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One more key point: 30 years of Gallup data show that when people have jobs that fit their talents and when they are engaged in their work, they are much, much happier. They are also more productive, healthier, and more economically profitable. If we give talented kids what they need to launch themselves as entrepreneurs and then show them how to be engaged and what their strengths are, we can guarantee them a happier, better life.

many businesses are now finding that the pace of change demanded by the global economy and facilitated by various technologies is requiring them to rethink how they are organized. Many are restructuring themselves as learning organizations—organizations in which new learning and innovation are the engines that drive the company.

Knowledge Forum is, of course, not the only online learning environment available. Others of note include FirstClass, WebCT, and Blackboard. Palloff and Pratt (2001) note that, whatever online environment is used, "attention needs to be paid to developing a sense of community in the group of participants in order for the learning process to be successful"

How does it work? In practice, the teacher presents students with a problem of understanding relevant to the real world. It could be a question such as What is the nature of light? or What makes a society a civilization? The focus here is to make student ideas, rather than predetermined activities or units of knowledge, the center of the classroom work. The next step is to get the students to generate ideas about the topic and write notes about their ideas in the Knowledge Forum (KF) database, an online environment with metacognitive enhancements to support the growth of the knowledge-building process. In generating these ideas, the students form work groups around similar interests and topics they wish to explore. These groups are  self-organized and dynamic; the teacher does not select the members, and members can join or leave as they choose. Idea generation can take place during these group sessions, during which all students are given the chance to express their ideas, or in individual notes posted directly to the KF database. While in a typical classroom setting ideas or comments generated in discussion are usually lost, the KF database preserves these ephemeral resources so that students can return to them for comment and reflection. Students are then encouraged to read the notes of other students and soon find that there are differing schools of opinion about the problem. The teacher's job is to ensure that students remain on task and work towards the solution of the problem under study by reading each other's notes and contributing new information or theories to the database

such as Facebook in particular are associated with having a more diverse social network.

Cell phone users, those who use the internet frequently at work, and bloggers are more likely to belong to a local voluntary association, such as a youth group or a charitable organization.

However, we find some evidence that use of social networking services (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn) substitutes for some neighborhood involvement.

Rather, it is associated with engagement in places such as parks, cafes, and restaurants, the kinds of locales where research shows that people are likely to encounter a wider array of people and diverse points of view. I

Challenging the assumption that internet use encourages social contact across vast distances, we find that many internet technologies are used as much for local contact as they are for distant communication.

But liberal arts colleges are reluctant to expand in size out of fear of diminishing the quality of their experience. Their small-class and residential-campus models are expensive to provide, as are the financial aid programs they deploy to ensure diverse student bodies. Administrators fear breaking down the four-year, full-time model, which they believe is crucial to developing well-rounded students. And the liberal arts curriculum isn’t necessarily tied to preparing students for a specific career, and certainly not a single job

Despite significant looming challenges related to affordability, access, public skepticism about value, changing student demographics, and the influence of technology on students and education -- which all the attendees readily acknowledged -- most of the presidents of the liberal arts colleges here this week aren’t planning on substantively changing to how their institutions operate or their economic models.

our school culture and capacity. I need to be able to clearly articulate our vision and help them understand what we are doing to obtain this reality. I do not want all of my teachers to have the exact same strengths, as that is not realistic or beneficial, but want to continue to build their leadership abilities. It is essential that if we are working in a climate of continuous change, school administration needs to create a system based upon the strengths of individuals, and build a system that utilizes these strengths to the benefit of the entire school. We need not only to have a purpose in our schools, but we need to GIVE purpose to those who are a part of our school. Find the strength of your colleagues and use them.

A degree document is no longer a proxy for the competency employers need.” Too many of the “skills you need in the workplace today are not being taught by colleges.”

Added Sharef: “What surprises me most about people’s skills is how poor their writing and grammar are, even for college graduates.

ireArt sees many talented people who are just “confused about what jobs they are qualified for, what jobs are out there and where they fit in.”

We gave her a very rigorous test, and she outscored people who had gone to Stanford and Harvard. She ended up as a top applicant for a job that, on paper, she was completely unqualified for.”

he most successful job candidates, she added, are “inventors and solution-finders,” who are relentlessly “entrepreneurial” because they understand that many employers today don’t care about your résumé, degree or how you got your knowledge, but only what you can do and what you can continuously reinvent yourself to do.

Schools that tweak the existing assembly line model of learning will become increasingly irrelevant in a world that does not reward the output of that learning. 

“Technical” means that there are methods of learning that work better than others, and the experts are experienced teachers. They know what works; they just may not know how to adapt this knowledge to a setting in which they, the teacher, are farmers in the ecosystem, not preachers in the pulpit.

nnovative schools become culturally comfortable with rapid ideation, shipping, and iteration.

ts time to pursue knowledge about which they are passionate is antithetical t

Opportunities to network are now ubiquitous as colleagues can connect frequently, inexpensively, and across all divides of space and time via professional and social media.

Aversion to risk and failure is one of the greatest impediments to innovation. 

chools that do embrace innovation share a universal quality: leaders who are willing to take risks; who support and require their employees to take risks; who develop systems that leverage failure as a unique learning experience that builds institutional grit.

Organizations maximize innovation if they embrace distributed leadership that truly amplifies opportunities for anyone in the organization to imagine, prototype, and build on new ideas.

Adults want proof that something new will work; we want a 20-year longitudinal study to show that something different is better than what we have done in the past.

They can, and do, each tell their own story of mission advancement. 

I would definitely share my own thoughts, my own experiences, and my own reflections on how the environment of learning is changin

I would be very transparent in my online learning activity and try to show people in the school that it’s OK, that it has value. I think it’s very hard to be a leader around these types of changes without modeling them.

students should be able to create, navigate, and grow their own personal learning networks in safe, effective, and ethical ways.

And now we’re moving into what they call a “lifelong learning” model—which is to say that learning is much more fluid and much more independent, self-directed, and informal. That concept—that we can learn in profound new ways outside the classroom setting—poses huge challenges to traditional structures of schools, because that’s not what they were built for.

So, I think we need to focus more on developing the learning process—looking at how kids collaborate with others on a problem, how they exercise their critical thinking skills, how they handle failure, and how they create. We have to be willing to put kids—and assess kids—in situations and contexts where they’re really solving problems and we’re looking not so much at the answer but the process by which they try to solve those problems. Because those are the types of skills they’re going to need when they leave us, when they go to college or wherever else. At least I think so. And I don’t think I’m alone in that.

I almost defy you to find me anyone who consciously teaches kids reading and writing in linked environments. Yet we know kids are in those environments and sometimes doing some wonderfully creative things. And we know they’ll need to read and write online. You know what I’m saying? But educators would read Nicholas Carr’s book, and their response would be to ban hypertext. It just doesn’t make sense.

“Why do you blog?” That’s what we need. We need people who are willing to really think critically about what they’re doing. I’m not an advocate of using tools just for the sake of using tools. I think all too often you see teachers using a blog, but nothing really changes in terms of their instruction, because they don’t really understand what a blog is, what possibilities it presents. They know the how-to, but they don’t know the why-to. I’d look for teachers who are constantly asking why. Why are we doing this? What’s the real value of this? How are our kids growing in connection with this? How are our kids learning better? And I definitely would want learners. I would look for learners more than I would look for teachers per se.

And I think we have to move to a more inquiry-based, problem-solving curriculum, because

it’s not about content as much anymore. It’s not about knowing this particular fact as much as it is about what you can do with it. What can you do with what you understand about chemistry? What can you do with what you’ve learned about writing?

What does it look like? Kids need to be working on solving real problems that mean something to them. The goal should be preparing kids to be entrepreneurs, problem-solvers who think critically and who’ve worked with people from around the world. Their assessments should be all about the products they produced, the movements they’ve created, the participatory nature of their education rather than this sort of spit-back-the-right-answer model we currently have. I mean, that just doesn’t make sense anymore.

an academic crime they have told us they really do not fully understand.

It’s not the core topic of most courses; it’s not fun; and it sounds school-marmish to bring it up. I prefer not to bring it up in my own teaching, so I quite understand the reluctance of teachers in your sample to do so.

It’s wrong to take the work of someone else and pass it off as your own, whether in the academic context or otherwise.

