I recently read an article about a condition called body dysmorphic disorder, another lens on bio-distress, a trend explained in the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning. It’s a type of mental illness that causes those afflicted to just see the pieces of their faces–not the overall shape of their faces. Overly obsessed by the imperfections of the pieces, patients often seek multiple plastic surgeries. According to the article, plastic surgery almost never fixes their unhappiness about their appearance: 81 percent are dissatisfied with results of cosmetic treatments.

A study about how these patients literally “see” themselves is being led by Dr. Jamie Feusner psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “It turns out that people with this condition have abnormal brain function when it comes to looking at pictures of their own faces…When viewing themselves in photographs, patients with BDD underutilize parts of the brain used in seeing the face’s overall shape and size,” says Feusner.

“The study is ‘groundbreaking’ in its demonstration that patients with BDD are too focused on the details aren’t able to see the whole picture when they see themselves”, said Sabine Wilhelm, director of the BDD Clinic and Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the study.
I see (at least) two connections to a greater sociological phenomena: 

1. Is this illness a symptom of a much larger bio-distress as mentioned in the 2020 Forecast that says. “greater threats to human and environmental health from climate change, pollution, war, extreme urbanization, and other natural and human-made disasters will in the next decade create new stresses on minds and bodies.”
2. I cannot help but be reminded of the systems thinking axiom, “If you optimize the parts of the system, you are guaranteed to sub-optimize the whole (larger) system.” Tinkering with the individual pieces of the system–the details–will not enhance the “whole.” This kind of near-sightedness, that sees only the details and not the interconnections and interrelatedness of whole system, can be attributed to most system failures.

One last intersting thing that the article mentions is that although findings are early, one possibility for patients with BDD is that they be retrained to see their own faces. “What we need to do in cognitive behavioral therapy treatment development is to really enhance efforts at teaching patients how to see the big picture,” Wilhelm said.

Do any of us really see the big picture? Perhaps we have to retrain our ways of thinking and seeing.

Google SketchUp, ZD650 printer, Cloud Computing, oh my!   The technologies that are giving rise to the Maker Economy  are amazing.  But when it comes to sustained and transformative change, taking a closer look at where the Maker Economy driver intersects with other drivers is where things get really exciting. 

One of my favorite intersections is between the Maker Economy and Platforms of Resilience because it holds the promise of an expanded local economy while redefining relationships with the broader community in a way that extends health and well-being to all. A beautiful example of this intersection exists today in Homeboy Industries.  Created by Fr. Gregory Boyles, Homeboy is the result of Fr. Boyles’ commitment to addressing the issue of gangs in Los Angeles through employment.   Homeboy runs five local businesses where rival gang members work side by side with each other (Homeboy Bakery, Homegirl Cafe, Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy/Homegirl Merchandise and Homeboy Maintenance).

Of course, this doesn’t happen overnight or without additional support.  The profits from the businesses help fund everything from mental health counseling, free tattoo removal, a charter school, job placement and training, and a huge range of curricular offerings from anger management to domestic violence to parenting.  Homeboy didn’t start out offering all of these services, but seeing the needs of those they were serving, they flexibly and responsively adapted.   Homeboy utilizes the principles of resiliency as it strives to create the same in the individuals it serves.

Reading about Homeboy makes me wonder… what would learning look like if schools, instead of being wedded to one standardized model, had the same adaptive and creative ability to respond to learners that Homeboy has as it responds to former gang members?  Is there a way for schools to consider the concepts behind these drivers to become more connected to the surrounding community? What other businesses and/or organizations might be built to better serve the community on multiple levels?  Answering these questions might lead to ideas worth getting really excited about!

Before his first title bout with Sonny Liston, former World Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali once said, “Your fists can’t hit what your eyes can’t see.”  The same can be said for the modern day bully.  While I am certainly not advocating fighting, or any kind of violence, when dealing with a bullying situation, my father used to tell me that the easiest way to handle a bully was to stand up to them and show them you’re not afraid.  This was much easier to do when the bully was on a playground or in the school yard.  How do you stand up to the modern-day bully, the cyberbully?

