Design Economics Podcast with Vinny Tafuro

So it's a long answer to just say that what Robinson said about creativity and the ability to meet students where they are, it's always been an aspiration, but perhaps because of AI technology and now this interconnected world where we demand what we see with our own eyes, this may be the moment where it has to happen, not just it could happen.

Hello, and welcome to season two, episode three of the design economics podcast, where we explore how design thinking driven by data is revolutionizing economics for the twenty first century. My name is Vinny Tafira, a futurist, economist, your host for this episode. My guest today is doctor Walter Balzer, who serves as the clinical assistant professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Florida, where he teaches graduate courses on topics such as organizational leadership, technology leadership, and qualitative research methods. His research examines the changing educational ecosystem from the standpoint of decentralization, blended capital, and technological disruption. Our conversation today explores the decentralization paradigm shifts occurring in K 12 education and how AI will not replace teachers, but instead may help scale the creative ability of education systems to meet students where they are.

So with that, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Doctor. Walter Balzer.

Hi, Benny. Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be part of the conversation here, especially around concepts like paradigm shifts. I can't think of a better place to think about that than education. So thanks for having me.

Absolutely, I've been looking forward to this conversation. So you studied decentralization in education and how power governance and influence shift as an education system evolves beyond traditional structures. So from that kind of statement, can you give a little bit about your background, what you're working on and how you ended up at this place in your career?

Yeah, sure. So give you a little bit of background and then kind of, that should sort of explain a little bit of how I enter this work and how I try to get others to think about this work from that standpoint of decentralization. What do we mean by that? So my background is, as a longtime educator. I was a school, teacher for years and then a school administrator.

And then eventually as I went into scholarship and began doing work around that space, initially, you know, in my research or my scholarship interests, they were really focused on what was going on obviously in the schools, especially background where I worked with a lot of, English language learners and I worked in urban schools. However, when I started my scholarship, I realized, and I've always been thinking more on the meta level, it's all of those conditions, those factors that kind of influence everything. And so my scholarship pivoted toward this, what, at that point in my dissertation and my scholarship in the earliest days, was really around this blended capital paradigm that started to play out in schools, which was really a lot of private and nonprofit work that was starting to proliferate in the 2000s, and then how that played out in terms of schooling. And I had a front row seat to that because I was part of one of the largest nonprofit experiments, or I could say education foundation experiments in Hillsborough County when we had Bill and Melinda Gates come in, and it was a multi $100,000,000 investment. So having a front row seat to that, I was really interested in how these different agencies were playing out in schools.

And then back up a little further, and what you realize is this isn't just about these agencies or foundations or nonprofits. There's just a decentralization broadly that's happening across learning, education, and that changes everything. So fast forward to today, the umbrella for the way I approach our understanding of schooling and education ecosystems is really all around decentralization on a paradigmatic or really a theoretical level. But then when you start to break it down and see how this plays out in numerous ways, that is how I enter the work. And I also try to get others to see the world of learning as not a public private or not urban, not urban, suburban, but the construct of, hey, decentralization is an unstoppable force.

It's playing out everywhere, and in schooling, this is what it looks like. So that's how I enter the work.

So looking at how that is, this is a shift that's happening regardless of kind of, there's stopping this shift. You mentioned there's these three layers of sponsorship lobbying and financial contributions contributing to this. Can you talk a little bit on that?

Sure, I think you're referencing a study that I did with a colleague at Monmouth University where we look at the school choice policies that have evolved in the state of Florida around, that eventually evolved into the education savings accounts. So in that case, we look at, well, decentralization is playing out in influence. And influence is not just money or an agency, but in today's hyperconnected environment, influence shows up in many, many different ways, some of which are opaque, others are front and center. But, we did a social network analysis of that, to show, you know, how this shows up. And central to that study is the understanding that, a lot of times we don't even understand what is happening, and that includes even influencers or even initial policymakers.

Like, things evolve in a decentralized paradigm. We use theory to explain this through communications theory. But when you add more lines and more nodes, eventually the theory we talk about is communications theory from Bavelas, which just states that you can't kind of see the puzzle coming together eventually because there's so much complexity. And so that's how we entered that work. But I wanna back up even further and just say that that's just one example of the way that we perceive this decentralization as an unstoppable force.

