Learning

Bertrand Russell: "The wish to pursue the past rather than the hope of the future dominates the minds of those who control the teaching of the young."

Right now I work with my son for twenty-five to thirty minutes a day on homework. That time used to be used reading books together, drawing or practicing our words. Now it's spent on worksheets. To me, that's tragic. I am watching him lose his love of learning each night. Pasted from <[]> Engagement is an outside force;impacted by what/where- passion is different.It's inside out- it's about WHO

On reading and books: The fear that computers will ultimately replace books supercedes the reality that the two, used in tandem in a thoughtful learning environment, complement each other perfectly. The core of the written word--the mission and substance--remains the same. At its heart, publishing is about sharing ideas, regardless of the medium. The whole art of teaching is only art of awakening natural curiosity of young minds for purpose of satisfying it afterwards Homework What if the only homework kids got was to ask questions? Tell me about a time when... What do you think about...? Have you ever...? What if the goal of homework were to extend learning to include family/community? To create connections and relevance?

"When we make our learning transparent, we become teachers" Seymour Papert from 1998 - "Kids never say schools is too hard; they say it's boring. Yet we still insist on 'making it easier.'" “Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.” “This is a time in which it is profoundly tempting to withdraw into old certainties, to return to familiar landscapes of teaching and learning whose routines and well-worn grooves give us comfort and a sense of control and order. But the world itself holds a different lesson for us: a lesson about the importance of teaching the young to live well when the very shape of that world emerges every day in ways that are unlike anything we have ever known before.”

“Kids learn not by being consumers of knowledge, but creators of it.” ~Nicholas Negroponte “Students must be encouraged to become ‘pilots, not passengers’ in their educational journey.”

“The inferior teacher tells you something is wrong with you and offers to fix it. The superior teacher tells you that something is right with you and helps you bring it forth.”

a school’s primary responsibility is to evoke a deep passion for learning; the kind of learning that feeds and nourishes us and draws out our authentic self and gives us a purpose for being here.

Any teacher today who believes that learning ended after graduate school needs to take another look at the profession and the world. The pace of change is accelerating. The students who sit in our classes are needier and more diverse than ever. Information and knowledge are growing exponentially, far faster than anyone can possibly keep up. As a teacher, I was asked daily to teach things to my students that I knew little or nothing about before I had to teach it. As an administrator, I’m asked to run programs about which I know far less than I need to. New ideas about how to teach appear in journals and blogs every day. Scientists have learned an enormous amount in just the last ten years about how the brain learns. If I am not before anything else a learner, if I do not dedicate myself to always getting better at what I do and how I do it, I have already lost before I even start. I can’t afford to rest on “it was perfectly fine last year.” Consider this: the primary thing we want students to get better at is not multiplication or grammar. It is learning. If we’re not learning experts ourselves, how can we possibly expect to teach someone else how to do it well?

I am not a teacher; only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead–ahead of myself as well as of you.-GB Shaw Frightened, clueless or uninformed? In the face of significant change and opportunity, people are often one of the three. If you're going to be of assistance, it helps to know which one. Uninformed people need information and insight in order to figure out what to do next. They are approaching the problem with optimism and calm, but they need to be taught. Uninformed is not a pejorative term, it's a temporary state. Clueless people don't know what to do and they don't know that they don't know what to do. They don't know the right questions to ask. Giving them instructions is insufficient. First, they need to be sold on what the platform even looks like. And frightened people will resist any help you can give them, and they will blame you for the stress the change is causing. Scared people like to shoot the messenger. Duck. The worst kind of frightened person is one with power. Someone in a mob of other frightened people, someone with a gun, someone who is the CEO. When confronted with a scared CEO, time to run. Before someone can change, they have to learn, and before they learn, they have to cease being scared. One reason so many big ideas come from small organizations is that there is far less fear of change at the top. One mistake board members and shareholders make is that they reward the scared but hyper-confident CEO, instead of calling him on the carpet as he rages at change. When I first encountered surfing, I was scared of it. It looks cool, but an old guy like me can get hurt. A patient instructor allayed my fears until I was willing to get started. When you first start out, the things you think are important are actually irrelevant, and it's the stuff you don't know is important that gets you thrown into the ocean. Finally, and only then, was I smart enough to actually learn. I'm bad at surfing now, but at least I know why. Comfort the frightened, coach the clueless and teach the uninformed.

