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We have to “re-train ourselves to become comfortable with sustaining our attention on a single goal and for young people, who may have never developed this skill, to learn the value and to appreciate the value and to even feel the value of sustained attention.”

Given the enormous impact that technology has had on nearly every other aspect of our society, how can that be?

Today our collective vision for education is broader, our nation is more complex and diverse, and our technical capabilities are more powerful. But we continue to assume the factory-model classroom and its rigid bell schedules, credit requirements, age-based grade levels, and physical specifications when we talk about school reform.

our focus should primarily be to design new classroom models that take advantage of what these tools can do.

Net Smart is a book for an era where we’ve moved past just creating online identities and communities, but still have to educate ourselves on how to operate in day-to-day life. Rheingold said he believes a better understanding and deeper use of things like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are “essential survival skills” that will last beyond today or the lifespan of those individual companies.

Rheingold sees as important: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts.

The courage to make mistakes is related in some measure to curiosity, exploration, and the ability to speak honestly about a topic and about ourselves.

We are born curious—so what happened?

That is, demonstrating our own curiosity and inspiring and cultivating the natural curiosity in others.

If we want students to collaborate, innovate, and solve problems, we need to model these skills ourselves.

We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.

Still, talking to strangers is different from handing over a set of your house keys. We’re learning how to draw the line between those extremes, and it’s a line that each of us will draw in different ways. That we get to make these decisions for ourselves is a step forward; the valley is a much richer and more connected place than the old divide between privacy and celebrity worship was. But it is going to take some time to learn how to live there.

 I am all for PBL but I think that we need to not only create the opportunities for our students to do this, but for ourselves as well.  Again referencing the Wagner book, schools in Singapore are seeing the importance of learning communities that promote active learning: