KnowledgeWorks Foundation's Educational Map of the Decade

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To provoke thought leaders to think about the future of education in new ways, KnowledgeWorks Foundation (www.kwfdn.org) and the Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org) constructed the “2006-2016 Education Map of the Decade.” In 2007, the Foundation followed the release of the Map with the launch of a fully interactive website (www.kwfdn.org/map) to help educators, business leaders, policymakers, and citizens examine the forces that will affect education, the economy, and the United States as a whole.

Building off the fundamental values that govern the Foundation’s work – including high expectations, high quality, public engagement in public education, and equal opportunity for all – the Map and its online counterpart were designed to help individuals and institutions think about the future of education in the United States in an engaging and constructive way. The Map is intended as a conversation catalyst, sparking new discussions and providing for new innovations and solutions.

Presenting a forecast of external forces that are important in shaping the context for the future of public education and learning in the next decade, the Foundation has offered an outside-in perspective of the critical challenges facing education policy.

About the Map

The Map was created by bringing together the opinions of relevant experts, including ethnographers, anthropologists, and others who do intensive case studies based on field research. The Map is a forecast - a credible, internally consistent view of how future forces will affect the components of public education. It is not a prediction: it does not claim to state what will happen.

Why Did KnowledgeWorks Foundation Develop the Map?

KnowledgeWorks Foundation originally commissioned the Map for use in its own strategic planning. The Foundation released it to the public in hopes that the Map contributes to changing the education conversation in the United States to a more realistic one for the benefit of all students.

The Map allows individuals and institutions to simultaneously study the complexity of several forces of change. It provides a means for moving the education conversation outside the details of traditional education debates, and into a space where the larger issues underlying those disputes come into focus. Taking this kind of long view allows one to make better strategic decisions now, as one will begin to see there is no single answer to the challenges and opportunities facing education.

The Development of the Map

The Map is structured as a grid that presents the intersection between six key drivers of change, which represent the most important global movements with the greatest impact on education (the vertical column on the left side of the Map) and five critical impact areas (the horizontal axis of the Map) which represent key areas of activity where the major trends are viewed from the perspectives of family, community, markets, and more. Each intersection is marked by one or more specific trends likely to affect education.

This design shows how multiple issues and influencers will shape the broader future of education in the United States. The full impact of these trends can be used to provoke conversation about insights on the future and lead to actions that make a difference for students in the future. The Map also helps spur stakeholders to think deeply about the dilemmas that will be facing education in the next decade and about how to address them.

2006 - 2016 Core Drivers of Change

KnowledgeWorks identified six driving forces of change (link to http://www.kwfdn.org/map/map.aspx) that form the core of the Map forecast. These major trends, which represent the most important global movements with the greatest impact on education, include:

• Grassroots Economics -- Building greater value through collaboration, shared resources, and bottom-up thinking

• Smart Networking – Forming ad hoc groups and communities through technology-driven outlets

• Strong Opinions, Strongly Held – Using social networks, instead of global media, to drive public opinion

• Sick Herd – Recognizing the health impacts of population growth, environmental crises, and similar issues

• Urban Wilderness – Facing the reality that more than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in urban centers

• The End of Cyberspace – Embedding technology in our day-to-day lives

Impact Areas

The Foundation also identified five impact areas (link to http://www.kwfdn.org/map/map.aspx). These areas represent key groupings of activity where we see the major trends from different perspectives. The five impact areas are:

Family & Community

This impact area represents students, parents, teachers, and individuals as families, households, and the various social groups and associations that constitute communities.

Markets

Markets include various forms of exchange of value among people and organizations. This area includes traditional economic exchange as well as non-monetary forms of value exchange such as knowledge transactions and exchange of other non-tangible assets like trust, reputation, and loyalty.

Institutions

This perspective represents the formal and informal organizational structures and processes related to social and economic systems such as the structures and systems for education, learning, banking, governance, and community-life.

Educators & Learning

This impact area includes educators-teachers, learning professionals and resource people of all kinds – as well as the experience of learning and gaining new knowledge, skill, and self-awareness.

Tools & Practices

This impact area reflects digital technologies, social media, and new processes or techniques emerging in the next ten years. It also includes new skills, activities, and practices that emerge from the intersection of the driving trends and these new tools.

The Launch of the Map

The Map was officially unveiled by KnowledgeWorks Foundation at the Learning 2006 Conference (www.learning2006.com) hosted by The MASIE Center’s Learning Consortium (www.masie.com) in November 2006. The Map served as the centerpiece of discussion for more than 2,000 CEOs and corporate leaders who attended the conference.

In early 2007, the Foundation launched an interactive website (www.kwfdn.org/map) around the Map that provides a new and valuable experience for educators, policymakers, business leaders, and other individuals and institutions seeking to improve the quality and access of education in the United States. The website allows stakeholders to connect with other interested parties to discuss and compare ideas and concepts around education resulting from study and implementation of the Map. The new site provides additional resources related to the concept of the Map and allows visitors to tag trends and hot spots with key words and labels, among other new interactive action items.

KnowledgeWorks Foundation’s Map Partner

The Foundation worked in partnership with the Institute for the Future (IFTF) (www.iftf.org), an independent, nonprofit research group, to develop the Map. Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation (www.rand.org) researchers – with a Ford Foundation (www.fordfound.org) grant – to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, the IFTF is committed to building the future by understanding it deeply.