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You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."

"Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."

It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."

As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".

There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."

"We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.

Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."

Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."

In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."

So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."

Most highly regimented urban charter schools are largely for the “other” –the underclass children of color whom powerful people talk about but seldom meet.    I wonder if Mssrs. Gates, Broad, Dell, Walton or Bloomberg would subject their own children to such a school environment, where they would march in tight formation and eagerly parrot the “right” answers required by the training manual?    I would guess not.  Of course I didn’t see many of those guys at Fort Benning either.         

There is little evidence outside of the short term, self-fulfilling cycle of call and response, that these schools are educating students at all

but why don’t teachers understand this? To figure this out we need to understand this philosophically and historically. Doctors, in the mid-19th Century resisted technologies as most teachers do now. Lister and Pasteur were “so far ahead of the curve they weren’t on the same road” when they suggested sterilization. Doctors of the time, seeing themselves as “healers” could not comprehend that they were killing half of their patients by resisting the technologies of the time – the belief system inherent in the identity model of the profession actually prevented them from being what they perceived themselves to be.

Part of this is because we teach neither history nor philosophy. We do not share with teachers why Socrates opposed literacy, or what Gutenberg destroyed. We do not allow them to understand the essential humanness of technology, or to understand technology in Heidegger’s terms – the art of manipulating the world for our benefit.

Now I don’t know what Glogster is, but I do know that every technology gives and takes. The book disabled hundreds of millions and wiped out hundreds of languages. It also spread learning and allowed both the novel and eventually journalism to appear. And I know that our students must have the philosophical grounding in what technology is, how to learn it, and how to use it, that so many of our current teachers lack. After all, the classroom is filled with technology – chairs and desks (1835 via William Alcott), chalkboards (1840 via William Alcott), Time schedules (1845 via Henry Barnard), Books (1840s, mostly Henry Barnard), testing (1910, the Carnegie Commission), even ballpoint pens – that highly controversial 1950s invention of Marcel Bich. And all of those technologies have benefits and real limits.

I’m not really focused on, nor do I think Scott is focused on, “administrative technologies” but on “educational technologies.” A gradebook – I might argue, is no more an “educational technology” than a file cabinet is.

What I think we are discussing is transformational technologies. Technologies whereuse alters the learning process.

I need to say two things: First, and I think this is a big part of Scott’s target here, every school administrator, every policy maker, and every tech director making “blocking decisions,” needs to wake up and take responsibility for keeping our current century away from education.

But – in the end – a big part of this remains “taking responsibility for your own learning.” The first free seminars in these systems which I offered were presented in 1998, and at that point there was already a massive research base for what Scott is saying here. The laws regarding technology access in terms of students with disabilities (and those with “504″ plans) were placed on the books in 1995. IBM was promoting speech recognition and text-to-speech in 1996, and Lynne Anderson-Inman was already proving the value of “digital texts” and “digital notebooks” and digitally linked note-taking in the mid-1990s.

Jerrid, Troy, and everyone… The issue is this - In order to be lifelong learners it is essential to understand and know how to function with the information and communications technologies of our world, and to know how to adapt when those technologies change. In order to be human successes we also must understand how to communicate what we know, how to collaborate, and how to distribute information. This is why Socrates drilled his students on memory. In pre-literate Greece, that was the essential tool. This is why we taught “reading” (meaning decoding ink-on-paper alphabetic texts) in school, and why we taught writing with pens and pencils, and why we introduced students to libraries. In the Gutenberg era these were the essential tools.

But, when kids are writing, I want them to (among other things) be able to communicate with Grandma even if Grandma lives thousands of miles away, even if Grandma is blind, even if Grandma speaks another language. And if they are reading, I don’t want them limited to the 2,000 “age appropriate” books and 1975 World Book Encyclopedia in the local public library.

Newspaper readership, yes a minority, but a rapidly changing environment http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1133/decline-print-newspapers-increased-online-news with (in 2009) only 25% of Americans getting news from print daily.

The change is occurring across the “print world” – Amazon, 19 July 2010: “Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books.

The lack of real history of education courses is what leaves so many teachers completely unaware of why schools do what they do, and leaves them confused about what the tools of education are.

Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger. In fact, the majority of the voices in the EdTech Community are so far ahead of the curve that it doesn’t even seem like their on the same road anymore. Most educators have never listened to a podcast, much less created one. They’ve never edited a wiki, much less started one of their own. So how on earth could they be expected to have a rational conversation about the impact new technologies are having on the skill sets our students need? Simply put, they can’t. The majority of the voices many of us listen to on a regular basis… actually represent just a tiny fraction of the educators out there. We’re the minority, the outsiders, the ones who talk using strange terms involving words with far too many missing vowels.

You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.