Sunday's Keynote Address by Andrew Zolli

The president's address was followed by a very informative and entertaining address by Andrew Zolli http://center.uoregon.edu/ISTE/NECC2007/program/keynotes.php. He is a well-known futurist, and he shared his thoughts about the next 10 - 20 years.

Because of constantly decreasing costs of digital connectivity, everyone is going to have access to digital resources. This will cause a fundamental shift in our culture.

Anything that can be done by a computer, will be done by a computer. What will be left for us? We will need to develop our creative spirit. He feels that brain research proves that we all have latent creativity. We must find our creative center.

He shared four approaches to finding new ideas and solving problems: 1. thinking; 2. looking at the issue from a perspective outside the organization; 3. play; 4. imagination. None of these approaches is successful all the time. Zolli feels that a networked approach that incorporates all of these approaches is most successful. We must build networks.

He then talked about five areas of change.

1. Demographics. In the United States, our population will be growing in the number of young people and the number of older people. There will be fewer in the middle. Women have and will continue to make strides in higher education. More women are in college today than men.

2. Attitude toward nature. There are pressures toward increased environmentalism from mature societies that appreciate nature and from societies experiencing environmental degradation.

3. Learning places. There will be continued effort for people to reconnect with nature and get out of sterile (concrete and plastic) environments.

4. Coping with choice and complexity. We have so many choices in so many areas (his example was white bread) that consumers are not finding much actual difference and find wading through all the choices frustrating. More and more of the same has brought mediocrity.

5. Redefining literacy. This is the one that most directly impacts education. We have been measuring literacy by how much you know and how much unique knowledge you have. With the advent of the omnipresent Internet, housing most of mankind's knowledge, our current definition won't work any more. Zolli proposed that we define literacy by the ability to find, build and use complex information. The problem is that we don't know how to certify such literacy.

He then talked about the pull of four pairs of different attractions that govern how we approach life. He believe that the personal trumps the impersonal, that the tangible trumps the intangible, that the present trumps the past or future, and that the desirable trumps the responsible.

He is involved with Pop!Tech http://poptech.org/. A yearly conference "an ongoing conversation about science, technology and the future of ideas."