Photo: noaa.gov

The Future of Education Is Happening Now

United States Travel Ambassadors
by Matthew Abrams Jan 21, 2013

If you want to see into the future, you just need to look around you. It’s happening now.

In February, I load into an RV and hit the road with seven other pioneers in education to document the future. We’ll be traveling from Pennsylvania to San Diego highlighting, capturing, and sharing innovations in education from across the country. The Educate 20/20 Road Tour is intended to shift the focus from what’s wrong in education to what’s possible.

We’ll do this by spotlighting what’s already happening. Equipped with professional photographers, media partners, and documentarians, we’ll capture these stories and share them with the world. We believe in learning. We believe that how we learn today will be one of the most powerful tools in designing and creating the world of tomorrow.

Moving into the future we’ll need educational models that are appropriate for our rapidly changing world. What they will look like, no one can say. But we need experiments. And we need to share the results with each other. We need to try new things, see what sticks and see what falls. As Einstein said, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” A new way of thinking will come from a new way of looking at how we learn. The intention behind this trip is to help short circuit old ways of thinking about education that are outdated while opening the imagination to the possibilities of what education could be.

The team behind the Road Tour believes our times call for a new story. We believe parts of this story have already been written and we’re setting out to find and share them. We’ll make stops at 15 of the most innovative college campuses and programs throughout the country. While there, we’ll capture stories, share ideas, and host popup learning opportunities. These experiences and takeaways will be condensed into a documentary and toolkit that will be disseminated to over 2 million people across the world to inspire action.

The travelers behind the Road Tour are, themselves, inventing new ways of experimenting with how we learn. They have created several evolutionary initiatives such as Co Spaces, The Mycelium School, TheOpen Masters, Citizen Circles, De Universiteit, and P2PU. While all these innovations have their own flavor, the travelers have one thing in common: a deep desire to grow and accelerate educational models that are personally meaningful, socially relevant, and financially accessible.

The Road Tour has three main objectives:

1) Connect with some of the most innovative learning communities in the world, 2) Document how they design and execute transformative experiences for their learners, and 3) Create a tool kit for other schools, communities, and learning programs to inspire their models

The final destination on our tour is the AshokaU Exchange in San Diego, CA. The exchange is the largest global convening for social entrepreneurship education, bringing together 650 individuals representing over 150 institutions from 40 countries. The Exchange is an experience and an experiment that seeks to answer: “How can universities spark ideas big enough to change the world?” The crew behind the Road Tour will present their findings and a trailer of the highlights from the trip.

To find out more about where the Road Tour will be stopping and how to get involved, visit www.educate2020.com

To support this initiative, you can contribute to the IndieGoGo campaign that ends on January 26 th by clicking here.

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