Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Change and Survival of the Fastest

Facebook, Twitter, cloud computing, LinkedIn, 4G wireless, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, big data, Skype, system-on-a-chip (SOC) circuits, iPhones, iPods, iPads and cellphone apps ... nine years ago these were not on the scope of most of our personal horizons.  We looked to the future with hope for a better life, a better world after a terrorist attack on the US.  The perpetrators were relative mysteries to all of us and we looked to our security denizens to protect us and deliver us from unknown enemies.  Many among us now look at the mobile, electronic mediums and applications as unknown enemies.  We long for the days of a slower, simpler life and harbor the illusion that all of the advances are merely a fad that will fade as soon as "others" go back to the more personal, face-to-face forms of exchange and communication.

I have often mentioned a thought from A Toffler, author of Future Shock. In the late 1970's, when life was slower and simpler, he posited that the illiterate of the 21st century would not be those who could not read and write, it would be those who could not learn, unlearn and relearn.  Fast forward to the second decade of the 21st century ...  and here we are.  For those that think of the 70's as a radical time in our lives,  how can you adapt to an even more radical shift of your world view?  Many of you were not even a future thought; not yet born.  So many of us are locked in 20th century thinking and waiting for a return to the "good old days".  History has demonstrated time and again, that while we have roots in the past, the future is upon us and we had best prepare for constant change; for change to happen at an increasingly faster pace.  It seems that we too often forget those lessons from the past ... the biggest one is that change happens, no matter how hard we wish to ignore or fight change.

The past few years have seen monumental changes in so many global arenas and coming to grips with what those changes mean is often mind numbing.  Twitter, Facebook, Skype and camera phones fueled a revolution felt on a global level.  Most of us were only peripherally aware of the seismic proportions of the speed in which hundreds, even thousands of years of cultural mores were being irrevocably changed.  What do you know of today's Egypt, Mali, Syria, India, China, Brazil?  What changes there have impacted us here?  What have the changes here (on this side of the globe) meant for places in other parts of our globe?

Facebook, Twitter, cloud computing, LinkedIn, 4G wireless, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, big data, Skype, system-on-a-chip (SOC) circuits, iPhones, iPods, iPads and cellphone apps
 ... how literate are you with these daily modes of communication; with the connectedness and resulting change that is happening so fast that it seems overwhelming, impossible to keep up, much less move forward.  The traditional world of education,  developed at least 100 years ago, no longer prepares us for the present or the future in a realistic manner.  We can find the information we previously needed to memorize.  We can use digital and robotic entities to perform the tasks we used to labor over.  We need to retool ourselves and our learning in order to survive and advance in our more closely connected world. And, we need to do this much faster than most of us realize.  That brings us to  ...
Massive, Open, Online, Courses ... MOOCs.
That brings us to Creativity and Multicultural Communication ... CMC11.  We are swimming in a sea of constant change of information; in increasingly faster connection modes and we need to learn how to use, master and move on to even faster, more ubiquitous, yet to be realized methods of learning and communicating .... Facebook, Twitter, cloud computing, LinkedIn, 4G wireless, ultra-high-speed bandwidth, big data, Skype, system-on-a-chip (SOC) circuits, iPhones, iPods, iPads and cellphone apps  ... and beyond to the current swift change in the world of education ....to the swift changes in the world.