IAE Blog

The first IAE-pedia entry in the What the Future Is Bringing Us series was published on December 1, 2008. It included some articles that were published on the Web in 2007. My goal was to look at forecasts for likely changes in technology that were “coming down the pike” and consider some of their possible educational implications.

Less than three weeks ago, I began writing What the Future is Bringing Us: 2018. Access the current 2018 entries and those from the past 10 years in References and Resources at Moursund (January, 2018). This means that current readers can look back over the past ten years, and think about some of these old forecasts. What follows are three of the entries from What the Future Is Bringing Us: 2007. That IAE-pedia page contains information about some forecasts made in 2007 and some made in early 2008.

The MIT Technology Review is on my regular “must read” list of magazines that I subscribe to. Every issue contains articles that challenge my current knowledge and insights into how the world is changing.

The first issue of 2018 is certainly no exception. Antonio Regalado’s article about gene editing, These Are Not Your Father’s GMOs, caught my attention (Regalado, January/February, 2018). In brief summary, gene editing that merely changes a gene without inserting “foreign matter” is legal in the United States. For example, it is legal to insert an extra copy of a small piece (a snippet) of a plant’s DNA strand into the DNA strand, or to remove a snippet. This can be done with current technology, and it is being done.

The purpose of this IAE Blog entry is to introduce you to The Download, a free newsletter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I enjoy reading (MIT, n.d.). One of the interesting aspects of this free newsletter is that you can specify the areas you like to keep up with, and the weekly newsletter you receive will then focus on the topics you specify. The list of topic areas is:

1. Business Impact
2. Connectivity
3. Sustainable Energy
4. Rewriting Life
5. Intelligent Machines

Samples from a Recent Issue

Each of us has our own thoughts about what we individually, non-profit and for-profit companies, our community, our state, our nation, and the world should do to help address worldwide problems such as air pollution, hunger, disease, and homelessness.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently released a report on the extent to which air pollution is harming children under age five (WHO, 3/6/2017). Quoting from the report:

I have long been interested in Project-based Learning (PBL). The References and Resources section of this IAE Blog includes links to some of my writing in this area.

Thus, I was interested when I read the article, Vista High Prepares to Create School of the Future (Brennan, 12/27/2016). Quoting from the article: