In the US, 75% of students graduate high school. Our national college graduation rate is even lower at approximately 54%. And those students who aspire to go to college are faced with a rising tuition cost, which has increased more than any other major good or service for the last twenty years. Looking ahead to the next 20 years, students will pay $221,722 to drop out of a state school, and close to $450,000 to try their luck at a private school in hopes of getting a higher education. These unfortunate statistics don't even begin to describe the current university system's neglect to harness experiential and digital approaches to open-source educational models. We are facing an education crisis in the United States. This panel will explore the future of education, examining the roles of design, technology, and human beings in reshaping the way we teach and learn. While the panel is diverse, the speakers all share unconventional views of learning, a passion for design and creativity, and an entrepreneurial commitment to driving change through both action and technology.
Dennis Littky, a founder of The Met School, Big Picture Learning, and
College Unbound, has spent 40 years as an educator in rural, urban,
and suburban districts working from kindergarten through college. Big
Picture now has more than 60 Met-like schools in the United States,
and more than 40 overseas.
Dennis has PhDs in education and psychology and has received national
recognition, including a Principal of the Year award, The McGraw Hill
Education Award for Excellence, and selection as one of George Lucas’s
Daring Dozen in Education. He authored the book The Big Picture:
Education is Everyone’s Business and was the subject of A Town Torn
Apart, a made-for-T.V. movie starring L.A. Law’s Michael Tucker. In
Rhode Island, Dennis has been honored with a Bank of America Local
Hero Award, a Providence Business News Entrepreneur of the Year award,
and the New England Board of Higher Education's 2011 Higher Education
Excellence Merit Award. In December 2010, Dennis was a featured
speaker at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar.
Jon Kolko is the Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv, a venture accelerator in Austin, Texas. Jon is also the Founder and Director of Austin Center for Design, an educational institution teaching interaction design and social entrepreneurship. He has worked extensively in the professional world of interaction design, solving the problems of Fortune 500 clients. His work has extended into the genres of consumer electronics, mobile, web, supply chain management, demand planning, and customer-relationship management, and he has worked with clients such as AT&T, HP, Nielsen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Ford, IBM, Palm and other leaders of the Global 2000.
Prior to joining Thinktiv, Jon has held positions of Principal Designer and Associate Creative Director at frog design, a global innovation firm. He was also a Professor of Interaction and Industrial Design at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he was instrumental in shaping the Interaction and Industrial Design undergraduate and graduate programs. Jon has also held the role of Director for the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), and Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine, published by the ACM.
Jon is the author of the book Thoughts on Interaction Design, published by Morgan Kaufmann, and Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner's Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis, published by Oxford University Press.
