Welcome to the Future Trends Forum, an ongoing, participatory, and open video conversation about the future of higher education.
Each week a different guest – an inspiring expert, visionary, practitioner, or researcher – converses about their area of interest. I kick off the discussion with a question or two, then facilitate further questions and comments generated by participants via chat, video, and Twitter. Discussion is the name of the game, as we avoid PowerPoint and encourage the entire audience to actively engage.
Guests have ranged from deans to librarians, startup founders to journalists, leading technologists and technology critics. They are associated with entities like the United States Department of Education, Google, the University of Cambridge, and the Digital Public Library of America. They have included Audrey Watters, Martin Dougiamas Anya Kamenetz, Cable Green, Curtis Bonk, Robbie Melton, George Siemens, Casey Green, Deanna Marcum, Jim Groom, Robert Archibald, Phil Long, Gardner Campbell (Campus Technology article), Will Richardson and Richard DeMillo, and more.
Topics have covered a wide range, such as: open education, financing education, blockchain and other emerging technologies, institutional transformation, testing and assessment, students hosting their own web content, connections between K-12 and post-secondary schooling, and the Internet of Everything, to name a few.
The Shindig platform in operation. Guest and host are on top; participants are on the bottom left and center, chat box on the lower right.
Each session lasts one hour, and is open to anyone with a digital device, the Chrome browser (preferably) or the Shindig mobile client, and decent broadband. If you’d like to speak out loud with participants, or to join guests, participants, and myself on stage, you should have a working microphone and camera.
Every week’s Forum enters our free and accessible archive. We record each event, then upload it to YouTube. Every recording is available here, for your free viewing, listening, commenting, linking, and embedded pleasure. Blog posts add my introductions, notes and any Twitter conversation.
Please join us. Check back on this page for more information, or click on the Shindig Forum page for the latest.
Bryan Alexander 