Group items tagged

Stage 1: Planning – “Listen to Learn”

Stage 2: Presence – “Stake Our Claim”

Stage 3: Engagement – “Dialog Deepens Relationships”

A steady diet of pundit Thomas Friedman, publisher Rupert Murdoch, and press releases from the Business Roundtable would convince most readers that CEO decisions in managing their businesses, technological choices, swings in financial markets, and global boom-and-bust cycles had little to do with the U.S. economy. While putting onto public schools the solution for economic downturns, rather than business executives, is a loony non-sequitur, it is a victory in shifting blame from corporate leaders’ flawed decisions to the shoulders of educators

It is also a myth that all U.S. schools are broken. Surely,most urban schools are low-performing and in many cases have earned the label of “dropout factories.” Washington, D.C, for example, would be a poster child for such districts. Moreover, although islands of excellence in urban districts do exist (including D.C.), they are seldom stable over time. Where the myth-making enters is when urban schools are conflated with all U.S. schools. Not only I but many others have pointed out that the U.S. has a three-tiered system of schooling where the top two tiers have mostly “successful” schools by current standards. The bottom tier contains failing urban schools. Thus, all U.S. schools are not failures by any standard.

Historically, when the nation has a cold, schools sneeze. Examples are legion. When the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (1958) aimed at getting better math and science teachers National problems of drug and alcohol abuse and tobacco smoking has led to states mandating courses to teach children and youth about the dangers of all of these substances. The Civil Rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960s’s spilled over the schools across the nation. Christian groups have pressured school boards to have prayer in schools, teach creationism, and vouchers (Educational Policy-2004-Lugg-169-87). The U.S. has competed economically with European and Asian countries for markets in the 1890s and since the 1980s. Each time that has occurred, business leaders turned to the schools to produce skilled graduates then for industrial jobs and now for an information-based economy.

This vulnerability to political stakeholders is very clear now with business and civic leaders pushing schools to be more efficient and effective in competing with China, Japan, and Germany.

In big cities where the problem of bad schooling is worst, results-driven reformers want mayors to take over schools and appoint their own superintendents, individuals who will accept no excuses from teachers and principals, will fight union rules, raise test scores, and create more charter schools.

Do you remember those days?  Well, they are gone. Over the last 30 years, the dominant American firms have gone global.  Thirty years ago, they weighed in on American education policy because they were scared to death that they would be unable to compete because they would not be able to hire a competitive work force.  Now, they care as much as ever about getting a competitive work force, but they have learned that they can find the people they need at whatever skill level they require all over the globe, and often in greater quantity and at less cost than they can get them in the United States.  If they can't get what they need for their research and development labs or their distribution centers or their factories here in the United States, they can get them in Singapore or India or China or Hungary.

They tend to be deep believers in "disruptive change."  They typically distrust government and the "system," and adopt a rather libertarian outlook.  Rather than work within the education system, they tend to support people and entities that work outside the system or work hard to challenge it.  They distrust education professionals and prefer instead to trust young, bright, well-educated people who are willing to take the system on.  In short, they identify with and give their support to people like themselves.  They are big backers of individual charter management organizations and of policies that would strengthen charter schools, which they see as taking on the system.  It is very doubtful whether the charter school movement would have gotten away from the starting gate without these deep pocketed, very committed supporters.

I very much hope that, as the new generation of business leaders that has provided so much support to charters and other entrepreneurial efforts in education take pride in their successes, they also recognize the limitations of those efforts, and turn their talents and their influence to another, much more difficult challenge:  How to greatly improve the system that educates all the children in this country.

Think big, start small, fail quickly, scale fast.

Start with a clean sheet of paper.

But it's not about the tools. It's not about layering expensive technology on top of the traditional curriculum. Instead, it's about addressing the new needs of modern learners in entirely new ways. And once we understand that it's about learning, our questions reframe themselves in terms of the ecological shifts we need to make: What do we mean by learning? What does it mean to be literate in a networked, connected world? What does it mean to be educated? What do students need to know and be able to do to be successful in their futures? Educators must lead inclusive conversations in their communities around such questions to better inform decisions about technology and change.

