Open Course in Education Futures

I'm sorry if this post isn't precisely about creativity/critical thinking which is the topic for the week. Dallas's great post got me thinking along a different path entirely - and that begs the question: am I being creative, or irrelevant? Where do we draw the line? :-P

I guess my question is: given the definitions of creativity/critical thinking we saw in this weeks readings, where do these notions fit, in education futures? What will they look like? How will they be materialized?

The way I understand them, both creativity and critical thinking pinpoint our knowledge of things and how this knowledge can be restructured, redefined, redesigned, etc. But, these definitions of creativity provided by Harris do not (and I realize they weren't designed to) acknowledge the Foucauldian analysis of knowledge being comprised of discourses that function through rules of exclusion. These determine who may speak, about what, for how long, and in what settings or contexts.

That's why Dallas's post was intriguing to me, b/c if we are a knowledge economy more so than a knowledge society (and I think we are) - what does that tell us about how we view human beings and how they should be nurtured and bred to foster creativity and critical thinking, not only in the immediate, but the entirety of their lives?

Dallas referred to Rifkin's notion of a hyper-capitalist world, and that reminded me of Baudrillard's notion of the hyperreal. Baudrillard builds on the work of Guy Debord, the sitautaionist author of the Society of the Spectacle. Baudrillard traces the symptoms and tendencies of the trajectory of the postmodern; a set of concepts appropriate for a new world of technologies of images and communication developing in the late 20th century.

The first of these is the hyperreal - the reproduction that is more real than real, reality is whatever can be mechnically and technologically reproduced. The second is simulation - reality is that which can be simulated, xeroxed, etc. (eerily reminds me of Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines though he meant it to be a good thing!). The third is utopia realized.

For Baudrillard, we are becoming fractal selves, split, reproducible.

Look at how life changes are defined today - not like Augustine's conversion to Christianity when he thinks he hears the voice of god who says to him "tolle, lege" (take up and read) - and he reads and becomes a christian. and he's born again. No, that's over. Our rate and depth of change has leaped exponentially. We change rapidly. we change professions numerous times in our lives, we change definitions of who are and how we are situated in the world. We change our physical and metaphorical place in the world continuously.

This is while realizing that when I write "we" - I'm only referring to a limited, generally known as "privileged" subset of humanity who lives in the shadow of the silent majority.

So with this level of system complexity embedded into the hyperreal - what happens to our definitions of knowledge, of creativity, of looking critically at a world which seems to have changed form long before we have developed a way to critique the old forms ... How do we develop patterns to think critically about objects (mental or physical) when "object" has come to take on such a fluid, flowing definition?

These are presented as "hard facts" in this now very famous video. But isn't creativity in part being able to change or alter reality? How can we do so when "reality" seems so diluted, slippery, elusive?

It seems to me we have to develop skills to not think critically or creatively about things, but about the future (or tend) of things - critical futures thinking? How are we to take some sort of control over this train, when we seem to have lost all control long ago? Where can we fit ourselves into the decision making process, which seems increasingly uncontrollable, fast paced and out of the grasp of ordinary citizens?