One area where some confusion seeps in has to with remixing content.

The remixing of content, with proper attribution and in keeping with the fair use principle under copyright, is something that we ought to encourage and to celebrate. We do need to help students understand the line between riffing off and ripping off the work of others.

These are skills that we should find ways to teach. I think they are best taught in the context of active projects where students have their hands dirty with materials, whether digital or not.

ibrarians should help our students figure out how to manage the rivers of digital information that they encounter every day…right now librarians are focused on the pools.

I think we need to be in the business of using these new rivers of information, adding to them, sharing what we know, and coding – developing, in the sense of writing computer code – new ones that work even better.

First, I want students to learn more about creativity and what they can and should do with information, whether or not it is held in copyright by someone else. How can they use and re-use they extraordinary wealth of information that they are blessed to have access too? Second, I hope that they will learn the skills to manage the vast amount of information they are confronted with. That includes knowing where to look, how to be efficient, how to stay on top of great sources.

And third, I think it’s crucial that they continue to learn to think independently for themselves.

Despite Bauerlein’s skepticism and a mountain of statistical doubt, today’s students can be inspired by technology to ponder, imagine, reflect, analyze, memorize, recite, and create—but only after we build a bridge between what they know about new tools and what we know about good teaching.

I . . . have heard quite enough about the 21st-century skills that are sweeping the nation. Now, for the first time, children will be taught to think critically (never heard a word about that in the 20th century, did you?), to work in groups (I remember getting a grade on that very skill when I was in 3rd grade a century ago), to solve problems (a brand new idea in education), and so on.

Instead of recognizing that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who are intellectually adept—able to identify bias, manage huge volumes of information, persuade, create, and adapt—teachers and district technology leaders wrongly believe that tomorrow’s professions will require workers who know how to blog, use wikis, or create podcasts.

Verbs are the kinds of knowledge-driven, lifelong skills that teachers know matter: thinking critically, persuading peers, presenting information in an organized and convincing fashion. Nouns are the tools that students use to practice those skills.

In teaching, our focus needs to be on the verbs, which don’t change very much, and NOT on the nouns (i.e. the technologies) which change rapidly and which are only a means.

I've settled on five skills that I believe define the most successful individuals: The ability to communicate effectively, the ability to manage information, the ability to use the written word to persuade audiences, the ability to use images to persuade audiences, and the ability to solve problems collaboratively.

Aspiration 1: We want to be disruptive in our work. 

Aspiration 2: We see our work as taking place on the edges.

Aspiration 3: We want to work with thinkers and doers, makers and movers beyond the “usual suspects.”

“The Strength of Weak Ties,” made popular in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. The theory suggests that our larger, weaker ties are equally important, if not more beneficial as they connect us to a larger pool of people to pull resources from.

 A friend recently told me that there are two kinds of people. People who leave their phones on the table screen facing up and people who leave the screens facing down.

an we find a way to have students whose passion is math and science explore rich, meaningful mathematics that isn't divided up into courses (Algebra), semesters (first semester linear, second semes

So, do you believe in Algebra as a separate course/body of study in high school?

Much of what we're transmitting is doomed to obsolescence at a far more rapid rate than ever before.

The textbooks are the same for every child; every child gets the same textbook. Why should that be? Why shouldn't some kids get a textbook -- and you can do this online a lot more easily than you can in print

Maybe it's important for teachers to quit for three or four years and go do something else and come back. They'll come back with better ideas. They'll come back with ideas about how the outside world works, in ways that would not have been available to them if they were in the classroom the whole time.

We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.

e notes that, for all its inhabitants’ Googling and Skypeing, America’s productivity performance since 2004 has been worse than that of the doldrums from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.

esearch by Susanto Basu of Boston College and John Fernald of the San Francisco Federal Reserve suggests that the lag between investments in information-and-communication technologies and improvements in productivity is between five and 15 years. The drop in productivity in 2004, on that reckoning, reflected a state of technology definitely pre-Google, and quite possibly pre-web.

nnovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy.

n the end, the main risk to advanced economies may not be that the pace of innovation is too slow, but that institutions have become too rigid to accommodate truly revolutionary changes—which could be a lot more likely than flying cars.