I don't do this often, but the Twitter feed is alive today with ideas about creativity, trans-disciplinary study, and idea generation, so I am going to re-post a blog from last year: Many of us are talking about the need to shift learning in the direction of creation, rather than consumption, of knowledge. Students and [...]
The synergistic connections just keep flying in! My friend Glyn Cowlishaw (@PDSHead), head of Providence Day School in Charlotte just Tweeted a link to a BBC article on the great Kursk tank battle 70 years ago involving 9,000 German and Soviet tanks. Glyn asked "Will there ever be another large scale tank battle?" My response: [...]
This is a teaser of things to come, but I could not keep it to myself. Over the last few months I have conducted workshops attended by hundreds of educators: teachers, business officers, and school CEO's. One of our collaborative exercises is to look critically at this institution we call "school" and ask what aspects are utterly [...]
Looking for something to start off the school year, put up on a big screen, turn the volume way up, get a smile on everyone's face and feel that, yep, there is a reason to come to work each day and feel a ray of optimism in this crazy, fast, thorny world? Here's my nomination! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us-TVg40ExM
In the long march of human civilization there has, in just the last few hundred years, developed a line of demarcation that will prove the success or failure of human societies in the future. It is not a line between rich and poor, liberal or conservative, north and south, Occident and Orient, or believer (of [...]
The annual NMC Horizon Report for K12 schools, a comprehensive forecast of what technologies will most impact K12 education in the next 1-5 years. What I enjoyed seeing this year is that we are recognizing that technology will become less a driver of education than a facilitator of learning. I also think that the Horizon [...]
I just read an important recent post by my friend Jonathan Martin and will not reprise it all here. But I want to re-post the video he included from the ATC21S working group. It was not long after I first heard the term "21st Century skills" and realized it referred to the kind of transformative learning [...]
Democracy, discomfort, courage, and educational innovation collided last night. What is in a name? I have been working with a team from the Poway Unified School District. Their charge: open a new K-8 school in 2014 with a mission that has four key words: Design, Learning, Creative, Future. It will be the first "choice" school [...]
As I am writing chapters to my book and an article for Independent School Magazine, I find threads from both inside and outside of education weaving together into a tapestry of future vision that is both exciting and inevitable. I came across two more such threads today, or more accurately confirmation of threads from two [...]
Somewhere hovering in the open rafters of a large design space at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School, the ghosts of my fictional protagonists from The Falconer, Mr. Usher and Sunny/Sun Tzu sat and had a cup of tea today. They don’t have Twitter accounts so we can’t follow their thoughts, but we know they listened with [...]