And the way I describe that is that's the natural phenomena of what's out there now. If you look at the way we consume information, the way we learn, the way we connect, our politics, that's what I call the natural order now. That's just it's like a root system. It's all out there connecting, and there's fibers that connect. And the only way that you can really, control that is through basically literally that controlling.

You have to control because the new natural is that these are going to be roots and systems that are just constantly expanding. So that's kind of a theoretical view of that. But with something as tangible as a social network analysis of policy, we try to explain that and say, hey, over a four or five cycle period of legislation, this is what was the original intent and this was the outcome. Is that what we meant to do? And that's what we try to do in that study.

Gotcha. And I think that's a good segment into our first tenet of design economics and this acknowledging change in the education system. There are, of course entrenched stakeholders who would love to keep things the same forever. There are the outliers of like why can't we just change it all today? How do we kind of talk to both of those groups and get everybody together to understand that the change is happening and is it more about moderating the change, like you said control, or is it just accepting but with moderation?

Like how do we get there on the paradigm shift?

That's a great question. So one way that I some of it is literacy, literally the work you do in your institute and the podcast. There's new terminology, new frameworks, new understanding of what is, you know, the way, you know, perceptions and conceptual views of the world. Right? So a lot of it is literacy.

A simple example of that is saying blended capital. I was introduced to that term when I was at Boston University, and prior to that, everything to me was really public private. Or we talked about Public public private partnerships was about the best we could do as far as trying to blend the two. But then understanding that there was an entirely new construct around blended, and what is this blended? Well, blended is obviously nonprofit and, you know, for profit and the third sector.

There's all this other work that goes into that. But that then brings up divergent views as well, like neoliberalism and and going too far in one direction or another. So there's always going to be, some disagreement. So this is the way that I try to approach it with either my students or in any of my writing is, at the heart of this is understanding that there's two forces in play. There's that natural piece that I just mentioned, and then there's the rational, which is what we try to layer in as apparatus or schools or, you know, machines, societies, rules, governance.

We try to do that. What we need to do is get an integrated an integrated, view of the world. And that is the difference between being in the reality we're in today versus twenty or thirty years ago, is that you could sort of suppress those other ideas or those truths or those alternative views, but no longer can you do that. So if somebody has a disagreement and sees blended capital

as That makes a lot of sense.

Then that is.

How do we take that you know, like, there we've gotten this at the point where there's almost like the industrial you know, educational industrial complex. And how do we shift from this kind of this is the system, this is the way it is to allowing for that kind of marketplace creativity and shift where maybe is this different education systems are competing against each other to see what the new base level is? How does that kind of work within the paradigm, you know, within that shift happening?

Well, think here too is a good example of literacy and understanding that there's different ways of viewing it that sometimes we break down a little too simplistically. I use often this framework from the OECD, and this is European countries that really are producing some great thought leadership around the way to view schooling. And this breaks things down into four quadrants. You know? The massive schooling model is what we see and know.

That's the one most of us have gone through. Whether it's public or private, most of us have gone to a relatively large school system of some sort. Even a suburb is part of the massive schooling model. Then there's the virtual schooling model. That's another quadrant, and that's evolved in the last twenty years.

But this bottom half of this framework is the one that folks don't see as often. They don't have verbiage or terminology around, but it's actually the fastest growing, and that's deschooling and reschooling. So we have massive schooling, virtual schooling, and then there's deschooling and reschooling. And those are actually the fastest growing. The fastest growing segment is homeschooling.

We'd call that deschooling. And then there's reschooling. These are small schools, microschools, or rethinking the entire school day. So those are actually the growth trajectories probably in our schooling paradigm, but yet most of our discourse and policy, etcetera, is still focused on this top half. For good reason, that's where the majority of students are currently.

But I think it goes back to your question is, how do we get around those shifts? Well, we have to start using terminology and understanding that there's more than what we know, and these are actually the growth areas.