“Consider this: the primary thing we want students to get better at is not multiplication or grammar. It is learning. If we’re not learning experts ourselves, how can we possibly expect to teach someone else how to do it well?” “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” “Building a thought-filled curriculum serves the larger agenda of building a more thought-filled world–an interdependent learning community where people continually search for ways to care for one another, learn together, and grow towards greater intelligence. We must deepen student thinking to hasten the arrival of a world community…” (Arthur L. Costa, “The Thought-Filled Curriculm”, Educational Leadership, 2008)

The huge advantage of technology is not educating the whole class but in individualizing instruction for each learner. Creativity is the learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual ~ Arthur Koestler "Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are." ~Proverb "Standardized tests tell socioeconomic status of students and which schools have taken time away from real learning" #kohnlive You're not paid to teach stuff; you're paid to cause learning." -Wiggins. What if an "F" meant the teacher failed to reach the student instead of the student failed to learn?  Shawn Achor - "creating a happiness advantage for your students" –  Teachers do not need to be masters of all knowledge. Kids can take on that role.  Every kid can have the access to the best teachers through technology. Learning without boarders.  Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions." Alfie Kohn "Do not confine your children to your own learning for they were born in another time." ~Hebrew Proverb "The real difficulty in changing the course of any enterprise lies not in developng new ideas but in escaping from the old ones." J. M. Keynes Creativity is the learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual ~ Arthur Koestler "Standardized tests tell socioeconomic status of students and which schools have taken time away from real learning" "You're not paid to teach stuff; you're paid to cause learning." -Wiggins. He who dares to teach, must never cease to learn." - John Cotton Dana I have stood in a room with hundreds of people whispering. It is very loud.

If you take enough people to the middle of nowhere, it starts to feel like somewhere. -- Auto advertisement

At the beginning of any course of study the teacher lays out clearly defined goals for his/her students. These goals ultimately shape the way the course is structured, the content that is presented and the measurable objectives for students. However, in many of today’s classrooms we still hold fast to goals that value skills which had much more value in the past century than now. In order for our digital natives to develop skills essential for their present and future, we need to modify our pedagogy and rethink our goals. This requires an examination of the knowledge and skills we hope to foster in our students and the methodologies we apply to make this happen. Our students’ minds need to be challenged and developed in new ways for the “new world” (Gardner, p.11). Mastery of content is indeed essential; however, students’ factual understanding of content is not enough nor is it in today’s world a true representation of mastery. The ability to regurgitate facts represents a surface-level understanding of subject matter. Students must possess the ability to process content and develop a “disciplined” (Gardner, p. 27) approach to evaluate, question, test and revaluate in order to truly understand the content’s relevance as well as its underlying connections to other areas of study. Essentially, our goal is to develop our students' minds, not just fill them with facts. As we'll discuss next, helping our students achieve this goal often requires our own openness to a new instructional approach.

After reshaping our goals, we can begin the process of developing “disciplined” minds by rethinking our instructional practices including our presentation of content. At some point you’ve probably heard someone in education - your professor, colleague or maybe your principal - say that teachers need to be a “guide on the side” and not a “sage on the stage.” Although somewhat cliché at this point, it is still very good advice. Part of developing a disciplined mind does involve mastering content associated with a particular discipline. Yet, our students can easily retrieve, or “google,” factual information in seconds using the digital encyclopedias (i.e., cell phones) in their pockets. Our role must evolve to the point where we focus on helping students take content, apply it to other concepts they’ve learned and make connections to the larger whole. To do this, we need to present content in different ways from many different angles in many different forms. And, we need to challenge them to ask different questions. We can use digital media as a powerful tool to help us achieve our new goals. Students are presented with content in a format that is natural and engaging to them, in addition to being flexible enough to address different learning styles and needs. For instance, by embedding digital media into our presentations, learning centers and ultimately in our assessments, we can present content in different forms (e.g., images, audio, video) across many different subject areas and in a manner that is interactive as well as self-paced. Then, we challenge students to make connections and demonstrate their understanding by recreating their own digital interpretation of the content – an activity that culminates with them presenting and defending their projects to their peers. There are many ways that we can reshape or tweak our instructional practices through the integration of digital media that help facilitate students' deeper understanding of subject matter. You are challenged now to post your thoughts about simple, yet meaningful strategies for using a single digital resource in variety of ways in your classroom.

T hey didn’t make conversation; rather they let a seedling of thought sprout by itself, and then watched with wonder while it sent out branching limbs. They were surprised at the strange forest this conversation bore, for they didn’t direct their thinking, nor trellis nor trim it the way so many Imagine your workplace as an award-winning garden — a place where you nurture knowledge and success. A place where people grow and learn from one another by sharing best practices. A place where training content expands and improves through crowdsourcing. A place that’s self-sustaining, dynamic, and always fresh. That place is called collaborative learning.

innovation is not creativity. Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about executing the idea — converting the idea into a successful business.

Today’s students graduate from high school and college facing a multitude of challenges. Increasingly, the progression and use of technology has resulted in a fluid and interconnected world, one in which new careers emerge overnight. While students entering the workforce ten years ago were accustomed to the idea of working multiple jobs in their lifetime, today’s graduates may have multiple careers. The focus of learning has shifted from basic skills and vocational training to something broader: students must learn how to learn. Tomorrow’s graduates are growing up in a world where technology dominates various aspects of daily life, from social interaction to data analysis to professional advancement. Their education should reflect this reality, by better equipping them to interact with a digital world, and by using technology to drive student achievement, measure student progress, and create an individualized approach to learning that instills students with invaluable critical thinking skills.

"While there is often talk about making school ‘fun’, the real trick is to challenge our students with work that they can deeply believe in, work that matters and gives them a chance to make an impact on the world around them. When school is merely about keeping kids ‘busy’, then kids often ask for ‘fun’. On the other hand, when the work is authentic and powerful, kids rise to the challenge. Every time."

“Youth”, by Samuel Ullman. “Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity of the appetite, for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of sixty more than a body of twenty. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust. Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station; so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the Infinite, so long are you young. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at twenty, but as long as your aerials are up, to catch the waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at eighty.”

Learning and Teaching are not the same thing. How many times have we heard a colleague say, “I don’t know why these kids don’t get it. I’ve taught it a hundred times.” I equate teaching and learning to a basic physics principle. If an object does not move, no matter how much force has been applied, no work has been done. Therefore, if a student has not learned, not matter how much effort has been exerted, no teaching has been done. Teaching in the 21st century is going to be about working smarter and not harder.

(Ideally) real participation involves students being initiators of what needs to be learned and then working with their teacher to determine ways to demonstrate and assess the learning.

Autonomy-supportive teachers seek a student’s initiative … whereas controlling teachers seek a student’s compliance. -- J. Reeve, E. Bolt, & Y. Cai

Not that you asked, but my favorite Spanish proverb, attributed to the poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, can be translated as follows: “If they give you lined paper, write the other way.” In keeping with this general sentiment, I’d like to begin my contribution to an issue of this journal whose theme is “Motivating Students” by suggesting that it is impossible to motivate students. In fact, it’s not really possible to motivate anyone, except perhaps yourself. If you have enough power, sure, you can make people, including students, do things. That’s what rewards (e.g., grades) and punishments (e.g., grades) are for. But you can’t make them do those things well -- “You can command writing, but you can’t command good writing,” as Donald Murray once remarked -- and you can’t make them want to do those things. The more you rely on coercion and extrinsic inducements, as a matter of fact, the less interest students are likely to have in whatever they were induced to do. What a teacher can do – all a teacher can do – is work with students to create a classroom culture, a climate, a curriculum that will nourish and sustain the fundamental inclinations that everyone starts out with: to make sense of oneself and the world, to become increasingly competent at tasks that are regarded as consequential, to connect with (and express oneself to) other people. Motivation – at least intrinsic motivation -- is something to be supported, or if necessary revived. It’s not something we can instill in students by acting on them in a certain way. You can tap their motivation, in other words, but you can’t “motivate them.” And if you think this distinction is merely semantic, then I’m afraid we disagree. On the other hand, what teachers clearly have the ability to do with respect to students’ motivation is kill it.[1] That’s not just a theoretical possibility; it’s taking place right this minute in too many classrooms to count. So, still mindful of the imperative to “write the other way,” I’d like to be more specific about how a perversely inclined teacher might effectively destroy students’ interest in reading and writing. I’ll offer six suggestions without taking a breath, and then linger on the seventh.

