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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.

A similar phenomenon is occurring today in places such as Iran and Syria, where government officials seeking unvarnished news of the world beyond their borders use so-called proxy servers and circumvention technology to access their own Facebook or e-mail accounts -- platforms their governments regularly block.

comparing the uncertain dial tone of the fax machine with the speed of today's handheld devices is like comparing a ship's compass to the power of global positioning systems.

Technology is no substitute for the human connections that help build a sense of well-being and satisfaction. But as all of the tech tie-ins listed above suggest, technology creates opportunities for students to explore, try different tactics, and exercise increments of freedom. It’s just one piece of the happiness puzzle, but it’s a piece every student should have the opportunity to find.

Have we reached the limits of our traditional school system's capacity to deal with the diversity of learners that come into our schools today?

To do this we need to shift our thinking from a goal that focuses on the delivery of something -- a primary education -- to a goal that is about empowering our young people to leverage their innate and natural curiosity to learn whatever and whenever they need to. The goal is about eliminating obstacles to the exercise of this right -- whether the obstacle is the structure and scheduling of the school day, the narrow divisions of subject, the arbitrary separation of learners by age, or others -- rather than supplying or rearranging resources. The shift is extremely powerful...

We can see an emerging crisis in our schools, while, on the other hand, we see a renaissance for learning. The question then simply becomes: would a completely different perspective that builds on the latter, be a more productive focus for us than the continued, largely unproductive, public debate around the former?

What does it take to get politicians and the general public to abandon misleading ideas, such as, “Anyone who tries can pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” or that “Teachers are the most important factor in determining the achievement of our youth”? Many ordinary citizens and politicians believe these statements to be true, even though life and research informs us that such statements are usually not true.

till further discouraging news for those who advocate testing as a way to reform schools comes from the PISA assessments (The Program for International Student Assessment). Nations with high-stakes testing have generally gone down in scores from 2000 to 2003, and then again by 2006. Finland, on the other hand, which has no high-stakes testing, and an accountability system that relies on teacher judgment and school level professionalism much more than tests, has shown growth over these three PISA administrations (Sahlberg, 2011).

Now, in the USA, our parents are a greater determiner of our income in life than either our weight or our height.

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.

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.

1.1 States should continue to revise, create, and implement standards and learning objectives using technology for all content areas that reflect 21st-century expertise and the power of technology to improve learning.

3.2 Leverage social networking technologies and platforms to create communities of practice that provide career-long personal learning opportunities for educators within and across schools, preservice preparation and in-service education institutions, and professional organizations.

4.1 Ensure students and educators have broadband access to the Internet and adequate wireless connectivity both in and out of school

More importantly the sum of all these technologies form an interacting whole much like a technological ecosystem. I call this super system of codependent inventions the technium. Like life itself, this whole system exhibits behavior that its parts do not. Just as we cannot detect any “hiveness” in an individual honeybee (only in the total system of the hive), we cannot see the behavior of the technium in a lone iPhone, knife, or refrigerator. The true influence of technology is felt in its whole system.

The patterns by which living organisms mutate and diversify in evolution so resembles the way technological varieties transform over time, that we can think of the technium as the “seventh kingdom of life.” Technology is an extension and acceleration of the same forces of evolution that crafted the other six kingdoms of life.

I would suggest that most of the problems in the world tomorrow will be caused by technologies that we are still inventing today.

We are preparing our children for a future of frightening uncertainty, but astounding opportunity, and to prosper within that future, our children must become skilled, resourceful, and habitual learners — not just lifelong learners but adopting a learning lifestyle.

1. What if… a community received quarterly dashboard updates correlating the number of community mentoring hours, internships or even online parental homework assistance with critical student success factors such as student attendance, school climate and academic performance?

2. What if… doing something that is good for you, such as enrolling in a spinning class, could offset the electricity costs for schools?

3. What if… we replaced conventional currencies with other value exchanges that made it possible for parents and community members to contribute subject matter expertise or other resources to schools in exchange for extended hour care for their children or use of school facilities?

"The Internet offers incredible opportunities to build high-level, deep thinkers if we provide the instruction that's needed."

Vicki Collet, a literacy facilitator for the Poudre School District in Larimer County, recently met with a group of middle-school teachers and posed a question: Are kids reading as much as they used to? The unanimous response: More. And yes, that includes novels, not just online fare. But the teachers saw a connection between the two — online information, including social networking, often steers students toward an attractive literary niche. Think "Harry Potter" or even "Twilight." "Then," says Collet, "they read deeply within that genre."

Implicit in these very different proposals is the assumption that urban schools are failing because they are run badly, and that the solution lies in improving their management.

enacting policies that address the underlying problem of economic inequality will our country remain a place where education opens the door to opportunity and upward social mobility and the kind of society in which all Americans can take pride.