That's actually when you mentioned mass school, this mass production model of it, which I think is a good transition to our thing on how do we not punish creativity or how do we celebrate creativity? Because in my journey on this, I think it was 2010 when I first twenty eleven when I first started writing on changing paradigms and economics. I remember Sir Ken Robinson, I think He did an RSA animate on changing paradigms and compared it to the factory system. Know, the most important part of a child's upbringing was their born on date or their date of manufacturer and we put them through in that same order that if you were born at this date, you've got to graduate at this date and it's a linear path. And so it made me, it reminded me of that, like all of a sudden I'm like remembering this talk from fifteen years ago that was transformative to my thinking early on.

So since we're kind of, so much of that is still ingrained, how do we get to that creativity part of this where we really start playing with this opportunity as opposed to trying to withstand it?

Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. And, it's one that's been brought up a lot that we are essentially in the industrial model still. And that's in part because schooling on a compulsory level is really a product of that era.

But I'm really just channeling, you know, education historians on this, but I would tell the audience to think about it this way too. The creativity piece or what, sir Robinson noted, this has been revisited numerous times through eras. And even, in the twenties and thirties, as we saw the John Dewey model, and that was all about breaking that cycle of industrial thinking. And if you look at that, it was really the foundations of what we call constructivist schools and constructivist learning. So the John Dewey era or what we call the Chicago school, that gave rise to a tremendous momentum of progressive education.

To trace that back even further, it's really Montessori or John Locke. So we have a long history of the anti industrial model for education. And then take it one step further to the 70s or 80s when we started breaking into what we call the open schools movement. And I went to Ohio State for my teaching degree, and when I was there, that was a system that all over Ohio, you see the architectural remnants of open schools, which were schools with no walls.

Quite literally.

But here's the interesting piece. What you have there is they started putting up bookshelves because you couldn't hear each other in classrooms. So what you saw there was this sort of short circuit of ideas around open schools, breaking up the industrial model. There are no grades. I was part of a constructivist school.

And then you had a movement called the Howard Sizer Coalition of Essential Schools. All of this was flourishing all the way into the 90s. But here's the thing, there's a couple of limiting factors to breaking that model. So that's all to say real quick that what Robinson was talking about was nothing new. John Dewey was talking about it, Montessori, Locke, Howard Sizer, Coalition for Essential Schools.

I can go down the list. But there were two limiting factors that we may be able to break today. And that is, first and foremost, it was unscalable. That was the issue with, John Dewey's model or most progressive education. It ended up being an upper class education.

And so you could still go and get that education today if you're baron Trump or whatever. You're getting Montessori. But it was unscalable. And then the other limiting factor was that you you just could not do this, affordably and you could not meet every student's needs. If you have a, you know, tenth grade acumen and you're in sixth grade, we just don't have a system to do that within our model.

Well, I think because of where we're at today, those limiting factors are being reduced. So we're back in this moment where we can build these open schools, but we have to figure out how to do this intelligently. And that's the moment we're in right now. That's the moment we're in. So it's a long answer to just say that what Robinson said about creativity and the ability to meet students where they are, it's always been an aspiration.

But perhaps because of AI, technology, and now this interconnected world where we demand what we see with our own eyes, this may be the moment where it has to happen, not just it could happen.

So we may be able to scale it finally.

Perfectly said. That is the part I've been working on a book for some time now and there's a whole piece on this. I think that's ultimately the question is, was unscalable in the history of the record? We'll show you that. I'll also say one other piece.

It was scaling in the nineties, the coalition of essential schools and Howard Sizer. And I was part of that because I was in a school that was in Columbus, Ohio downtown. We had no grade levels. We took students that were in ninth or twelfth grade in their traditional school districts. And then in the afternoon, they came to us for an interdisciplinary program on humanities, and it was amazing.

Oh, wow. And that was called the Christopher School, and then there was the Metro School. And there's models like this all over The United States. What happened is the accountability movement literally eradicated the coalition for essential schools, and it was folded. So there was this great momentum all the way up to the nineties.

And if you wanna sum up the coalition of essential schools in one word, it's creativity. Everything about that was celebrating a student where they showed up at that moment in their life, we will meet them there. So that's a long way of saying that sir Robinson's call for creativity and sir Robinson's call for thinking beyond the industrial model, whether it was school grades or grade levels or testing, was already well underway through fits and starts for the last century. But definitely in the 1990s throughout the country, had hundreds of schools or even thousands of schools that were part of this coalition that were doing this, in their design, their pedagogy. And I was part of that.

