Yesterday Steve Hargadon interviewed Chad Wick, founding President and CEO of the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, and me about the new 2020 Forecast.

The interview was conducted in Elluminate, a great collaborative environment,  and you can listen to just the audio or the full elluminate recording (there were two visuals that we shared – an overview of the map and the interactive map website).

Reflecting on our interview, one of the big stories from the map for me is how we are shifting from a mental model of education as the institution of schooling to a mental model of teaching and learning as a lifestyle of creation and collaboration.  This shift reminds me of the change we have seen in the healthcare industry.  Over the past decade we have seen healthcare shift from a focus on hospitals and acute care to an active focus on wellness and creating a healthy lifestyle.  Health has become a filter for many individual and family decisions with a diverse ecology of services, providers, and individual practices emerging to address this broad wellness focus.  So with education, the focus is shifting to learning, creativity, personal growth and development, and personal relevance and meaning.  Access to opportunities for cultivating and nurturing a “learning lifestyle” is gaining ground as a way to think about the future of education.

The good news is that there is an abundance of experimentation in ways to organize teaching and learning and develop a diverse educational ecology: from amplified classrooms like the Flat Classroom Project to alternate reality gaming, to eco-schools who create the basis for resilient school-communities.  My hope is that we see an ambitious innovation agenda in alternative public systems ( or ecosystems) for teaching and learning so that we can support a diverse world of learning.