Wow, this is a great discussion, David. I'm wondering if we continue to be frustrated because we (the teachers) still own the learning? Simply asking students to demonstrate their understanding of content by doing a Glog won't fully engage them in the learning because we still own it...all of it. We (the state) decide on the content, we (the teacher) decide on the mode of instruction and we (the teacher) tell them what tool they' going to use. For me, we will transform learning when and only when we allow the students to personalize their own learning. We do this by taking the curriculum and opening up multiple pathways for students to get to the understanding; this could be accomplished by working in a group or independently; using a variety of tools to help construct their own learning; and then sharing in the way that best meets their needs. Am I making any sense? This is NOT pointing a finger at anyone in particular...I'm just saying that we probably want to engage in a discussion about why we continue to feel frustrated and digging into the way in which we structure instruction must be part of that conversation. Right? Why do folks spend time criticziing what is rather than pondering-actualizing what could be? But more than that: we need, first, to take charge of our own learning, and next, help others take charge of their own learning. We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves. It is time, in other words, that we change out attitude toward learning and the educational system in general. That is not to advocate throwing learners off the bus to fend for themselves. It is hard to be self-reliant, [|to take charge of one's own learning], and people shouldn't have to do it alone. It is instead to articulate a way we as a society approach education and learning, beginning with an attitude, though the development of supports and a system, through to the techniques and technologies that support that. Nor is it to advocate some fundamental reform of the education system. I will leave the system and its reformers to themselves. I doubt that the system could be reformed, and even if it could, do not have the time nor energy to try. Indeed, it remains a source of wonder to me that when people talk about "change" and "reform", they always mean, of other people. I'm not interested in that approach to education. Rather, it's about a complete redesign of the system, from the ground up, using new technologies and new ideas. That's what I'll be writing about in this column, hopefully once a week, in The Huffington Post's education blogs section. I'll be looking at the people who are building this new system now, at the people who are advocating free, open and authentic learning. I'll be describing the tech from the perspective of someone who builds it, and the philosophy from the point of view of someone who lives it. Because, you know, change does not come from the system. It does not result from the replacement of one set of leaders with another. It's not something you can create by reshaping old institutions that were designed in a different age for a different purpose. The only real revolution, as John Lennon once said, comes when you change the people. Ourselves. One attitude at a time. So that's it for today. I have a teleconference to get to. And a world to change.

The Chaos Scenario is about the collapse of mass media and mass marketing, and with it the destruction of entire economies and cultures built upon "mass." The culprit is the digital revolution, which is in several ways undermining the foundations of the Old World Order. But though the collapse of those symbiotic structures, and the subsequent chaos, will be devastating, it will also yield a Brave New World of connectivity. community and social interaction unimaginable even a decade ago. In short, the power is being shifted from the apex of the pyramid to the base. The crowd has been empowered, and it behooves all institutions -- marketers, governments, non-profits, science, the media, the Church, whatever -- to adapt or perish.

Imagine a school in which the students – all of them – are so excited about school that they can hardly wait to get there. Imagine having little or no “discipline problems” because the students are so engaged in their studies that those problems disappear. Imagine having parents calling, sending notes, or coming up to the school to tell you about the dramatic changes they are witnessing in their children: newly found enthusiasm and excitement for school, a desire to work on projects, research and write after school and on weekends. Imagine your students making nearly exponential growth in their basic skills of reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching, scientific explorations, math, multimedia skills and more! It is possible. It has happened, and is happening, in schools across the country. Life Wide Learning Pasted from  When offered degrees of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, students will engage more fully with their learning. Yet let’s be truthful: All too frequently, we ask students to learn without autonomy, without opportunity for mastery, and without purpose. So how can we use these forces to create more meaningful learning experiences for our students?

Students want to make choices, be directed by purpose, and master content—and schools can offer students meaningful learning experiences by having them play a role in solving the world’s problems. In doing so, we release the potential in our students, make effective use of 21st century literacy tools, and create learning experiences that are deeply meaningful for both our students and our world.

At one high school in Chicago, when students don’t master a particular unit of study, they don’t receive a failing grade—instead, they get a grade of Not Yet. Students are not ashamed of that grade because they know that they’re expected to master the material, if not the first time, then the next time, or the next.

[|for the love of learning: Curriculum Prisons]

It's easy to be distracted by the little things. Curriculum can be a guide or it can be a prison. When learning is driven by teaching more than teaching is guided by learning, things go sideways in a real hurry... learning turns into school... exploration fades into following a rubric and an education becomes an obligation... When I read a curriculum, I spend most of my time looking at the few general outcomes, largely ignoring the large list of specific outcomes. But I'll admit, it's not easy... Because accountability is about those outside of the classroom controlling those in the classroom, it's easier to comply than it is to construct something better. Quite frankly, the risk might bring nothing good. And more's the pity. Because that which is measured is controlled, it is preferable for those who wish to control to demand the minutia and those who inspire and nurture real learning would prefer the vague. The discrepancy between theory and practice. Curriculum in theory reflects on years of practice and action research. It is not intended to be disconnected from the experience of educators and the broad goals of all education's stakeholders. I believe the curriculum that guides me is by and large a thoughtful construction. It remains a broad road map in my mind. I think that view is shared by many educators. The curriculum should not be perceived as an educational 'On Star' that guides each moment of the learning journey. The immediacy of the classroom dynamic and the particular needs of our learners guides our practice. It is delusional to image this can be ignored. The powers that be imagine education to be a mountain children climb, each child taking their own differentiated path to arrive at the same prospect. They cannot conceive of education as resulting in people reaching their own unique prospect. This is what happens consistently. We simply fail to acknowledge the reality of all learning.

