WE ALL LEARN

Shared from The World Is Open: How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education (Wiley Desktop Editio
kindle.amazon.com
As the WE-ALL-LEARN framework indicates, we are no longer participants in Aristotle’s world where one could conceivably read from every book or document written. In the twenty-first century, no one can know all. However, we all can learn. And the vital signs of intelligence in this century are related to access and use of knowledge when needed. Knowing where to look, how to access, and what to focus on are the powerful strategies of today.

Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity | Video on TED.com

A great resource for economics, history, and global studies: Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.

Seth Godin on the Future of the Library

Via Stephen's Lighthouse.  This is great food for thought:

Yep, gotta love Seth:  The future of the library

“The next library is a house for the librarian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get better grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a soldering iron or take apart something with no user servicable parts inside. And even to challenge them to teach classes on their passions, merely because it’s fun. This librarian takes responsibility/blame for any kid who manages to graduate from school without being a first-rate data shark.

The next library is filled with so many web terminals there’s always at least one empty. And the people who run this library don’t view the combination of access to data and connections to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point.

Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brooklyn coffee shop combined with a passionate raconteur of information? There are one thousands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mission: take the world of data, combine it with the people in this community and create value.

We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime.”

Read it. Re-post it.

Sources of Disruption in Library Media

This is worth a long look.  Stephan's Light House recently posted Sources of Disruption in Library Land  with the following chart from A Digital Outrigger.  It's just a tool for discussion, but I like the way it is done visually.  It certainly challenges us to take a more global view of the impact of the web on libraries.

Magic washing machine

Not only is this an excellent presentation, the author also makes a great argument of the importance of the washing machine as an invention:

Folk og røvere i Kardemomme by

I just came across a wonderful children's book in Norwegian from the 1950's. Folk og røvere i Kardemomme by by  Thorbjørn Egner.  It's a fictional town where there is only one law: Kardemommeloven (The Cardamom Act). 

The law is simple:

Man skal ikke plage andre,

(One should not bother others,)

man skal være grei og snill,

(you should be nice and kind,)

og for øvrig kan man gjøre hva man vil.

(and otherwise you can do whatever you want.)

It's now a famous expression in Norway.  I love it.

Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together

Mae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer. An excellent biography of her can be found on the blog Amazing Women Rock. I agree with her as she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one -- to create bold thinker. This presentation from May 2009 is worth watching.

Responsibility in education

Students in Finland are at the top of the world in student performance.  One thing they teach there is personal responsibility.  Teachers are responsible for their curriculum.  Students are responsible for their learning. What does this mean for us?

Summer Reading List 2010

Summer Reading List 2010

• Introduction to objectivist epistemology‎ by Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff, Harry Binswanger
• Objectivism: the philosophy of Ayn Rand‎ by Leonard Peikoff
• Atlas Shrugged‎ by Ayn Rand
• The Fountainhead‎ by Ayn Rand
• We the Living‎ by Ayn Rand
• You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching by Swen Nater, Ronald Gallimore
• Disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns by Clayton M. Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, Michael B. Horn

Training

Dilbert shows a lot of wisdom. It's a hard reality that tomorrow's workforce will demand fearless and independent learners. Self motivated people, who pick up new technologies, will have a definite advantage in the world job market. I constantly tell my students that they must be independent, self-motivated learners to survive. In fact, it's the main theme on my library web page. Some listen and some don't.

In a free market system, employers don't waste a lot of time with training. They just hire and keep those who know what they are doing, and like Dilbert's boss, they get rid of the rest. That's why the free market systems are still the only ones who succeed.

Government works in the opposite direction. How many government institutions and school districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on 'training'? When you analyze the new technology training, it has mostly been how to fill out forms on-line. I can't even sit through the classes any more. It's the bane of governments and organizations. I once sat through a mandatory two hour class on how to fill out on-line forms for inter-library loan. What's amazing is that the instructor and many of the students were actually excited about the class.

In the first Men in Black, there is a scene where Will Smith is applying to join the organization. The room is filled with super achievers from West Point, the Marines, NYPD, etc. When filling out the application, Smith is the only one with the common sense to use the coffee table in the center of the room as a writing table. Rip Torn then tells the other super achievers present: "Gentlemen, you are all we've come to expect from years of government training." Will Smith's only negative is his "conflict with authority." He is the epitome of a fearless, independent learner. He doesn't depend on 'training', he just jumps in.

Fearless, independent learners use coaches and instructors as needed, but they don't expect to be spoon fed. In fact, independent learners have a way of using an instructor to their maximum advantage. They quickly get to the heart of a question or issue.

My Argentine tango instructor, Walter Kane, is a fearless, independent learner. Our tango group recently set up a new web site using Google sites (Hudson Valley Tango). Walter has been able to pick up the on-line program with a minimum of instruction from me. In fact, he quickly grasped how to insert text and write in HTML (hypertext markup language) on the site. He lamented that it took him 3 and 1/2 hours to pick it up. It's that willingness to invest the time and effort on a task that separates the fearless, independent learner from the spoon feeder. A spoon feeder will sit through 3 hours of 'training' and come out with nothing. The Dilbert cartoon is right on target.

