• John Dewey on the True Purpose of Education and How to Harness the Power of Our Natural Curiosity | Brain Pickings

  tags: dewey curiosity #MustRead

• The Unsung Heroes of Innovation: A 1964 Manifesto for the Role of the Critic-Curator in How Ideas Spread | Brain Pickings

  tags: innovation #MustRead

• On Excitement | Rowing Through A River of Thoughts

  tags: engagement Interest-based excited idiploma innovationdiploma #MustRead

• American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist | WIRED

  “Our kids learn within a system of education devised for a world that increasingly does not exist.”

  HT @MeghanCureton & Greg Todd Jones (two colleagues in significantly different worlds who sent me the link at exactly the same time.)

  tags: School Change #MustRead discovery PBL school3.0

  • We “learn,” and after this we “do.” We go to school and then we go to work.

     

    This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.

  • In such conditions the futures of law, medicine, philosophy, engineering, and agriculture – with just about every other field – are to be rediscovered.
    • In this paragraph there are so many “project starters” that one could design an entire “curriculum” to weave them into an advanced problem solving component to school!
  • Americans need to learn how to discover.
  • Failing to create a new way of learning adapted to contemporary circumstances might be a national disaster.
  • Against this arresting background, an exciting new kind of learning is taking place in America. Alternatively framed as maker classes, after-school innovation programs, and innovation prizes, these programs are frequently not framed as learning at all.
  • Discovery has always provoked interest, but how one discovers may today interest us even more.
  • in the course I teach, How to Create Things and Have Them Matter, students are asked to look, listen, and discover, using their own creative genius, while observing contemporary phenomena that matter today.
  • Learning by an original and personal process of discovery is a trend on many US university campuses
  • Success brings not just a good grade, or the financial reward of a prize. It brings the satisfaction that one can realize dreams, and thrive, in a world framed by major dramatic questions. And this fans the kind of passion that propels an innovator along a long creative career.
  • Culture labs conduct or invite experiments in art and design to explore contemporary questions that seem hard or even impossible to address in more conventional science and engineering labs.
  • The culture lab is the latest indication that learning is changing in America. It cannot happen too fast.
  • we need to get smarter in ways that match the challenges we now face.

• Why Experts Reject Creativity – Atlantic Mobile

  If you think of “teachers” as the “experts” in this piece, it provides an interesting reflection prompt about why we might struggle to innovate in school curricula, instructional methodology, etc. Are the schools most successful with innovating those schools with the highest concentration of “beginners minds”?

  HT @MeghanCureton

  tags: creativity innovation Expertise #MustRead

• Brian Chesky of Airbnb, on Scratching the Itch to Create – NYTimes.com

  tags: nytimes com design entrepreneurship #MustRead #CohortRead

• What Books Do for the Human Soul: The Four Psychological Functions of Great Literature | Brain Pickings

  tags: literature reading #MustRead

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Will · “Completely Inadequate or Outright Mistaken”

  As one can tell, I’m catching up on some Will Richardson reading. Great thought and action provokers! 

  tags: #MustRead School Change

• Will · Expansion of Learning vs. Limits of Structures

  tags: School Change #MustRead

• Emory freshmen determined to build a fast, portable Ebola test | Emory University | Atlanta, GA

  Great story of school work blending with real-world needs. I get excited about assignments that have more application and relevance than just grade-book entry. Also, though, it is interesting to me that this was an “extra credit” assignment for some points on a bio quiz. What if more of these opportunities were the core of student work?!

  HT @PamAmbler and @MeghanCureton

  tags: PBL Emory Ebola real-world #MustRead

• The Shape of the Meaning Organization – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review

  HT @CraigLambert

  tags: meaning organization significance wisdom #MustRead Leadership

  • It’s well past time to begin imagining an organization of a radically different kind — one that takes a quantum leap beyond strategy, marketing, and finance into a novel galaxy of unexplored, untapped economic possibilities.

     

    Here’s what I think that organization — call it the Meaning Organization — might look it. It’s a nod to — but a step beyond — Peter Senge’s learning organization. It’s built not just to learn (and then do “business”) but, more deeply, to redraw the boundaries of prosperity, by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most.

