

21 Reasons To Quit Your Job And Become A Teacher | Katrina Fried
A truly inspirational piece that reminds us professional educators to be grateful for our work. At the same time, I can’t help but think that one does not have to “Quit Your Job and Become a Teacher” if we would work more earnestly for Education 3.0, which could provide more opportunities for student learners to connect with “teachers” in their workplaces… a different way of thinking about “school.”
[HT @RhettsMustangs]
Recruiters Without Borders – Companies Scout Globally – NYTimes.com
“The third annual Global Employability Survey, designed and commissioned by the French education consulting firm Emerging and carried out by the German market research firm Trendence, asked recruiters and senior international executives to profile an ideal university graduate — and the ideal university producing such graduates.”
[HT Greg Jones @CoopScience]
An oldie but goodie! Hat tip to Eileen Fennelly for sending me this piece and reminding me of it. Krakovsky gives a strong summary of Dweck’s mindset work and connects to a number of related researchers and applications.
Do you ever wish you could choose the particular cable (or satellite) TV channels that you most want? Instead of having to buy the package service that comes with 361 channels or 902 channels, you could autonomously select, a la carte, the specific channels that you want to view.
Well, I’ve wanted to do that.
Listening to NPR’s Planet Money “Episode 488: The Secret History of Your Cable Bill” on a recent morning walk, I started to wonder how traditional school is like cable or satellite TV. Will student learners always have to “buy the entire package” of this class of math and that class of science, this class of English and that class of social studies? Or will we soon see student learners able to individualize their school subscription bundles?
It’s happened in music. We no longer have to purchase the entire album or CD. We can just buy the particular song we want and create our own playlists. It’s happened in news and broadcast journalism, and we now have the ability to create personal news stations and narrowcast our own story collections.
And it’s going to happen in schools. Well, it IS happening around schools. Think Khan Academy. Think Coursera and Udacity (Hat tip to EdSurge). Think Mozilla OpenBadges project. Think Juliette LaMontagne’s Breaker. Think Seth Godin’s Krypton Community College. Think of the future mashup of those ideas and ventures!
It’s highly likely that my 9 and 6 year-old sons will be able to autonomously aggregate courses and experiences (with badges and endorsements like on LinkedIn) and bundle their own “College Degree,” which I hope will include some residential, face-to-face relationship building in a particular physical community, too. (I imagine that it will.) But who knows?!
Learners entering MIT, Stanford, etc., will more and more be able to enter with NUMEROUS courses from those institutions already IN their digital portfolios. Will our schools require the seat-time, residential equivalents of those MOOCs? Or will they we build on the increased capacity that’s already been built when the learners reach them us?
How are you thinking about the way we package and bundle “school” in an age where people can increasingly pull and self-package the content-and-experience streams that best work for them, their passions, their interests, and their needs (with mentorship, of course!)?
Howard Gardner: ‘Multiple intelligences’ are not ‘learning styles’
“Gardner’s theory initially listed seven intelligences which work together: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, interpersonal and intrapersonal; he later added an eighth, naturalist intelligence and says there may be a few more. The theory became highly popular with K-12 educators around the world seeking ways to reach students who did not respond to traditional approaches, but over time, “multiple intelligences” somehow became synonymous with the concept of “learning styles.” In this important post, Gardner explains why the former is not the latter.”
“… anew breed of educators, inspired by everything from the Internet to evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and AI, are inventing radical new ways for children to learn, grow, and thrive. To them, knowledge isn’t a commodity that’s delivered from teacher to student but something that emerges from the students’ own curiosity-fueled exploration. Teachers provide prompts, not answers, and then they step aside so students can teach themselves and one another. They are creating ways for children to discover their passion—and uncovering a generation of geniuses in the process.”
HT @JamieReverb
Bringing Authenticity to the Classroom | Edutopia
“Authenticity — we know it works! There is research to support the value of authentic reading and writing. When students are engaged in real-world problems, scenarios and challenges, they find relevance in the work and become engaged in learning important skills and content.”
PBL: What Does It Take for a Project to Be “Authentic”? | Edutopia
“Everyone thinks that Project-Based Learning has something to do with “authentic” learning. But not everyone agrees what this means.” In this piece, BIE’s John Larmer gives advice about a spectrum of authenticity in PBL.