I’ve been blogging a lot about the future of education, and the coming of a new educational era. If we are on the cusp of transformational change, it’s very important for museum futurists to be actively scanning for hints of what this new era may look like so we can envision our preferred future and help make it a reality.

Here’s a resource I recommend: The Future of Education blog from KnowledgeWorks Foundation.

KnowledgeWorks is kind of the CFM equivalent for the education field. (Except they came first. And are larger and better funded. Oh well.) Their mission is “to transform education in the U.S. from a world of schooling to a world of learning – where efforts are focused on the needs of the learner, not the institution.”

Recent posts, for example, have explored:

• The potential for technology to amplify learning
• The rise of Personal Learning Environments
• How to measure success in a way that also values risk taking and failure (a tremendously important subject in the current fraught debate about standardized testing)

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On this blog I first read about self-directed (or passion-based) learning (prompting my explorations into the fringe educational world of “unschooling”). It’s also sharpened my focus on the increasing importance of data-privacy.

I’m a fan of KnowledgeWorks’ 2020 Forecast on the future of learning, and the Future of Education blog is a good place to follow updates to that project.

And happily, one good blog leads to another—Future of Education’s blogroll is no exception. This is where I discovered Edutopia (“What works in education” from the George Lucas Educational Foundation) and KQED’s MindShift (“How we will learn”) both of which I have added to my regular reading.

The Future of Education blog also has a code of ethics covering the behavior and responsibilities of users of the site—I’ve never seen this before (have you?) and I think it’s an interesting model.

Futurist Friday is becoming a semi-regular feature on the CFM Blog, highlighting recommended reading to fuel your futurist thought. You can find earlier posts in the series by selecting “recommended reading” from the tag cloud on the right.