What happened in the planetary event of the Near Future Education Lab: the challenge of the Future of Education has started

Education is a Commons event

Some days have passed since the Education is a Commons event, and a summary is needed to be able to have an overview of the scenario which is opening up before our eyes, and about the single most important fact which emerged fro the whole event: Now is the Time to start re-thinking the education system!

First of all: participation. People from 5 continents joined in for an entire week of discussion, representing individuals, organizations, universities, companies, associations, activist groups and, obviously, education hackers from all over the planet.

the final hangout:

Here are some useful links:

the opening hangout:

The most discussed topics:

  • The education ecosystem: what is it? How does it emerge and manifest itself? How accessible and inclusive is it in its current form? What organizational models, if any, can be adopted to make it more accessible, inclusive and readable/usable?
  • Koinoo, K-Coins, badges and more: a mutualistic currency for the education ecosystem. Reputation capital. Transformation of the current definition of value to a p2p, ecosystemic, well-being oriented one, based on networked trust, participation, mutuality. Understanding the ecosystem and the networks through the currency. A new role for credentials.
  • Knowledge Commons, recipes, knowledge and meta-knowledge. Transforming Education into a protocol, like the Internet: an accessible, p2p, network-of-networks. Hypotheses for implementation. A new p2p layer of the Internet protocol stack.
  • Ubiquitous Education. Ubiquity through time and space (connect experiences, places and situations for knowledge anytime, anywhere). Ubiquity through contexts (each place is a potential space/time for learning/teaching/knowledge, through the commons and ubiquitous tech). Ubiquity through roles (each one can be teacher, student, researcher, entrepreneur… depending on the context). What about Divides (technological, cultural, age, gender…)?
  • the Open Foundation: the role of the open foundation to host, preserve and promote the Knowledge Commons, the Ecosystem, and the value model, enacted through the currency, and as a shell to enact the Wirearchy through which the ecosystem will work.

More discussions are taking place as we speak, and we are starting up the implementation processes for the whole thing: so please join the Facebook Group of the Near Future Education Lab and participate to the discussions and activities, or get in touch with us anyway you can: we want to do it with you!

Below you can find more resources about the event and the overall process:

Some fundamental Facebook Posts in the discussion: