners. We are concerned with a mounting skills deficit.
World learning will never be reduced to a sum of MOOCs or lesser “OCCs”, but education is being transformed; educators have to learn to think in an on-line paradigm, to an increasing extent. Universities have to scale up their support eco systems, and barriers need to be broken down between academic disciplines that now face new challenges for collaboration and co-production of learning materials. Teachers training curricula will have to be reworked. And private-public collaboration faces new challenges with the coming of globalized education provision.
At the May 30th conference we will seek to highlight some of these challenges, as seen from the users´s point of view. Edcast will bring its network, H Star has a long history for international collaboration on these issues, and we are very fortunate to have the strengths of these stakeholders with us to look at the challenge from an international (not global, but inter-national) perspective. Several H Star staff members have been with us in Europe for events several years now, underscoring the relevance of what we try to do.