You know, I was part of a school in Columbus, Ohio that did this. So, the accountability movement and then other factors as well, but definitely the accountability movement pretty much put the kibosh on that and the coalition eventually collapsed. And so it's there literally as a remnant or an archive of a an era of constructivist education. And I think that's what we're seeing today with AI and some of these models is, you know, emergent versions of that.

I was also in the nineties. I remember at that time the standardized tests just became like it was a part of our annual education, but then I think it was that latter 90s is when that just, it was we started teaching to the tests.

That was it.

And you did it around the country and so all of, I guess what you're saying then is all the experimentation stopped because all of a sudden while we had these federally mandated national tests

and

started teaching too.

Yeah and I would say even that it was at a point of full deployment. It wasn't even experiments because through models like that and, you know, Howard Sizer's movement is just one example, but it was truly a consortium of schools across the country that were deploying a philosophy, pillars, and then had a network to build curriculum and programs, and that was maturing. And, you know, there's a direct correlation between the rise of this testing movement and then the demise of, scalable and public oriented, constructivist programs. And I say those two pieces there because it's key for us to remember that if you're wealthy or if you have access to resources, you're still getting that education because it correlates 100% to class size and freedom. So when you are in a private school and you're not aligned to testing or there's all this other, freedom, then you you're probably getting a constructivist education.

That's absolutely true, and this is something I say often is with the institute's work is we know how to prepare children for kindergarten. We know how to get them to third grade reading level where they're learning to read instead of reading to learn, or they're reading to learn instead of learning how to read. We know how to do this and again, if you have enough resources or you're lucky enough to go to the right nonprofit academy, you can get there but we don't have a way of scaling it. Which I guess then two things as we transition into kind of the idea, we've been talking about literacy a little bit throughout this conversation, is you mentioned the Chicago school and we do have some economics people that listen to this podcast, the Design Economics podcast. Oh yeah.

So what is the difference of the Chicago school you're speaking of compared to the Chicago school of Milton Friedman and the neoliberal movement?

Just to get a little bit

of literacy in there.

Right, right, let me clarify. It may even actually be the Chicago Movement. I'm pretty sure it was the Chicago School of Dewey as well. But just to clarify there, that is the term that we use to describe what was a progressive era of education that came out of the Chicago community, and that was, John Dewey created, basically very, student centered schools that focused on connection to practical life, connection to your surrounding community, an entire pedagogy and philosophy around education that is, really about community engagement, but on a on a very closely aligned with student centered needs and that constructivism again. That came out of Chicago in the early twentieth century.

And then about and Diane Ravich noted it perfectly. She said it died of old age. All right? Progressive, education died of old age. But what she was referring to there is, that it kept having an Achilles heel.

There was always this Achilles heel, and it was through the 40s and the 50s and 60s. And it was that it was mostly only attainable, going back to our scale question, by the upper classes. So these models that Dewey envisioned as being scaled to the masses could never quite do that. They just could never quite do it. So they only ended up being really accessible to the upper classes.

And then by the 60s or 70s, that was no longer, scalable and sustainable. And so it just petered out and became things like Coalition for Essential Schools, or elements of it began to get integrated into the scaled public school models in bite sized ways or in morphed ways. And that's what happened to that Chicago school, that model. And so it lives in different pockets and schools and energy and educators like myself or others that know what that is about. But in today's day and age, and definitely up until this moment, because AI is such a foundational difference.

But up to this moment, it's just been under immense stress for the last twenty, thirty years.

Fair. I appreciate the clarification there. And I think that's as we move into like, how do we what it's what's becoming apparent to me with this is the shift in education is not so much a shift to something. It's not a shift to anything new, Correct. Which I think so much in design economics and where we're going, whether it's the idea of mutual aid and cooperatives in nonprofit and community grocery stores or it is education returning to this meeting, meeting the student and child or person where they are.

How do we start bringing that literacy into the education conversation so that whether it's parents, teachers, administrations, how do we start talking about the fact that we're just really, we're not reinventing something that we don't know how to do. We're just trying to figure out how to make it fit, how to make it work in this twenty first century world.