Web technology is about to change how we learn - Russell Moench, Venture Beat

Here is a post worth reading
Web technology is about to change how we learn - Russell Moench, Venture Beat

from Educational Technology by Ray
The education industry is on the cusp of being massively disrupted by innovation in Web technology. Like other industries prior, it would like to pretend that it can weather the storm and continues business as usual, with only minor tweaking. We all know how that story ends. It won’t happen immediately, and the path won’t be a direct one. Marketing giants such foreign-language instructor Rosetta

From Daniel Pink

This is from Daniel Pink's blog
Factoid of the day: Revenge of the nonspecialist
Published October 5th, 2009

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:
“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”

#IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline by Ben Parr

Ben Parr in "Mashable: The Social Media Guide" provides the most comprehensive history of the interaction of social media on the Iran election crisis: #IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline. If it had not been for Twitter, YouTube and Flicker, we would have never known of the events in Iran. Certainly the mainstream media did not cover it.

Web 2.0 and the Iran Election

From Ben Parr's blog "Mashable: The Social Media Guide" we have these amazing statistics on the #Iranelection:
Twitter: 221,744 “Iran” Tweets in One Hour
The Blogosphere: 2,250,000 Blog Posts in 24 hours
YouTube: 184,500 Videos on Iran, 3000 in One Day
The photo below is from one of these blogs: "tehran 24: Daily Photos from Iran."http://tehranlive.org/2009/06/17/demonstration-and-protests-to-election-results-the-5th-day/

Iranian Revolution on Twitter

If you aren't following the Iranian revolution on Twitter, your missing out on one of the most important events of your lifetime. Here's a piece by Clay Shirkey on TED:

Liberal Arts

My best friend from high school, Rick Ward, professor and Associate  Dean at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, recently commented on the difficulty of recruiting students to a liberal arts education.  As a liberal arts graduate, I have spent some time reflecting on this issue.  There is no question that liberal arts has taken a pounding lately.  For example, Friedman in his book The World is Flat calls for a national commitment to science and engineering.   There is tremendous pressure toward "career" degrees.  Every where you look, you find the question, Can Liberal Arts be saved?

But if you take time to look at the reality of today's market place, you find a need for the broad education and skills that a liberal arts education can provide.  Consider a recent article in eSchool News by Dennis Carter "College web design courses fail with bosses" In this difficult economc climate, a study of web design employers finds they are looking for "broadly educated, open-minded, and self-motivated individuals" with a "general awareness of the web, social networking and culture, strong spoken and written language skills, [and] enthusiasm and commitment to life-long learning."  Doesn't this describe a liberal arts education?  

The skills needed to survive in this rapidly changing world are flexibility, life long learning, and self-motivation.  What better place to recieve them than a liberal arts college.  The problem, as my friend Rick states, is selling this to the college bound student.

The Cognitive Age

David Brooks in a NY Times editorial speaks of "The Cognitive Age" as an alternative view of globalization. The fact that technological change is what drives the world, not globalization, is an interesting concept and one that again falls in line with James Burke's connections theory. Each new invention is a trigger that sets in motion a series of changes in the world. The ability to recognize that becomes the cognitive age. Thanks to Mike Eisenberg's post on the Big6 Blog for calling this editorial to my attention.

21st Century Classroom

Note the "project based thinking" of this post from Power to Learn's Teachnology blog. this is the direction our thinking should take when we design a classroom.

Do You Have an Intelligent Classroom?
Sign up for Model Intelligent Classroom News or visit the Model Intelligent Classroom site to keep up with ideas and news about how to bring 21st Century Skills into your classroom. Find out what technologies can make a difference and how you can best integrate them into your teaching. Investigate Tips like Top Whiteboard Use, Digital Story Telling, Multidisciplinary Digital Photography, Launching a Laptop Program, Professional Development, and Building an Online Community. Model Intelligent Classroom is hosted by Technology & Learning and features Dell and Intel in partnership with school districts throughout the United States.

Flat Classroom Project

I have just become aware of a fantastic resource for collaboration from a teacher in South Korea named Clay Burell. His projects include the flatclassroom, liferoundhere, A Broken World and 1000tales. His blog is http://beyond-school.org/ . I will definitely make use of his ideas. Thanks to Dean Shareski for posting the information on Ideas and Thoughts from an Ed Tech.

Open Source

I just came across and open source. http://fullmeasure.co.uk/PowerTalk/
Power Talk is a free program that automatically speaks any presentation or slide show running in Microsoft PowerPoint for Windows. It works pretty good. I am going to use it for digital stories using powerpoint in a couple of my classes. This site also explains open source.