Henry Jenkins is the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. He has this to say about the program.

“To educate such students, we don’t so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network. The program has a large pool of loosely affiliated faculty members who participate in an ad hoc manner depending on the needs and interests of individual students: Sometimes they may contribute nothing to the program for several years and then get drawn into a research or thesis project that requires their particular expertise.”

And this…

“Students around the country are pushing to translate their analytic insights about media into some form of media production. And they are correctly arguing that you cannot really understand how these new media work if you don’t use them yourself.”

I grabbed those snipets from here, but you can find them on his blog as well.

And I really got started on this Henry Jenkins thing by reading this article on participatory culture. It’s a 72 page PDF written for the macarthur foundation’s Digital Media and Learning branch. I’ve only read the first 12 or so pages… but I will read it all. It’s a great read. Henry defines participatory culture. He also describes why we must teach media literacy instead of letting students pick it up on their own. He discusses how traditional public education is falling behind and is poorly adapting to new digital media.

[tags] henry jenkins,education change,participartory culture,digital media [/tags]

Daniel Pink wrote this article for reason Magazine in 2001. I came across it last fall. Dan has a lot to say about the demise of American public high schools. His comments are worth paying attention to. He emphasizes the importance of home schooling movement.
He plugs his then new book Free Agent Nation in the article. After reading the article I wanted to hear more of his ideas. I came across many blogs touting his latest book – A Whole New Mind. I bought a copy and thoroughly enjoyed the read. The book is not exactly about education; but his ideas are relevant to education. The sub-title of the book is “Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future”. You can read more about the book on his website. Here’s some of what he says about the book.

“This book describes a seismic – though as yet undetected – shift now underway in much of the advanced world. We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy and a society built on the inventive, empathic, big picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age.”

“In this book, you will learn the six essential aptitudes — what I call “the six senses”—on which professional success and personal satisfaction increasingly will depend. Design. Story. Symphony. Empathy. Play. Meaning.”

He spends a lot of time talking about those six aptitudes. Those aptitudes belong in our children’s educations. To varying degrees, they are already; but they could be emphasized quite a bit more.
As I re-read the article, and his comments about our free agent nation, I couldn’t help thinking of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which I recently read. Chris Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger wrote cluetrain in 1999. I was surprised that I hadn’t come across it before now. The manifesto starts off like so…

“People of Earth… A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.”

The 95 theses which follow are right on the money and hilarious. I laughed out loud repeatedly.

[tags] Cluetrain Manifesto,Daniel Pink,education change [/tags]

Education.au hosted a global summit on technology in education in Sydney Australia in October 2006. The summit recorded and podcasted its many excellent speakers. I have downloaded, listened to, and enjoyed two of those podcasts.

One speech was given by George Siemens from Canada. George has created a new theory of learning which he has named connectivism. He posits that information and communication technologies have changed the nature of learning and that a new theory must be created to adequately describe what happens when people learn using those technologies. He wrote a book called Knowing Knowledge, which I have read. You can download it for free on the website, you can buy it from the nifty self publishing website called Lulu, or you can read and edit it yourself online on his wiki.

His speech is 45 minutes long. I expect you won’t want to listen to it all. Here are a couple of my favorite segments. He sets up his speech with a dramatic analogy in the first couple minutes. Listen from minute 1:00 to minute 2:45 to hear this analogy. He then digresses a bit but comes around to the meat of his theory at minute 7:00. Listen from there to minute 17:00, or as long as you want, to get a beginning understanding of his theory. He sometimes uses terms that are not immediately understandable, but bare with him. He has some important ideas.

Leigh Blackall from New Zealand gave the second speech I listened to – 25 minutes long. Leigh begins his speech with the dramatic statement – “Teaching is dead”, but not learning. Thus the title of his speech – “Long Live Learning”. Listen to his introduction. If you’re short on time, jump to minute 9:00 and listen from there for a bit.

I hope these fellows provoke you as they did me.

[tags] Leigh Blackall,George Siemens,education change [/tags]

Karl Fisch created his 6 minute “Did You Know” video in August of 2006. Karl works for a high school in Colorado. I’ve linked to the YouTube version of the video above for easy viewing. If you want to download the original and read Karl’s comments about it, go to his blog here. The video has created a stir… viewed over 225,000 on YouTube alone.

The video is a series of compelling facts, set to inspirational music from the BraveHeart soundtrack I believe. Most of you will have heard some of the facts he presents in the video, especially if you have read The World is Flat. If you want his sources, you can download the source list on his blog.

So what’s so compelling, you ask? The facts point to this… We are living in a changed and changing world. He leaves the implications of this for the viewer to struggle with on their own. For me, and I assume for him since he works in public education, it means teaching and learning must change quickly and dramatically.

Stating that we live in a changed world is both easy to say and easy to accept. However, realizing the specifics and implications of that change and adapting accordingly is much harder for us all, especially me. I want to jump off that high dive and see what it means for education – specifically for my 4 and 6 year old children. I am a bit scared to do so; but I don’t really think any of the many possible outcomes of that leap could be worse than the status quo. The outcome might be far better.
[tags] Karl Fisch,Did You Know,education change [/tags]

This article was the first piece of information I read that started me in earnest down a new path, a path in pursuit of educational change. Will wrote this article for the George Lucas Education Foundation’s Edutopia online magazine, to which I subscribe. He wrote it in October of 2006, which tells me I have been stirring with excitement about educational change for about seven months.

That article, along with the torrent of additional information I have since consumed, has convinced me to significantly alter plans for myself and my family. I am currently pursuing an elementary teaching certificate through Western Governors University. I have just finished my student teaching and will soon earn my certificate. Despite this and because of Will and others, I am not planning to apply for a job in public education. I am hoping to create and/or participate in a more flexible teaching and learning environment. My wife and I hope to enroll our first grade son in a Montessori school part time next year and to home school him in the afternoons. Significant changes in our family plans…

The part of Will’s article that excited me the most follows.

“Some 2,500 pieces of published writing later (with almost as many comments back from readers), I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has.”

Needless to say, I’m blogging now. Not nearly so much as I intend to, but I’ve started.

More from Will…

“Most of us now live in a world where, with access, knowledge is abundant, yet we have yet to reconsider our traditional school model, which is based on the obsolete idea that knowledge is scarce.”

“This is a world where we can easily make connections to ideas and people and build potent learning networks in the process, one where leveraging these networks and tools can yield a powerful online portfolio of ideas and artifacts. Yet we teach in classrooms limited by physical walls, contrived relationships, and mind-numbing assessments. There are a billion primary sources out there — scientists, journalists, politicians, and the like — who may know more than we do about whatever it is we are teaching, and, for the first time, we can easily and flexibly bring them to our students to interact and learn.”

Those comments point to serious failings in traditional U.S. public education. Information and communication technologies are reinventing learning. Yet many teachers are wholly ignorant of these changes. Teaching and learning are related, but unique concepts. The learning is what’s important. Teaching must address learning, not vise versa. The ways and possibilities for learning are transforming daily. Teaching is not.

[tags] Will Richardson, education change [/tags]