 First, let me explain cyberbullying.  According to the website stopcyberbullying.org, cyberbullying is defined as, “…when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones.”  While there are countless incidents of cyberbullying, the most recent resulted in Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old Irish immigrant living near Boston, MA, committing suicide after, “Some students made mean-spirited comments to Phoebe in school and on the way home from school, but also through texting and social-networking Web sites,” according to Dan Smith, principal of the South Hadley High School Phoebe attended.

 Highlighted as part of New Civic Discourse on the 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning, New Civic Literacy allows digital natives to bring participatory media into the civic sphere.  While there are so many positive aspects to New Civic Literacy, cyberbullying is clearly an example of how social media can be misused.

 To learn more about cyberbullying, visit stopcyberbullying.org.  To learn more about preventing and stopping cyberbullying, click here.

Recently I read the William Gibson book Pattern Recognition, because I have been interested in the deeper meaning of one of the six drivers of change on our 2010 Forecast. The catch-phrase on the Forecast for Pattern Recognition is “An extremely visible world demands new sensemaking.” The key sentence in the overview reads, “New tools for visualizing data will require new skills in discerning meaningful patterns.” Like many terms on the forecast, “pattern recognition” makes metaphorical use of computer science lingo, where pattern recognition is a term from the field of artificial intelligence meaning the ability of systems to recognize patterns in data. It includes capabilities ranging from image analysis to speech recognition.

Well, in Gibson’s compelling book (which you can buy for your Kindle), as in the Forecast, pattern recognition is a capability - perhaps the defining capability - of human beings. It has become more important now that the world is changing so fast. Without a stable enough world to fully imagine our future as continuous with the past, we are left with what a Gibson character describes as “risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.” This is one way of explaining the methodology underlying the Forecast itself, which involves recognizing and extrapolating today’s societal trends. But it is also a skill we need to cultivate, and not just for analyzing data.

I see pattern recognition as a form of intelligence. You can find it in yourself and in your children. One of my sons was miraculously able to recognize patterns of action in any sport, and the other was equally fantastic at seeing patterns in language and literature. The ability to see patterns in life itself is a survival skill today just as much as it was when human beings were hunters and needed to recognize tracks. It seems to me a key skill for resilience: seeing the pattern helps you act sensibly in response to whatever comes at you, even if it is unfamiliar.

Pattern recognition, like intelligence, takes many forms. I am not sure what education does or should do to cultivate it in its many forms. Probably it involves the same kind of respectful personal relationship that is key to any learning. I feel a bit pessimistic about the degree to which today’s teachers are encouraged to approach teaching in that spirit.

As described by The Biomimicry Institute, biomimicry ”(from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new science that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems.” For example, people have created non-toxic adhesives inspired by geckos and energy efficient buildings inspired by termite mounds and have studied leaves to invent a better solar cell.  As the Institute describes it, “The core idea is that nature, imaginative by necessity, has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with.” 

They say that we can learn what works by studying adaptations that have evolved among animals, plants, and microbes.  Indeed, they view such emulation as a necessary human survival strategy and as a path toward a sustainable future.

By cultivating a community of people around these ideas, The Biomimicry Institute exemplifies the trend, as described by KnowledgeWorks’ 2020 Forecast:  Creating the Future of Learning, toward networked artisans, whereby inventors, tinkerers, and craftsmen form networks to collaborate and celebrate their creations.  This trend forms part of The Maker Economy driver of change, which suggests that we will move toward increasingly localized economies that make use of flexible fabrication technologies and collaborative approaches to create new ways of intersecting with the broader global economy.

One implication of The Maker Economy is that design promises to become a basic skill, like reading or math, no longer being the purview of specially trained experts.  To me, biomimicry extends the idea of what constitutes design – and therefore of what skills and orientations people will need in order to contribute successfully to our new economies – to include new sources (such as those geckos, termite mounds, and leaves) as well as an evolving understanding of how our human economic endeavors are necessarily situated in, and must be mindful of, a broader environmental context from which we cannot separate ourselves.

As a design orientation becomes more prevalent, and as biomimicry increasingly becomes part of designing for a sustainable future, we will need to consider when and how to incorporate it into learning experiences.

