May 28, 2016

Reflections on a trip to Silicon Valley (3/4)


Part III

Thought on 702010

The 702010 framework for development stands as strong as ever, and some startups even take it as their core principle. That’s heartwarming for a company whose research gave birth to this model of development. (For a recap of what that research was please read The Origins of 702010.)
If I can take a historic perspective on learning technology: it started by supporting the 10% of formal training in the form of content delivery and learning management systems to automate learning administration and delivery. Then we saw the emergence of social technology in the form of discussion boards, social networks or messaging apps that can help out with the 20% of learning through crucial relationships. It is now that we start seeing the first signs of technology like wearables, AI and mobile technology that is ready to scale at the 70% of learning through challenging work. It is an area we just couldn’t do so much about before but that is about to change.
One interesting side-note is that CCL’s original research on 702010 actually disclosed 5 areas, not just 3. One category that was discarded because you can’t or shouldn’t control for that in a developmental setting is ‘hardships’, which means learning through tough experiences or unfortunate events. But there is actually development going on in that area: just think of military-style bootcamps, or the deliberate shouting and deprivation at CIMBA’s neuro-leadership courses.

Thought on trends

One of our visits was to the Institute for the Future (IFTF.org) in Palo Alto. They specialize in disruption (defined as breaks in the current pattern) and 10 year out forecasts. Core predictions include an explosively connected world, distributed everything and increase of disruption altogether. You can spot signals for this unfolding future in advances in Artificial Intelligence, biotechnology, the many sensors of the Internet of Things, the rise of the ‘gig economy’, and experiments with peer-to-peer services cutting out the central platform.
One of the thought I had after visiting all these startups is that they all want to become ‘the’ platform for xyz. Well, that’s clearly not going to work out, there can only be so many platforms out there as the near-to-monopoly platforms of Facebook or Google have shown. So I was wondering how that is going  to work out?
An interesting development in that perspective is the ‘blockchain’. It is a concept that gets confused with BitCoin because it was an underlying technical solution to implement BitCoin, but in essence is all about distributed secure information that is not owned by a single source. The IFTF actually made a good video explaining it in 2 minutes: http://www.iftf.org/blockchainfutureslab/





So will the future of learning technology be more like a central platform where you can make money on the collected data and sponsorship, or more like a distributed service (an amazon without amazon as it were.)
Here is a collection of screenshots I named ‘sign o’the times’. It comes without any explanation to encourage you to make up your own mind on what the insight is from these signals of the future:






Continued in the 4th and final part.

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