#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Category Archives: 21st C Learning
Future Casting and an Interesting Resource Video from EPIC 2020
Future casting. This is part of what I pay attention to as Director of Educational Innovation at Unboundary. What are the destinations on the “future map” that will draw us to journey there? Such future casting provides possibilities to explore, spurs questions to research, and generates curiosities to develop into realities.
PlayBig, Inc. and Institute for the Future are two of several future casters that I watch. This morning, I find myself introduced to EPIC2020. I have much thinking to do about what I think is probable vs. just possible. But I am intrigued. It’s certainly worth the ten and a half minutes to have your thinking jiggled about the future of higher education…and what it could look like by 2020.
Guns and butter, production possibilities frontiers, and students doing real-life work #WhatIfWeekly
I believe the most underutilized resource in our nation is our young people in schools. As an economics major in college, and as a long-time teacher of 8th graders enrolled in economics, I studied “production possibilities frontiers.” You may remember them as “guns and butter” graphs, if you’ve studied any introductory econ.
Perhaps the school application is “20th century learners” and “21st century learners,” instead of guns and butter. Regardless, to work below the frontier is to underutilize resources – to waste available capacity. I believe we are wasting a good bit of the capacity of our student learners.
I believe students are perfectly capable and willing and eager to work on real-world issues. I love finding examples of such work, partly because I think it’s like the Bannister 4-minute mile. Once we know it’s possible, more people will do it! If you read here regularly, you’ll likely remember previous examples that I have highlighted about students doing real-life work. Kiran Bir Sethi’s Riverside School. Geoff Mulgan’s Studio Schools. Brittany Wenger. There are many examples.
Recently, I’ve discovered a few more examples of students doing work that goes beyond just handing it in to a teacher for grading and “recycling.” They’re doing work for a larger scope. For a bigger cause.
- Adobe has created The Adobe Educators’ Choice Awards: Honoring the work of innovative educators. The finalists in the primary and secondary-school categories are fabulous. Tagature and the study of graffiti tags combined with classics literature…turned into a book that you can acquire. A partnership among students and Powerhouse Factories to create gig posters for the band Belle Histoire. The Digital Voices project for understanding cultures (see the actual class website here). The work does not stop with the teacher and the classroom walls. The work extends well into the real world.
- Recently, TED released “Beau Lotto + Amy O’Toole: Science is for everyone, kids included.” The story they share is about 10 year olds who become the youngest people ever to publish a peer-reviewded science paper. As the talk begins, Lotto shares that “perception is grounded in our experience… Now if perception is grounded in our history, it means we’re only ever responding according to what we’ve done before. But actually, it’s a tremendous problem, because how can we ever see differently?” We must see “students” differently. They CAN work on real-world challenges. They WANT to work on real-world challenges. They SHOULD be working on real-world challenges. We adults are too often the greatest limitations to helping them reach their production possibilities frontier…exceed it even! What if more of us inspired and enabled such work and play for our students?!
#MustRead Shares (weekly)
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Future of learning: obsolescence of knowledge, return to real teaching
“Leading entrepreneurs and thought leaders provide a look at the future of education in a short documentary from Ericsson. It discusses how technology is changing the way students learn as well as what it means to learn and teach in a connected era.”
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The Less-Is-Best Approach to Innovation – Matthew E. May – Harvard Business Review
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IFTF: Anya Kamenetz Tells What’s in Store for Education
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“Is the stuff that we’re learning and the ways that we’re learning it really relevant to the world we live in?”
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TEDxAustin – Carrie Contey – 02/20/10 – YouTube
Carrie Contey is a nationally recognized prenatal and perinatal psychologist who reminds us of the power of pause. She explains that there’s a reason that so many ideas seem to materialize when were out of concentrated thinking mode; in the shower, on a walk, upon waking. Carrie urges us to do less to be more – and taking a moment to watch her talk is a great way to start. http://www.earlyparenting.com/
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How to Let Your Purpose Find You – Umair Haque – Harvard Business Review
Purpose, like any great love, redeems us. Perhaps not from the inferno, but from the void. Of a life, starved by insatiable self-regard, that comes to feel desperately empty — because, in truth, it has been. There is no singular, simple, final meaning to life. And it is the scars of purpose that, finally, don’t just merely give meaning to life — but endow us with a greater privilege — giving life to meaning.
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The Rise of Educator-Entrepreneurs: Bringing Classroom Experience to Ed-Tech | MindShift
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Eight Things in Education That Will Change in the Digital Age | MindShift
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C. M. Rubin: The Global Search for Education: The Education Debate 2012 — Andy Hargreaves
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Why Learning Should Be Messy | MindShift
Can creativity be taught? Absolutely. The real question is: “How do we teach it?” In school, instead of crossing subjects and classes, we teach them in a very rigid manner. Very rarely do you witness math and science teachers or English and history teachers collaborating with each other. Sticking in your silo, shell, and expertise is comfortable. Well, it’s time to crack that shell. It’s time to abolish silos and subjects. Joichi Ito, director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, told me that rather than interdisciplinary education, which merges two or more disciplines, we need anti-disciplinary education, a term coined by Sandy Pentland, head of the lab’s Human Dynamics group.
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Unsolicited Evaluation Is the Enemy of Creativity | Psychology Today
In physically demanding tasks, like lifting heavy weights, and in tedious tasks, like counting beans, we do better when we are being evaluated than when we are not. But in tasks that require creativity, or new insights, or new learning, we do better when we are not being evaluated—when we are just playing, not stressed, not afraid of failure. Evaluation generally promotes effort—because we want to impress the evaluator—but effort is insufficient for creativity. You can’t be more creative just by trying harder. To be creative, you have to back off of yourself in a way that permits the full engagement of certain unconscious mental processes—processes that generate unusual associations and new ideas. Those unconscious processes work best when you are playing, not when you are striving for praise or some other reward.
Resilience: C.J. Huff, Joplin Schools-Community Synergy, PopTech
Reality: C.J. Huff and his community are the human version of that proverbial plant that determinedly and lovingly fights its way through concrete and asphalt to get to the sun and water. What an amazing story and inspiration.
Thank you: Thank you C.J. Huff, Joplin, PopTech and David Cannon for sharing this story of resilience. May we all go and do likewise…and not just because of tragedy.
From PopTech site…
C.J. Huff on resilience in the aftermath of the unthinkable
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C.J. Huff is the superintendent of Joplin, Mo. schools who led his district of thousands of employees and students through the recovery effort that followed the infamous Joplin tornado. “We had children in the rubble…and there is no worse feeling in the world,” he said about the moments after the storm. “I can tell you, at this time in my life, I had 7,747 kids that I was responsible for, and I could only account for my two children.”