  • First, its brain wouldn’t be the strategy group, but the wisdom group.
  • And the wisdom group’s lifeblood wouldn’t be in the hands of a finance team — but in the hands of what you might call a significance team.
  • companies are going to have to get lethally serious about having an enduring, meaningful, resonant, multiplying, positive, proliferating set of impacts — of all types, whether social, human, intellectual, spiritual, creative, or relational.
  • In the Meaning Organization, the nerve center wouldn’t be marketing — but what you might call humanizing.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Harnessing the Power of Curiosity | David Blake

  Great piece on #Curiosity. The first example of the Obay ad campaign alone is worth the #MustRead! HT @MeghanCureton

  tags: curiosity #MustRead

  • In an age where information is superabundant (but attention spans are short), the potential value to be gained from understanding and harnessing the power of curiosity is huge.

  • For anyone with the challenging task of selling information to an audience, here are three excellent strategies to create curiosity:

    1. Create conflict

     

    2. Introduce novelty

     

    3. Encourage perplexity
  • High school math teacher Dan Meyer defines perplexity as the state wherein a student doesn’t know something, wants to know it, and feels it is in their power to do so. When sufficiently perplexed, students actively pursue the knowledge that would otherwise have been forced on them.

• Like, Comment, Mention: Feedback | The Life of Pinya

  tags: idiploma blogging motivation #MustRead reflection

  • This blog has helped me realize how important feedback really is for both the receiver and the giver.
  • since this blog, it has been the first time I can honestly say that I felt like my writing was making some sort of impact.
  • I care more about maintaining this blog then I do about some if not most of my school homework.
  • despite the other work I may have because this is just as important.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The Modern Craftsman’s Guide: Work with Dignity – 99U

  “The autonomy that many of us enjoy requires greater responsibility in making the deliberate decisions about how we choose to conduct ourselves in our work. What decision can you make today to bring greater dignity to yourself and your work? What does the first step of greater dignity in work look like for you?”

  Curiosity
  Craftsmanship
  Humility

  HT @TreyBoden

  tags: motivation work #MustRead

• 5 Tips for New Team Leaders – Jeanne DeWitt – Harvard Business Review

  HT @CenterTeach

  tags: leadership #MustRead

  • success out of the gate is normally tied to being truly open to learning, communicating openly and honestly, and ultimately being prepared to take action when you know where the team needs to head.

• Relevance and Purpose = Engagement, Motivation, and Persistence « Annie Murphy Paul

  tags: relevance engagement purpose motivation persistence #MustRead

• Now | steelemaley

  tags: school model School Change schooldesign schoolreform #MustRead

• Make Innovation Systematic and Never Again Ask ‘Why Didn’t We Think of That?’

  HT @MeghanCureton

  tags: innovation #MustRead

  • Innovation occurs when an individual or small group collects significant amounts of information about a myriad of topics and identifies trends, gleans insights, and draws conclusions about how a new paradigm might be introduced to fundamentally change an existing market or create a brand new one to solve a basic problem.
  • In other words, innovation is as much about collecting information and connecting the dots as it is about building a product.
  • Systematic innovation requires the development of key processes that promote the intersection of these dichotomous ideals. These processes must support five key capabilities that organizations need to systematically develop.
  • 1. Diverse information gathering.
  • 2. Creative analytical processing.
  • 3. Deep technological understanding.
  • 4. Tight cross-functional collaboration.
  • 5. Broad product experimentation.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Praising Children: Evaluative vs. Descriptive » Playful Learning

  Judgement vs. feedback. I wonder if this is why so many feel strange about “evaluation” — because we have grown too much toward thinking of it as judgement versus feedback for growth and learning.

  HT @CliffordShelley

  tags: growth mindset #MustRead praise comments

  • Children need to make their own conclusions and our comments should merely help inform that self-assessment.

• Avi Reichental: What’s next in 3D printing | Talk Video | TED.com

  After watching these 9 minutes of video, I am compelled to “write curriculum.” How might we “scope and sequence” future curricula so that learners are exploring the capabilities of such hyper-local manufacturing, need meeting, and interdisciplinary design? SO exciting!

  tags: 3Dprinter #MustRead Maker

• X–SPACE: A Library Designed and Built By Its Students by Project H Design, 501c3 — Kickstarter

  When we make room for students to design and do, they almost never disappoint. How might we stop underestimating student voice?!

  tags: space Student Voice PBL ProjectH #MustRead designthinking

• The Mathematics of Hope | YouCubed | Teachers

  tags: mathematics JoBoaler #MustRead GrowthMindset

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.