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The whole 'stranger danger' thing was very much driven by parental alarm

Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, reports that children from as young as 8 months old through preschool explore through techniques that would seem familiar to any scientist: they make hypotheses and test them against data; predict outcomes using statistics, and can infer the causes of failed actions.

All of these things, Gopnik and her colleagues argue, happen years before any formal training in the same scientific techniques. "What we need to do to encourage children to learn is not to put them in the equivalent of school, tell them things, give them reading drills or flash cards. We really need to put them in a safe, rich environment where the natural capacities for exploration, for testing, for science can get free rein," she said in a briefing with reporters.

Decentralized systems have proven to be more productive and agile than rigid, top-down ones

And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else.

Here are some strong core beliefs that people leading in this area hold.

What I propose is to think of yourself as a learning construction expert. Use the right tool for the right purpose.

Traditional training programs will not be able to supply the large pipeline of knowledge, skills, and information that your workers will need. The traditional hierarchical knowledge structure creates a bottleneck

A classroom that has successfully integrated technology into the curriculum would be one where you would not really notice it because it would be so second nature. The teacher would not have to think up ways to use whatever tools were available, but would seamlessly use them to enhance the learning of whatever content was being covered. Technology [would be] used to assist in acquiring content knowledge, and the acquisition of technology skills [would be] secondary. Contrast this depiction with what the International Society for Technology in Education’s (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students (NETS-S; ISTE, 2002) say about technology integration: Curriculum integration with the use of technology involves the infusion of technology as a tool to enhance the learning in a content area or multidisciplinary setting….Effective integration of technology is achieved when students are able to select technology tools to help them obtain information in a timely manner, analyze and synthesize the information, and present it professionally. The technology should become an integral part of how the classroom functions—as accessible as all other classroom tools.

his urging to shift the focus from the learning tools to what is being learned and how that learning happens still needs to be heeded—almost 20 years later.

Integration is defined not by the amount or type of technology used, but by how and why it is used.