Some educators have already begun to do so.  For example, Prasad Boradkar (Arizona State University, InnovationSpace), Marjan Eggermont (University of Calgary, Schulich School of Engineering), and Tom McKeag (University of California, Berkeley, and California College of the Arts) recently participated on the education panel at a Biomimicry Conference that The Biomimicry Institute hosted with the San Diego Zoo.  To support more educators in incorporating biomimicry into their teaching, The Biomimicry Institute holds an annual summit on biomimicry education at the university level, hosts an educators’ network, and develops K-12 curricula that can stand alone or be part of larger units on science, math, and other subjects.

How much weight should we give this approach as we look toward the future of learning?  How might it intersect with other ways of preparing for the future – such as increasingly hands-on and authentic learning experiences, not to mention the movement toward eco-schools – to form a rich tapestry of learning experiences?  Are there ways in which the design of learning itself might benefit from studying adaptation and evolution in nature?

On October 28, I had the opportunity to hear world-renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva speak as part of the Ecology and Sustainability: Food and Agriculture lecture series being hosted by Xavier University’s Ethics/Religion and Society program this academic year.  Shiva’s latest book, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis (2008), links industrial agriculture and climate change.

In her talk of the same name, Shiva spoke about how our globalized industrial agriculture system, with its heavy use of chemicals, has waged war on the world’s soil by depleting its biodiversity.  It has also undermined community independence and human health by promoting dependence on chemical companies and patented seeds instead of cultivating the health of the planet.

To me, this discussion represents an insightful example of the bio-distress trend highlighted by KnowledgeWorks’ 2020 Forecast: Creating the Future of Learning.  This trend describes how threats to our biological, ecological, and built environments will increasingly drain resources and demand coordinated responses.  In keeping with that trend, Shiva detailed some of the damage done by chemical agriculture but also pointed the way toward a healthier response.

She shared some staggering statistics about the impacts of chemical agriculture:

• Ironically, 560 million of the world’s hungriest people are food producers who cannot afford to feed themselves adequately because they are paying off debt
• In India, the government has attributed 300,000 farmer suicides over the last decade to debt
• Only 12% of the world’s potential food is being eaten, with the other 88% becoming waste along the chain of production and distribution or being used to produce biofuels. 

In face of such statistics, Shiva argues that the only path toward food security is through small farms and ecological principles.  She speaks of moving from a dead carbon economy based on fossil fuels and charcoals toward a living carbon economy in which we reclaim our civilizations on the basis of soil.

Our challenge, she says, is to rebuild the community of organisms in the soil as well as the human community that depends on it. 

Shiva argues that we will need to develop transition plans to help people move into local ecological food economies and that we will need to return to a sense of place in order to address the global ecological crisis.  For me this guidance connects with the 2020 Forecast’s smart localism trend, which describes how communities can increase their resilience by developing new solutions for complex challenges as they play out at local levels; and with the maker economy driver of change, which highlights how we will increasingly rely upon customized local economies that connect with the broader global economy.

Indeed, Shiva sees the shift from oil-based to sustainable agriculture as pointing the way to such an economic transition: as she said during the talk, “Oil gave us monopolies; soil will give us local economies.”

It seems to me that we will have much to learn as we explore paths toward greater ecological and economic sustainability, and that we might need new structures to support that learning.  As my own experiments in procuring more of my food from local sources have highlighted, and as a panel discussion on running community supported agriculture programs that I facilitated last week for Cincinnati’s Turner Farm reinforced, these paths are not straightforward.  Finding mixes of solutions that work for people with modern lives can be complex, and earning a living by growing food continues to be tough, even with increasing community support.  But being in conversation about options seems like a way to uncover and create together the solutions that we will need to manage increasing food insecurity and climate degradation, as well as other facets and impacts of bio-distress.

At the recent Pegasus 2009 conference in Seattle, “Now More Than Ever: Critical Skills for a Courageous Organizations,” I had the opportunity to hear Bob Stilger of The Berkana Institute and Teresa Posakony of The Berkana Institute and Art of Hosting discuss their approach to systems change.  In a session called “Whatever the Challenge, Community Is the Answer,” they described a double-loop approach to how change occurs in living systems.

According to this approach, a diagram of which I have attempted to reproduce from my notes below, once awareness that a system is broken begins to emerge, some people need to keep the current system running and shepherd it down gently while others incubate and experiment with new ideas.  The old system can serve as an umbrella for the new, protecting experimental approaches as they emerge and as many of them fail to achieve their intended results – or even achieve worse results than do the approaches that they aim to replace.