[|What is Understanding?]

Understanding goes beyond knowing and doing. To understand something you need to be able to apply what you know or can do in a variety of different contexts. But understanding also involves being able to carry out "performances of understanding". As teachers if we want our students to understand something we also have to give them the opportunities for these "performances". For these performances to be successful students need to have a lot of feedback along the way to help them reflect on progress and on what they need to do to get better. These performances should not just be part of a summative assessment, but ongoing or formative assessments, so that students demonstrate their understanding right from the start and have plenty of time for reflecting on our feedback so that they can move further and deepen their understanding. Pasted from <[]> What that framing forgets, though, is that the other side of fragmentation can be focus: the kind of deep-dive, myopic-in-a-good-way, almost Zen-like concentration that sparks to life when intellectual engagement couples with emotional affinity. The narrows, to be Carrian about it, of the niche. And when that kind of focus springs to life — when interest becomes visceral, when caring becomes palpable, when you’re so focused on something that the rest of the world melts away — the learning that results tends to be rich and sticky and sweet. The kind that you carry with you throughout your life. The kind that becomes a part of you. The kind that turns, soon enough, into wisdom. Pasted from <[|http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/11/attention-versus-distraction-what-that-big-ny-times-story-leaves-out/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+NiemanJournalismLab+(Nieman+Journalism+Lab)]> Heres to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you cant do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. Pasted from <[]> In a world too big to know™, our basic strategy has been to filter, reduce, and fragment knowledge. This was true all the way through the Information Age. Our fear of information overload now seems antiquated. Not only is there “no such thing as information overload, only filter failure” [|Clay Shirky], natch, in the digital age, the nature of filters change. On the Net, we do not filter out. We filter forward. That is, on the Net, a filter merely shortens the number of clicks it takes to get to an object; all the other objects remain accessible. This changes the role and nature of expertise, and of knowledge itself. For traditional knowledge is a system of stopping points for inquiry. This is very efficient, but its based on the limitations of paper as knowledges medium. Indeed, science itself has viewed itself as a type of publishing: It is done in private and not made public until its certain-ish. But the networking of knowledge gives us a new strategy. We will continue to use the old one where appropriate. Networked knowledge is abundant, unsettled, never done, public, imperfect, and contains disagreements within itself. Pasted from <[]> School is temporary. Education is not. If you want to prosper in life, find something that fascinates you and jump all over it. Don’t wait for someone to teach you; your enthusiasm will attract teachers to you. Don’t worry about diplomas or degrees, just get so good that no one can ignore you. James Marcus Bach, “Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar” Pasted from <[]> [|Many Journeys Begin With a Single Step]

