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“We’ve been having this curriculum war for years.”

Mr. Kay, in contrast, painted the P21 vision as one that transcends this debate. The partnership tries to encourage states to be more deliberative about how they help students learn the skills,

“[But] the liberal arts movement, which we embrace, has not been as purposeful and intentional about the skill outcomes as we need to be.”

Mr. Willingham argued not only that the teaching of skills is inseparable from that of core content, but also that it is the content itself that allows individuals to recognize problems and to determine which critical-thinking skills to apply to solve them.

Students become proficient critical thinkers only by gleaning a broad body of knowledge in multiple content domains, he said.

Those techniques include student-directed methods such as project-based learning, which requires students to work in groups to solve a specified problem, relying on teachers for guidance rather than for explicit instruction.

“Teachers will rise to the challenge given the kind of supports they need.”

“If [curriculum] is just picking up a manual, or a series of nonconnected or nonsequenced experiments in science or literary works with no connection and no background knowledge, it’s not going to help our kids think any better,” she said in an interview.

Academics like Ms. Darling-Hammond said that setting forth a clear understanding once and for all about what students should know, and which teaching methods best help students engage that content in depth, will be crucial to putting such debates to rest.

The highest-scoring countries on international exams, she said, undertook efforts to outline such goals specifically 20 to 30 years ago. “When you really think about delivering a rich curriculum, it takes a very skillful type of teaching,” Ms. Darling-Hammond said. “It can be done badly; we have to acknowledge that. But we don’t really have a choice, if we want to join other nations.”

Meanwhile the critics go about squawking while promoting their own panaceas

he majority of kids just go right on tuning out, dropping out, or just getting by

I challenge what I read by looking at source material. These are timeless skills. It's the technology that is 21st century.

As for the topics we are unfamiliar with, the poster just before me rightly points out that the Internet is out there for just that purpose. Real teachers are also learners, and should be constantly seeking to know more.

Many recent studies have concluded that the current system is broken beyond repair and that point solutions like those being advocates above cannot fix it. We know that people learn best when they teach others so small groups that encourage peer-to-peer mentoring should be encouraged. Those same small groups require the students to learn and use the high-performance skills advocated by P21. At the same time, there is a body of knowledge that has been determined to be important to a student's future - represented by the state academic content standards. Robust, in-depth discussions of academic content help achieve the mastery of academic content. To ensure the content has meaning, it is best learned in a multi-disciplinary environment. By embedding a selected set of content standards from a variety of disciplines into a realistic setting/project the students get the opportunity to use the knowledge and go beyond the standards as their interest leads them.

The fact is, while "experts" pore over the fabric of pedagogical delivery methods, online teaching and learning is quietly replacing classroom environments globally. Educators better make some quick adjustments or the very definition of what an "education" means nowadays will make many of these folks irrelevant.

advent of a galaxy of new media

we may well have reached a set of tipping points

learning may be at once more individual

Both the demands of the workplace and the demands of education have changed profoundly and promise to do so for the foreseeable future.

technology is often cited as a primary driver of cultural change

One could argue that a strictly formal learning experience is characterized by classroom-based instruction featuring an explicit curriculum and traditional pedagogical goals, and scaffolding implemented by a single educator; a pure informal learning experience lacks all of these characteristics

A successful informal learning practice depends upon an independent, constructivistically oriented learner who can identify, locate, process, and synthesize the information he or she is lacking

The future that kids and adults co-create can provide the emerging knowledge/innovation economy a boost, greatly enhancing human capital and potentials. How would you teach, learn, and create in Education 3.0? ShareThis

Historically, new media first appear to the vast majority of us in read-only form because they are controlled by a relatively few technicians, developers, and distributors who can understand or afford them. The rest of us only evolve into writers once the new media tools become easy to use, affordable, and widely available, whether these tools are cheap pencils and paper or inexpensive digital tools and shareware.

Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play—namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively.

n the mid 1960s, Marshall McLuhan explained that conventional literacy caused us to trade an ear for an eye, and in so doing, trade the social context of the oral tradition for the private point of view of reading and writing. To him, television was the first step in our "retribalization," providing a common social experience that could serve as the basis for dialogue in the global village.2  However, television told someone else's story, not ours. It was not until Web 2.0 that we had the tools to come full circle and produce and consume social narrative in equal measure. Much of the emerging nature of literacy is a result of inexpensive, widely available, flexible Web 2.0 tools that enable anyone, regardless of technical skill, to play some part in reinventing literacy.

What is new is that the tools of literacy, as well as their effects, are now a topic of literacy itself.

Students need to be media literate to understand how media technique influences perception and thinking. They also need to understand larger social issues that are inextricably linked to digital citizenship, such as security, environmental degradation, digital equity, and living in a multicultural, networked world. We want our students to use technology not only effectively and creatively, but also wisely, to be concerned with not just how to use digital tools, but also when to use them and why.

The fluent will lead, the literate will follow, and the rest will get left behind.

They need to be the guide on the side rather than the technician magician.

But, even though Skype has not been a major financial success, it has succeeded in becoming the dominant internet telephony service globally.

With the subsidies, the end-cost to students’ families is only €50 to €150 for laptops that would otherwise sell for more than four times that amount. Qualified low-income families receive theirs for free. The Escola computers come with a one-year mobile broadband contract for €17 a month (discounted from the normal €23), and other plans are negotiable depending on the providers.

“It is most important to have scale,” says Grilo. “It can’t be just a pilot project confined to a small community. It must be everyone at once. That way, you have maximum cultural impact. Everyone feels part of the mainstream, not an anomaly or a test subject.”

Perhaps the most important lesson for countries seeking to emulate Portugal’s success is to design a policy that aligns the interests of all the major stakeholders: telecom providers, local OEMs, multinational partners, government ministries, local communities, schools, and the public.

The more students have an opportunity to read, speak and write the more they are going to understand the power of words.

The moment students craft words meant not just for the teacher and a few other peers, but for the wider world, is the moment students learn that a misplaced, mispronounced, or misspelled word has consequences far beyond a grade. These authentic learning opportunities are crucial to prepare students for the new realities of a more global and transparent world.

Students (and teachers) need to understand that everything they do communicates, whether they know what they are communicating or not.

Once students really figure out who they are and what they stand for then they can more comfortably be themselves. However, an important social skill that many students have difficulty grasping is knowing appropriate social norms in various settings.

Anyone can be a teacher... if you are alert and willing to learn from others. We need to teach students to be alert and willing to learn from sources other than textbooks. We need to teach students how to create and cultivate learning from a personal learning network, in order to extend the traditional capabilities of school from the limited hours of the school day to the unlimited hours beyond the school day. The informal classroom of life offers lessons far more valuable than the classroom if only we are open to learning from each other each and every day.