It's such a great question and and brilliantly worded because what design economics is about and what your work is about is ultimately on the primal level, nothing new in that we're ultimately after people thriving. Right? We're after people we're after capital being counted in different ways that are nuanced. Right? We're after redefining what we thought was going on, but it still goes back to those primal needs and how we are all going to thrive and have enough and have abundance.

It's the same in education, right? So what I've tried to do and to get back to the technical elements of how do we do this on a technical level. Okay? So but on a theoretical level, we have to land on the fact that ultimately, there are just a few key things we need to go back to that are primal and source code, I say. It's just source code.

And in education, it's time. It's time. Time with a child, time with a class. And this is I'm in the business of thinking about the future. I'm in the business of innovation, quote unquote, or whatever.

But I'm constantly saying we're overcomplicating this. Okay? And it's because of what we just talked about. Historically, we already know what this looks like, but the limiting factors have been there. But now we've gone off the rails with so much rational order on our system to try to solve these gaps or whatever you want to call it.

But it's really just about time. When we thought about how students learn and what Sir Robinson was saying, it was about meeting a student on their time, all right, and what they brought to the table, just like capital, right? Well, now it's the same with And if I had one silver bullet, and I try not to do that because it's way more nuanced and complicated, and there's so much research I could refute anything. But I have come to a firm conclusion that if we just had one silver bullet right now, whether it's Florida or anywhere else, it's just class size. If we just address that and allow people to do their job and meet students where they're at, we probably can start cracking at all of these other issues.

So it's way more nuanced than that. But I think that that right now is that primal piece that is, know, that's the technical answer I could give people.

I agree with you 100%. My entire education, there's always been a difference depending on the class size that I'm in. And I've been fortunate enough to always be on the side of smaller classes. Like I did not suffer through that. It was only one undergraduate class that I took in a short period of time and I dropped the program and didn't return to school for a decade after that because there were a 100 kids in the

Yeah. And I've seen repeatedly, even in our own state where there were amendments to the constitution around this. And I was a practitioner when the fidelity to this was intense. I mean, we counted everybody, and that was it. And little by little, again, the rational order of apparatus comes in.

We start finding ways to get around it, and it just runs away from us. So Yeah. This is drift to mediocrity that Peter Sengay talks about is we eventually move farther and farther and farther away from the center. And that was part of that study is that we eventually Is this what we meant to do? Because we're getting farther away from the goal here.

I'm not sure that this is what we meant, you know?

Yeah, and I think that's the awakening that happened with standardized testing, that all of sudden, this was never the intention of these programs.

Right, right.

Continuing on that thread, how do we get at least focusing on the public's the childhood education side of this? How do we bring more understanding between these groups because I think a big part of it is that class size is directly attributed to school budgets. We can only have enough teachers and we're losing teachers arguably across the country, they're not well compensated. How do we change that language? Do you see any changes happening in conversations you're having?

Yeah. And I'm surrounded by great scholars who do work in early childhood and many, many fields that touch on this. What I would say is, what we're dealing with right now, and it's extremely complex because the policy is, there are so many different goals to different policies. So that's why I always try to distill this down to, alright, what is one or two things we can all agree on? Alright.

So can we all agree on the fact that if we give students more time, we're probably going to be able to meet their needs? Okay, we agree on that. So again, going back to a couple of key things. And then it's going to be, you know, there are policy battles that will need to be fought and, and agreements that will have to be struck at some point to recalibrate, depending on where you're at. As I said earlier, sometimes I think overcomplicating this, and not to lift up one state above the others, but again, if you look at where, systems are not suffering as much, and they're consistently at the top in all rankings and all assessments globally, not just nationally.

It's Massachusetts. It's New York. Well, what do they have in common? It's how much they spend per child. So we're in a dynamic right now in this state that is vastly different, but across and your work is across all, environments where we have to really think about our investments.

What are we what are we investing in? And, is that going to in my opinion, the one thing we should be looking at is time. How do we do that? How do we give more time to those students?

Absolutely. So then let's move into some practical applications here. You've got, how can advocates, citizens, parents look at this analysis to get these things, what questions to ask in your community, What different policy things are happening or how can people engage in this conversation?

