Tiresias, anyone?

Ulysses set his foot on an airplane in Helsinki, Finland. He sat down to his seat and opened James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds.

Surowiecki shows how a numerous and varied crowd can hit the nail a lot better than one or two experts, and how it’s possible to get better results by adding some less-informed laymen to the decision-making, if they make the group more versatile.

If the group is too homogeneous or if it relies on one authority, the decision-making process is doomed into one-minded and one-eyed group thinking. In it, criticism and radical alternatives are regarded as threats to the truth of the group and as wrong and impossible solutions.

We'll have wonderful opportunities to vision and mold the future of education in mLearn and ISTE2012. We will see and listen to world-renowned professionals in plenaries and other sessions. In reflecting on these visionaries, modern-day Tiresias, let's keep the real subject, the learner clear in our mind. What is the core essence and the actual goal in the particular learning process? What will change in his or her learning by changing the tools or methods?

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The Sirens sing irresistible songs, marketing hype if you like, to all Ulysseses who sail on the sea of knowledge and try to make smart decisions and choices. I’m not talking about eLearning or mLearning now, as topical they might be here, but about sustainable development.

American Airlines served us a mug of coffee, and not just any standard java, but Rainforest Alliance Certified Coffee. That comes from farms which will protect the wildlife and improve the quality of life for farm families.

"Sustainably Grown" they've written on the mug. On a styrox mug. A mug made of material that takes five hundred years or more to decompose. I hear the call of the sirens. I listen to it, and I drink the coffee. Hope the crew maintains the course.