Right now, the web requires us to reconsider the ecology of schools, not just the technologies we use in them. We must start long-term, broad, inclusive conversations about what teaching, learning, and being educated mean in light of the new technologies we now have available to us. Just like business, politics, journalism, music, and a host of other long-standing institutions that the web has rocked at their foundations, education will be and is being changed. To understand the implications fully, we need to start with the questions that focus on our students—and not just on the stuff.

Our data show that great teams: Communicate frequently. In a typical project team a dozen or so communication exchanges per working hour may turn out to be optimum; but more or less than that and team performance can decline.Talk and listen in equal measure, equally among members. Lower performing teams have dominant members, teams within teams, and members who talk or listen but don't do both. Engage in frequent informal communication. The best teams spend about half their time communicating outside of formal meetings or as "asides" during team meetings, and increasing opportunities for informal communication tends to increase team performance.Explore for ideas and information outside the group. The best teams periodically connect with many different outside sources and bring what they learn back to the team.

“To reading, writing and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child’s analytical ability.”

“ ‘Literacy’ implies reading and writing, so ‘computer literacy’ suggests that writing programs is a required skill for activity under this name,” says Henry M. Walker, a computer science professor at Grinnell. “However, general citizens may or may not have to write programs to function effectively in this technological age.” He prefers to promote “computer fluency,” attainable without assignments in programming.

Someday, the understanding of computational processes may be indispensable for people in all occupations. But it’s not yet clear when we’ll cross that bridge from nice-to-know to must-know.

This book is the result of my attempts to answer these questions with data and evidence from a variety of sources. Essentially, I reached the following conclusions: The current education reform efforts that attempt to provide a common, homogenous, and standardized educational experience, e.g., the Common Core Standards Initiative in the U.S., are not only futile but also harmful to preparing our children for the future. Massive changes brought about by population growth, technology, and globalization not only demand but also create opportunities for “mass entrepreneurship” and thus require everyone to be globally minded, creative, and entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship is no longer limited to starting or owning a business, but is expanded to social entrepreneurship, policy entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship. Traditional schooling aims to prepare employees rather than creative entrepreneurs. As a result the more successful traditional schooling is (often measured by test scores in a few subjects), the more it stifles creativity and the entrepreneurial spirit. To cultivate creative and entrepreneurial talents is much more than adding an entrepreneurship course or program to the curriculum. It requires a paradigm shift—from employee-oriented education to entrepreneur-oriented education, from prescribing children’s education to supporting their learning, and from reducing human diversity to a few employable skills to enhancing individual talents. The elements of entrepreneur-oriented education have been proposed and practiced by various education leaders and institutions for a long time but they have largely remained on the fringe. What we need to do is to move them to the mainstream for all children.

The most impressive technology-rich classrooms don't look like classrooms. Instead, they look like creative businesses on deadline—like advertising agencies pulling together a big campaign, architectural firms drawing up blueprints, or software companies developing new programs.

The teacher circulated through the classroom like a project manager, answering questions, providing feedback, holding students accountable to deadlines, and providing just-in-time instruction.

I have to say that, of course, with a caveat. You have to do it carefully and strategically. Most people are risk averse, which means that they play it quite safe and they don't explore as widely around their assumptions, or their mental models, as they perhaps should. Organizations exacerbate this because they reward people for results most of the time, and not so often on good intentions or good process for exploration. If your intention is to change a business model or if you're in a new environment, I think you should have more tolerance for mistakes than is typically the case in companies.

It's The Integration Economy, Stupid.

Tablet & Mobile Wars Create Ubiquitous Social Computing.

Facebook Interrupts Location-Based Networking.

The event marked the first time that social media had helped force out a national leader.

How does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy respond to it?

social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it.