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that factory-model schooling was not just ineffective but actually harmful to most students—a message which had been so radical and out of the mainstream twenty years ago, actually sounded very much like the messages of my other guests.

the Internet has become an unparalleled platform for learning, intitiative, participation, productivity, and creativity, almost all of this happens outside of formal educational institutions

technology as a liberating force

When students step out the door of the institution called school today, they step into a learning environment that is organized in ways radically different from how it once was

The third scenario might be called “open access to learning,” or “caterpillar learns to fly.”

Not that this is a truly radical idea, Einstein understood this and stated ‘Education is not the learning of facts, it’s rather the training of a mind to think’.

If our goal is to teach students to swim we would not do so by pushing them into the sea, but we would also not expect them to learn to swim without ever getting into the water.

go back to trying to understand how we may best support our students achieve their potential and prepare for a world beyond our classrooms

Schools, teachers, parents, and students must set aside grading as a system of rewards and punishments, and begin to see grading as a subset of assessment, which must be used as a system of feedback and student revision to support student learning.

My alternative to the zero is that students must complete fully all work assigned or no credit can be assigned for the course; this approach addresses the problems with both assigning zeroes and simply passing students who do not complete the work.

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.