   Graphic reproduced from my session notes

One thing I like about this approach to systems change is the compassion with which Stigler and Posakony describe all of the roles in the change process.  They consider each role to be essential in the evolution of a system.  We need to keep our current systems running while we search for their replacements.  And in that search, we need to “be in the depth of learning” so that we can find new approaches that meet our aims.  I appreciate their compassion for the failure that can accompany experimentation and the learning that can result from those failures, even as I realize how impossible it can seem to risk any results when it comes to educating our children.

Given such real concerns about risking children’s learning, and the concomitant need to experiment toward a system of learning that can become a platform for resilience that stays flexible and innovative as our circumstances continue to evolve, I find it useful to think about where my work falls on these two curves.  While placing one’s work isn’t absolute — at the conference, I chose to stand on the “illuminating the choice” bridge, while my colleague chose to stand in the “supporting the emergence of the new” curve — I think that it can be helpful to consider what role one is playing in the process of a system’s evolution.

Innovation is the new watchword of the day. We say that, although the U.S. is losing manufacturing, tech support, and even tax preparation jobs to cheaper, overseas competitors, we still have the edge in good old American ingenuity and innovation. To keep this edge, however, we tell ourselves that we need to teach our children how to innovate, too. And, of course, we realize that we need innovative methods of education to teach our students such innovation and creativity. So we have an Innovation office in the US Department of Education, and an Investment in Innovation Fund in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

At times, I have felt rebellious about this emphasis. I have wondered, “Is everything new really better than anything old?” At such moments, I know that I am experiencing a moment of kinship with the proponents of a “back to the basics” education, which isn’t new at all. After all, I had a good, sound education without any projects or any effort to make content “relevant,” and I came out OK, didn’t I? But then I think: there were relatively few moments of the pure joy of discovery over the 20 years of my formal schooling, and, while I have a nimble mind, my specific, innate intelligence and intuition - which might have made me an innovator - were generally ignored rather than nurtured.

So, if I find myself at least a provisional believer in the new gospel of innovation, what can our 2020 Forecast tell us about innovation? A couple of points stand out. First, look at the driver of change for systems, “Platforms for Resilience.” This driver warns that we need “flexibility and innovation” to meet the challenges of “system failures.” Looking more deeply, we can see that, in this view, innovation is, in fact, made possible by “responsive flexibility,” and also by “distributed collaboration, and transparency.” But the link is even closer than that: These behaviors will, in turn, “allow institutions to meet…challenges through innovation, adaptation, and openness.” Putting all this together, the Forecast suggests that, if we are to become innovative educators, we need to be flexible and adaptable, and we need to collaborate openly and transparently.

Secondly, we can find insights from trends that fill out the driver Amplified Organization. For example, the trend “Beta Building,” under “Amplified Organization,” forecasts that “Transparency, collaboration, and rapid iteration [will] create a beta culture displaying open critique and reflective practice.” So this, again, recommends transparency and collaboration. But it adds a new point: what is this “beta culture”? The metaphor is drawn from the “beta” version of software, meaning software that is new and still in development. And along with a culture in which new ideas are being developed for learning, this trend suggests that educators, parents, and students should be involved in reflection and critique. So this is not about doing something new just because it is new. Instead, it is about innovations that have a purpose, and that are the subject of discussion and ongoing refinement.

The third, explicit mention of innovation comes in the trend “Enabled Innovation,” under the driver “Altered Bodies.” The trend says, “Neurodiversity, physical enhancements, and disability communities converge, turning marginalized populations into mainstream innovators.” This trend is just beginning to unfold, but one of the most interesting areas involves emerging research on autism. Some scientists believe that children with autism display extreme reactions to “toxins, food and airborne allergens.” Treatments and understanding being developed to help these children have the potential to facilitate learning for everyone.

So, according to the 2020 Forecast, these are the behaviors we need to cultivate to accomplish the innovations we need in education: collaboration, transparency, adaptiveness, flexibility, openness, purposeful experimentation, and attentiveness to innovations pioneered by disabled and otherwise marginalized groups. Can we do this? Will we?

