I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

In many schools and even states, it's been, rather, a movement to block and bust: no blogs, no cell phones, no IM. We take away the powerful social technologies our kids are already using to learn and, in doing so, tell them their own tools are irrelevant. Or, instead of using the complex and challenging phenomenon of a site such as Wikipedia to teach the realities of navigating information in this new world, we prohibit its use. In fact, at this writing, the U.S. legislature is in the process of deciding whether schools and libraries should have access to any of the potential of the Read/Write Web at all. When you read this, blogs and wikis and podcasts (and much more) may be things that students (and teachers) can access and create only from off-campus.

I wonder whether, twenty-five or fifty years from now, when four or five billion people are connecting online, the real story of these times won't be the more global tests and transformations these technologies offered. How, as educators and learners, did we respond? Did we embrace the potentials of a connected, collaborative world and put our creative imaginations to work to reenvision our classrooms? Did we use these new tools to develop passionate, fearless, lifelong learners? Did we ourselves become those learners?

 bloom's Digital taxonomy v2.1.pdf

To me it really brought home how artificial speeches about canned subjects in front of a class are little to no preparation about talking to people naturally in a real-world setting. It’s like the students are only good at “pretend speaking”

(These types of schooly speeches also unconsciously perpetuate the teacher-centered model of 20th century classrooms, with students being trained to carry that largely stultifying ritual into the future.) 

Ours is a century of sharing ideas, and sharing the stage, with the audience. (I’ll resist the Speech 2.0 label.)

Oh, one more thing. We need to expand our options for students who aren’t ready to be in school. There are a number of students who, for whatever reason, just are not ready to be in school, at least, school as it is now conceived. If there isn’t going to be changes to school structures, then there needs to be some type of option for those students who don’t want to be in school. They find it stupid, a waste of time, irrelevant….. making the life of those around them much more miserable than it needs to be, especially during the teenage years when things aren’t always that hot to begin with. In some way, these students need our most creative thinking and problem solving.