So this is the, obviously the hardest part is how do we get from these, whether it's truisms or whether it's theory, etcetera, to practical. Right? And I think one of the things that I love doing with the work we did when we wrote that book chapter on moving schools from strategy to foresight is we looked at conceptualizing these persistent challenges through a lens of futurism and a lens that takes us beyond the tactical, which is two to five years where most schools operate, to the foresight, which is five to ten, fifteen years, right? And a lot of other industries do that, whether it's technology industry that gave us AI, that gave us LLMs, or DARPA and those settings. In education, we don't do that as much.

It's mostly tactical strategic because of the urgency of the moment, which we articulate. Right? Alright. Well, again, is this practical? No.

So here's what I've been doing is I've been working here at the University of Florida to develop a concept of foresight teams. And so the idea is that every school would have foresight teams consisting of a multitude of dispositions across the team, So maybe eight to 10 people in every school. And then within that, in the districts, it's the same thing. There's a district foresight team comprised of these site based teams. Now, the idea with that is that you would be able to have a call to action to address some of these persistent challenges with what we call triple loop approaches or testing the prior assumptions.

And I'll give you a quick example is something like busing. Transportation is the second most expensive line item in most systems. So could we agree that if we were able to find a way to make that more efficient, if we were able to fuse grades six through 12 transportation with public transportation, might we free up funding to then give us more time with students in the classroom? Probably. But the paradigm in schools today is such that you can't even tackle that.

You just there's what I call there's no oxygen for what we call h three solutions that you and I talked about in that chapter. Yeah. Third horizon solutions, there's no oxygen for that in schools. And I think that's a practical way to really address this is we have to give oxygen to these paradigmatic shifts that need to happen that match the world around us. And there's the, you know, the low hanging fruit here is there's really nothing being done in this space.

So this is a growth area for schooling systems.

That makes sense. This foresight side of it, I mean the chapter that we got to publish was insightful for me to kind of get a window into the education arena that way because, so what you're saying then is this gives a place where parents, educators, policy makers in a region, a district or whatever can start using this framework to experiment, to at least scenario what it would be like. Like okay, We obviously can't do that now, we have all the tactical issues, but if we talk about what could happen, we can start to see okay, well now while we know we can't do it today, we know if we could get it done we would free up this much money and it would allow us to spend X amount more time with the children. And so at least now you go, okay, we were able to experiment enough to get a number to start going, okay, well man, that's real.

Exactly. And I'll give you a very practical example that I just witnessed the other day of that. So what you're just describing right there is literacy. It's like we literally We do not use terminology around futurist thinking in a K-twelve setting, simply put. Okay?

And there's good reason for that, which we articulated. And there's the urgency of the moment. And there are teams, many RTI team. I could go down SAC committees. There's plenty of teams in schools.

But here's the difference. There's not intentionality around futurist thinking and bold h two, h three solutions, which, you know, second horizon, third horizon solutions. And I'll give you a quick example of one right here locally. And there's not intentionality, and this is a key one that I am proposing. There's not intentionality around the team composition.

My work is around leadership development, organizational behavior. And I teach this, and this is at the heart of all of it, is it takes a diverse group to solve complex challenges. I hypothesize, and there's very little data on this, but I'm working with some students to explore this, but that in most large complex systems like school systems or districts, the folks that are making most decisions around some of these challenges we're talking about probably hold similar profiles, dispositions. I mean, if you rise up the ranks of a complex system like the ones that I've been a part of, you probably are able to manage bureaucratic environments. Gives only certain people can handle that.

Yes. Well, foresight work is not gonna just be those people, right? I mean, it's gonna be people that are a little bit all over the place. But if you just have futures thinkers, nothing's gonna get done either. So my approach is that foresight work is intentional about the team composition.

It's intentional about the language and the call to action on H2H3. And I'll give you a simple solution. Here, locally, I went to a school the other day with a colleague, we did a professional development with the frontline team. And these are not the faculty. These are the folks who are in transportation.

These are the folks who are the school nurses. They're there front and center, the secretaries with the schools every day, they need to be on the foresight team, 100%, all right? Those are people that are part of this. There's one example in that school that I thought, wow, what a microcosm of a foresight challenge that every school should be doing. It turned out that this school had a school bus that was dedicated for field trips.

They actually had two buses. Somehow they had managed to get that and have a full time driver on-site who helps do this. This also happens to be it's a public school, but it also happens to be one of the ones that folks want to go to. Students are thriving. They love it.