I was thinking the other day about one of the drivers of change on our 2006-2016 Map of Future Forces Affecting Education. Paul Krugman reminded me of “Strong Opinions, Strongly Held,” in his column in the October 4 New York Times entitled “The Politics of Spite.”

As a driver of change, SO,SH (as I abbreviate the title when I take notes) forecast that, over the 10 years beginning in 2006, we would move “from a global media culture to a splintered fundamentalism.” The map went on to say, “As media channels fragment and subcultures form around strong common interests, fervent opinions will be reinforces by powerful digital networks - with a tendency toward more fundamentalist views of complex problems.”

Little did we know how increasingly true that would become. As Krugman points out, the cheers at the Weekly Standard when Chicago lost its Olympic bid, along with the joy expressed by Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report on the same occasion, are trivial examples of a serious problem. He comments on the tactics of Republican opponents of health care reform, claiming that, unlike Democratic resistance to the privatization of Social Security, it is not principle-based. That is because Republicans fought the creation of Medicare in the 1960’s and now are arguing that Medicare savings needed to fund health care reform will ruin Medicare!

This all continues today, as the right waxes sarcastic about the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama. The Nobel Committee says that he has already “created a new climate in international politics,” contributing to renewed use of international institutions, nuclear disarmament, and a new constructive role for the U.S. in climate change. The President humbly accepted the honor saying that he understood it as “a call to action,” rather than a reward for accomplishments. But if you Google “Nobel peace prize,” you will find that sputtering outrage and mean jokes outweigh pride and resolve in the online conversation. This is just the kind of digital network in support of extreme views that our map forecast in 2006.

As a Democrat, I am, of course, inclined to put all the blame on the Republicans, but a more objective observer, not so entrenched in her own “subculture…of fervent opinions” might be able to see the other side! I know that this kind of polarization threatens our ability to do anything together as a nation, at a time when we have really big problems and dilemmas that we need to address together. But I suppose that is just thinking like a Democrat…

I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on George Orwell - in 1969-1970. Of course, in those halcyon days, we thought we were on the brink of creating a brand new world, where everyone would “give love a chance,” and social justice for all was just around the corner. It was before the Internet, at least as a popular medium, and, although 1984 was still more than a decade away, we were not worrying about it. It seemed to be a parable criticizing the totalitarian regime in Soviet Russia, which Orwell was among the first on the left to see for what it was. He was, in fact, ostracized in left-wing circles for parting company with the course taken by the Marxist revolution, at a time when the Great Depression made capitalism appear unredeemable.

A few weeks ago, I had the disturbing pleasure of reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It is a novel for young adults, but worth a look by adults of all ages. It envisions a world in which our fear about terrorism has long since reached such a peak that our “homeland security” measures rob us of basic freedoms. You remember how shocking it was to go through security right after 9/11? (Foreign visitors still find it pretty shocking….) Well, the young hero (Marcus, aka w1n5t0n) of this story experiences an arrest by DHS, and his city (San Francisco) turned into a police state. After he recovers, he takes on DHS himself. In a page-turning narrative, Marcus confronts gait recognition devices, BART turnstiles that track his movements, and more. At the time I read it, I started to worry again about the domestic surveillance that the real DHS has undertaken.

Still, I had stopped thinking about this book until this morning, when I read the article in eSchool News entitled “Congress Weighs Online Privacy Changes.” The Congressional concern, according to this article, is about commercial use of data about online habits, to target consumers with customized advertising. Legislative proposals would give people more say about use of their data. That seems like a fine idea to me, but perhaps the same limits should apply explicitly to government use of our data.

The 2020 Forecast notes potential positive results of data compilation in its discussion of Pattern Recognition. The Forecast points out that we will need new tools to see patterns and make sense of the “data trails,” “location-based information,” and “health and environmental data.” The patterns have the potential to help in the design of “differentiated learning experiences and environments,” as well as contributing to new “forms of knowledge, knowing and assessment.”

That will all be great - really! But I can’t help but be aware of the potential for misuse of all this
data. Like so many technologies, it can be used for good or ill. In light of Little Brother,, the explosion of potentially invasive commercial uses of data, and our own ongoing fears of terrorism, I feel that we all need to stay alert and to participate in the thinking and decision-making about these issues. What do you think?