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Dale J. Stephens brings a unique perspective on the future of education, talent, and innovation.  He is a sought-after education expert appearing on major news networks including CNN, ABC, NPR, CBS, Fox, and TechCrunch.  His work has been covered by the New York Times and New York Magazine to Fast Company and Forbes. At 20, Dale leads UnCollege, the social movement empowering students to create their own education.  In May 2011 Dale was selected out of hundreds of individuals around the world as a Thiel Fellow.  The Thiel Fellowship recognizes the top entrepreneurs around the world under the age of twenty. His first book, Hacking Your Education, will be published by Penguin in early 2013. 

Collaboration & sharing Young people communicate and collaborate every few minutes - it's an obsession. They text, MSN, BBM, Myspace, Facebook, Facebook message, Facebook chat and Skype. Note the absence of email and Twitter. Then there's Spotify, Soundcloud, Flickr, YouTube and Bitorrent to share, tag, upload and download experiences, comments, photographs, video and media. They also collaborate closely in parties when playing games. Never have the young shared so much, so often in so many different ways. Then along comes someone who wants to teach them this so called 21st C skill, usually in a classroom, where all of this is banned. I'm always amused at this conceit, that we adults, especially in education, think we even have the skills we claim we want to teach. There is no area of human endeavour that is less collaborative than education. Teaching and lecturing are largely lone wolf activities in classrooms. Schools, colleges and Universities share little. Educational professionals are deeply suspicious of anything produced outside of their classroom or their institution. The culture of NIH (Not Invented Here) is endemic. 

There was a great article in the New York Times this weekend, "You've Won a Badge (and Now We Know All About You)," that explains how businesses are using gamification to deepen engagement with their brands. Reviews possible education connections.

The predominance of data-driven education is a product of the eduindustry, not the basis for sound teaching and learning beyond the factory model. Data itself is not bad; standardized assessments though are just one assessment and cannot define achievement. "Fixing" a teacher's "deficit" in "understanding" "standardized" "test" "data" is as ideologically and practically flawed as the "data" we're talking about. Professionally-developing teachers on how to work with bad data is still going to yield bad data. Standardized test scores are not effective measures of student skill mastery, and that's the more pressing debate. -- reeveskd comment

Paul Martin, the former prime minister and guest speaker at Wednesday's We Day youth rally in Winnipeg, has been busy building his non-profit Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative to fight what he calls the federal government's "absolute discrimination" against Aboriginal students.

But some schools are way ahead of the curve. By using technology, giving students the opportunity to choose what they want to study, or even just allowing teachers to deviate from the curricula norm, these schools have already taken education to the next level and waiting for the ministry to catch up.

Don't shoot the medium. While no doubt FB presents challenges in its application in education, the real problem is not Facebook. The issue is professional value of teaching in the US, and North America in general. Until teachers are treated as professionals with salaries, responsibilities and statuses on par with university professors, following the Scandinavian and Asian models, the calibre of professional conduct will be as inconsistent as the pool of quality teacher candidates committed to an underpaid and undervalued profession.

Research by the Institute for the Future released in a report entitled "Future Work Skills 2020″ shows that preparing for a specific career area based on content is difficult and, instead, people should be developing certain broad skills. These same skills are important for our students to learn. The report explains each of the skills in detail, and also goes into the implications for education and policies. 

Are we bold? So, with a minimum of description, I'm thinking "bold" schools are: 1. Learning Centered - Everyone (adults, children) is a learner; learners have agency; emphasis on becoming a learner over becoming learned. 2. Questioning - Inquiry based; questions over answers 3. Authentic - School is real life; students and teachers do real work for real purposes. 4. Digital - Every learner (teacher and student) has a computer; technology is seamlessly integrated into the learning process; paperless 5. Connected - Learning is networked (as are learners) with the larger world; classrooms have "thin walls;" learning is anytime, anywhere, anyone. 6. Literate - Everyone meets the expectations of NCTE's "21st Century Literacies" 7. Transparent - Learning and experiences around learning are shared with global audiences 8. Innovative - Teachers and students "poke the box;" Risk-taking is encouraged. 9. Provocative - Leaders educate and advocate for change in local, state and national venues.

Actually I get the feeling this is been shared before oh well some good ideas as a template for us to work towards

But increasingly, schools are offering students more ambitious options, such as participating in an international field placement, a university-organized volunteer opportunity, or a course with a community service learning (CSL) component. CSL is a special form of experiential education that connects course material to real-life experience. During the course, students either work in small groups or individually with an organization-often a not-for-profit agency-toward a specific solution or a goal that is mutually beneficial. As part of their grade, students are required to reflect on how their community outreach experience is explicitly linked to what they've learned in the classroom

The position causing the most controversy, however, is the statement that they oppose the teaching of "higher order thinking skills" -- a curriculum which strives to encourage critical thinking -- arguing that it might challenge "student's fixed beliefs" and undermine "parental authority."

"No news is better than Fox News" What the researchers found out may not surprise you: For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors). Fox News watchers are also 6 points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news.

We've spoken of education for so long as though it is representative of an objective academic truth that we've missed the fact that for the majority of human history it was a matter of survival. A matter of love. A matter of inspiration and compulsion. As often a matter of the irrational as the rational.... there may not be any objectively "best" practices, only your communities' own best findings in any practice. 

What does the SOPA threat mean for online education and the cloud? Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and sixth most visited site in the world, will join websites like the content aggregator Reddit to "go dark" on Wednesday in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its companion bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which are currently being debated in Congress. "What these bills propose are new powers for the government and also for private actors to create, effectively, blacklists of sites that allegedly are engaging in some form of online infringement and then force service providers to block access to those sites," says Corynne McSherry, intellectual property director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "What we would have is a situation where the government and private actors could censor the net."

Great discussion piece... good for TOK and beyonmd... Good for a staff discussion... . I like #1, 2 (especially for Mulgrave! I want access like Starbucks!), 4 (go Wikipedia), 5 (go Facebook),  #6 is Mulgrave's moment. Love #8: If you were a video game, no one would play you -- feedback is too slow. But I'm slow anyways 

Are hardbound textbooks going the way of slide rules and typewriters in schools?

Distributed leadership and transparency needed in education and student leadership. It's time to abandon antiquated models of Prefects and Student Councils/Governments which promoted limited voice, action and impact.  Discussion by Mashable and OneYoungWorld inspire some thoughts in this direction and the role of social media and new models of social entrepreneurism