Why isn't every school doing that? Why haven't we solved that challenge where every school has that? Doesn't that transform what a school can do if you just gave them two school buses to do? Immediately, if you raised that in a district, folks would be like, It's impossible. A bus We driver shortage.

Is the kind of work that a foresight team, I believe, could take on and could solve within a year, two, three years max. But that's just one example. So that's a practical approach, Vinny, to solving this on a technical level is how do we do this? Well, we have to put the right people in place to do it and give them a call to action. I

appreciate that Walter. That is quite actionable and I think what we're doing here is really getting to the point where we're getting people to understand the power structures that are here. The fact that changes, that this paradigm is changing to a distributed format regardless. Yes. So how can we get transparency in those tools to help citizens become more literate about how policy actually forms along these lines and giving them the tools like Foresight to dream and scenario plan a little bit beyond what the tactical horizons are.

Does that kind of make sense?

Absolutely. And and that's on the site level. Right? And, you know, meaning the schools and systems. And then on the societal level, this is playing out every single day, and we just haven't figured out how to sense make as communities.

But every single day, everybody's going to make their own truths around the information that they have that twenty years ago could be sort of controlled. So and the practical example I just gave on providing students with community learning opportunities through a school bus, well, twenty years ago, parents maybe didn't demand that, but now they're given 30 different options to be able to go to school. And those are solve those are solutions that all schools have to solve. So those are just some examples of how the paradigms are kinda colliding.

Yeah. So, Walter, what's what's what are you

working on now or headed towards in this kind of arena? So the work I just mentioned around foresight work, this is an ongoing initiative here at the University of Florida. So working with some media and a scalable series that could be deployed autonomously. So schools and systems could basically build foresight teams and then perhaps a foresight convening where we bring folks together periodically once a year to build a discipline around this, similar to, like, IDEO and design thinking did with schools and design thinking. I think that was a great model for scaling framework.

So that's one. The other piece I've been wrapping up, getting close to a book called Open Source Schools, where I show I draw parallels and lessons from nature and my experience over the last twenty plus years working with developers and technologists to build open source approaches to schooling and then other initiatives around AI efficacy in schools. I'm working with a team here in a major district to explore that. So all those initiatives are all under that umbrella of decentralization. And then lastly, I have an organization that I started at the University of South Florida that is still there as an open source community learning platform called learnopen.org, and that is a platform to allow ideas to kind of build on themselves, to fork and merge based on what we call pathways, just little mini pathways.

If I share a video with you, that's just a video. It's very fragmented. But what I could do is curate a couple videos, a couple of podcasts, couple articles, and then send you a pathway, and then that could be forked and merged. So that's at learnopen.org. So those are all the initiatives I've been mostly working on in the last, or will be working on moving forward.

I love the pathways idea. I think that's getting, right now we've got the influencer culture, but I think the education version of that is finding the people you trust are able to send you information, give you pathways. And I mean, you are one of those people for me over the past however many years it's been since we were introduced. Likewise, likewise. Thank you.

It's been a pleasure having you here. I guess continuing from learnopen.org, what other ways are best for people to find you? Social, web, etcetera?

Yeah. So on the web, my website is walterbalcer.com. That is where you can see some of the scholarship and media. A lot of what we talked about today, you can pretty much pull down examples of that, including active research on some things that could, not just research, but really practice oriented solutions. I'm always exploring collaborations.

So that's a good starting point there. And then on social media, just only have a Twitter and hardly ever, ever tweet because of the reasons we But all it's pretty much all my handles and my writing and everything is under WBalser. So Okay. Glad to connect with Well, put that in

the show notes as

well. Awesome. Awesome.

Well, Walter, it's been a pleasure having this conversation. I look forward to having you back on the show again in the future as we go forward on this design thinking and paradigm changing journey.

Thanks Vinny. We need your work. We need institute's ideas in this podcast. So thank you for having me here today.

Appreciate it. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the design economics podcast. We will be back next month with another engaging conversation. You can find the design economics podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Please check out our show notes on our website, designeconomics.io.

The designeconomics podcast is produced by the Institute for Economic Evolution, and I am your host, Vinny Tafuro. Thank you for listening.