How do we begin to know and understand the magnitude and scope of a single step? It is often those single steps that lead us in directions we might never have thought to begin. It is how we find ourselves as part of a journey, an adventure that fuels our greatest desires to know, to dream, to imagine, to learn. Such is the path that unfolds before me. I have ignited my passion to learn, to create and challenge every part of my being. The feeling of accomplishment satisfies my emotional thirst. I never understood that sensation as it applies to words, to be utterly consumed that time stood still. My years as a student never afforded me these particular feelings. I spent many an endless moment, countless, insufferable days wrought with inadequacy and the loneliness of someone who saw themselves reflected in failure. Each and every day the seconds, the minutes, the hours ticked by endlessly. I felt nothing as a student but sheer inadequacy. Small glimmers of hope cut through that darkness like slivers, seemingly miniscule rays of sunshine. The interesting part, the lens I am able to look through as an adult, is that these moments were defined by authentic learning experiences. Opportunities to communicate, consolidate, reflect, infuse a little part of me into the larger scale of learning. I was able to pinpoint these exact moments and keep them frozen in time, for these were not daily occurences in my life as a student. They were happenstance, when the moon and the stars align, and fleeting. This is not the fate that our young learners need to be chained to. We have the power as educators to shape their learning in ways, we are ourselves as learners, could only have imagined. Embracing the strides we have made in our field, tapping into research that supports, shapes, inspires, and empowers students to chart their own life long learning journey. I do know this as truth ...we owe it to the generations that follow in our footsteps, a map as a beacon and guide for all to find their element, their passion that allows creativity flow and individuals to soar. "The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed—it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardize education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions." Pasted from <[]> Problem-based vs. Project-based: I think projects are problems inviting a solution. I was reading Shelley Wright’s blog last night and I cried. She is a member of our eci831 class and a high school science teacher who experimented with adopting a technology-rich, student-centred approach to her teaching. [|(See her blog post, “taking the plunge”)]. After a two week trial she shared the results on her post, [|“the jury is in”]. I cried for the girl in her class that experienced the joy of learning for possibly the first time in her school career; I cried for my son who dropped out of school after Grade 10 because he thought he couldn’t learn and in the traditional class environment he was right); I cried for my 11 year old granddaughter who is in Grade 6 and came home last week with a 90 average on her fall report card, including a 100 in computers, but she hates school so much that her mother has to argue with her everyday to get her out the door; and I cried for all the kids and adult learners like them who are being sidelined by a traditional approach to teaching and all their parents and grandparents who don’t know how to help their kids to be successful in school and their teachers who for one reason or another are afraid to try and change the way they teach. Pasted from <[]> A New Way of Talking about Space In the book Campfires in Cyberspace, author and futurist David Thornburg assigns metaphors to the four spaces where learning happens: the campfire, the watering hole, the cave, and life. The campfire. This is where we have gathered throughout history to pass on the stories that represent our culture and wisdom. The campfire exemplifies our formal learning spaces. These are our classrooms, auditoriums, and libraries, where students gather with their teachers to learn their formal lessons. The watering hole. This represents all of the informal places where people gather to share information with peers. Whereas meeting spaces around schools, such as hallways, cafeterias, and courtyards, provide students with areas to gather and share gossip, they are not purposefully designed as places where students and teachers can get together and discuss what they have learned “at the campfire.” Similarly, these spaces are often overlooked as venues where more formal learning could occur. The cave. This is where we come “in contact with ourselves,” as Thornburg puts it. This can be a library, office, bedroom, kitchen, or den, where we process what we’ve learned. Unfortunately, other than the library, it is often difficult to find quiet places in our schools where students can reflect on their learning. In fact, schools are often purposely designed without these potential quiet places. Life. This is the term Thornburg uses to describe the fourth place. In life, we apply what we’ve learned. It can be at our jobs, in our homes during interactions with family members, or in our relationships with others in the community. Students need to be free to interact in all four of these spaces to hear the wisdom of the elders, share their understanding, test their assumptions with peers, retreat to a quiet place to reflect on what they have learned, and then apply that knowledge in authentic settings.

"The one question we don't get enough of is: How is this changing the way you learn?" Pasted from <[]> I too have been thinking about how we can move past the kind of surface learning that is memorized, parroted back and quickly forgotten to a deeper learning that is schematically connected to experiences and thoughts. Pasted from <[]> This is not a case of saving up this occasion to participate in the world for when they turn 18 and are handed their school leavers books full of notions of empowerment. It needs to be happening every day. They need to be not just imagining their futures but creating them, whether this is in the form of life changing projects or developing more specific, short term interests. Pasted from <[]> Instead of 'teaching', create a space where learning can happen. In [|Why Don't Students Like School], cognitive scientist [|Daniel Willingham] describes true thinking (not just relying on memory or how you've always done something) as "slow, effortful, and uncertain." We tend to avoid this kind of thinking, Willingham says, unless our fragile curiosity is nurtured in an environment that includes Pasted from <[]> You can't push writing-it needs to pull you. We need to create pulls in our classrooms!
 * challenge yet opportunities to be successful,
 * adequate background knowledge in our long-term memory,
 * adequate environmental clues, and
 * room in our working memory.

"Learning is the ability to acquire new ideas from experience and retain them as memories" (from Eric Kandel). Effective communication depends on the ability to read, write, and interact across multiple media and social platforms. (provided by [|www.transliteracy.com]) In the emerging decade, ideas will migrate across multiple social media platforms: podcasts, digital video, virtual worlds, microblogs, wikis, social networking, tagging, etc. The amplified, transliterate organization will have the capacity to communicate across these platforms. Pasted from <[]>
 * Podcasts
 * Digital video
 * Virtual Worlds
 * Microblogs
 * Wikis
 * Social Networking
 * Tagging