Group items tagged

And in the end, every member of the team must understand that they are expected to produce measurable results.

88 percent of faculty members see challenges in moving away from the traditional lecture format, including large class sizes, lack of time and lack of professional development.

Most of us could not imagine our lives without technology, and so we would not imagine today’s students’ education without it. 

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. 

Online learning should originate from everywhere on the globe, not just from the U.S. and other technologically advantaged countries.

The best online learning programs will not simply mirror existing forms of university teaching but offer students a range of flexible learning opportunities that take advantage of new digital tools and pedagogies to widen these traditional horizons, thereby better addressing 21st-century learner interests, styles and lifelong learning needs.

This can happen by building in apprenticeships, internships and real-world applications of online problem sets. Problem sets might be rooted in real-world dilemmas or comparative historical and cultural perspectives. (Examples might include: “Organizing Disaster Response and Relief for Hurricane Sandy” or “Women’s Rights, Rape, and Culture” or “Designing and Implementing Gun Control: A Global Perspective.”)

The artificial divisions of work, play and education cease to be relevant in the 21st century.

Both technical and pedagogical innovation should be hallmarks of the best learning environments. A wide variety of pedagogical approaches, learning tools, methods and practices should support students' diverse learning modes.

Experimentation should be an acknowledged affordance and benefit of online learning. Students should be able to try a course and drop it without incurring derogatory labels such as failure (for either the student or the institution offering the course).

Open online education should inspire the unexpected, experimentation, and questioning--in other words, encourage play. Play allows us to make new things familiar, to perfect new skills, to experiment with moves and crucially to embrace change--a key disposition for succeeding in the 21st century. We must cultivate the imagination and the dispositions of questing, tinkering and connecting. We must remember that the best learning, above all, imparts the gift of curiosity, the wonder of accomplishment, and the passion to know and learn even more.

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.

ost games encourage you to push your own personal boundaries.

But they could be. Imagine looking up the notes that previous students leave in e-textbooks. Or seeing Jon Stewart's comments in the margins of Sarah Palin's latest tome.

PRINT BOOKS: Write to a favorite author, hope for a response by mail. DIGITAL BOOKS: Visit a favorite author's Facebook page to send a message and a friend request; follow that author's Twitter feed.

PRINT BOOKS: Collect an author's autograph at a bookstore reading. DIGITAL BOOKS:Use Autography, which debuts next month. It's a software program that allows writers to autograph an e-book using an iPad.

PRINT BOOKS: Want to publish a book? You'll need a proposal, an agent, an editor, a publisher and a marketing department DIGITAL BOOKS: Want to publish a book? There's an app for that, and authors can be quite successful. Amanda Hocking, JA Konrath and Karen McQuestion all are authors as famous for their aggressive self-promotion as for their books. However, self-publishing isn't always a good thing.

PRINT BOOKS: Donate used books to charity, sell them to a secondhand bookstore. DIGITAL BOOKS: "Used books" don't exist.

PRINT BOOKS:Swap books with friends. DIGITAL BOOKS: Until recently, the options were mostly limited to loaning your e-reader (and the books on it) to friends, or resorting to pirated files. Amazon's Lendle allows users to share certain (not all) Kindle titles for 14 days, similar to the way libraries arrange e-book loans.

PRINT BOOKS: Find an unfamiliar word in a book? Get a dictionary, look up the meaning. DIGITAL BOOKS:Use your e-reader to highlight the word and click on it, and the definition will display at the bottom of the page.

PRINT BOOKS:Collecting rare books, including first editions and antiquarian books. DIGITAL BOOKS:There's no equivalent so far.

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.