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we have to shift education from focusing mainly on the acquisition of knowledge (the central underpinning of most adaptive learning software today) to the development of learner states of being (affect, emotion, self-regulation, goal setting, and so on).

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.

HOWEVER, none of this, for a moment, displaces the teacher. On the contrary, it amplifies teacher skills. It may also facilitate the ability for teachers to play to their strongest card:

We should not try to recreate what Salman Khan of the Khan Academy and others are doing so brilliantly, namely to meticulously build up entire curricula on video. No. TED is known for its ability to evoke curiosity, wonder, and mind-shifting insight.  That should be our prime goal here. Short lessons that spark curiosity.

Today, we're never finished, and that's okay.

Today, every teacher needs to be in charge of his or her own professional development,

But as Dr. Boyd sees it, adults are worrying about the wrong things.

“Children’s ability to roam has basically been destroyed,”

even though by all measures, life is safer for kids today.”

Many of the arguments being made today as to how the Internet is ruining our society were first put forth with the introduction of public speaking, the printed word, telecommunications and so on.

should respond to emails at 6 a.m. on a Saturday (emergency or not), this is less about your boss's disposition and more about a common lack of education as to how to best use technology.

It's my job to best manage my technology (and not the other way around).

John Seely Brown on Interest-Driven Learning, Mentors and the Importance of Play

in the past, it was likely to be very hard to find other people around you with your specialized interests. For example, when I was obsessed with building transmitters and radios as a kid, there were maybe five other kids in the entire state of New York who were also designing electronic equipment. I had no cohort group. Today, no matter how specialized a kid’s interest is, he or she will find a cohort group. When my godson was 9, he became fixated on penguins. He went on the internet, and he found himself a group or a collective that was deeply engaged with penguins. I said to him one day, “Well, who is this group?” And he said, “Well, they have a funny name.” And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Johns Hopkins!” He’d locked into a research group at Johns Hopkins! Yes, as a 9-year-old.

I personally feel that in order to get hooked on something—well, that’s the role of a great teacher, a great mentor. The role of the mentor is to get you to discover things you might not actually know you were interested in, to confront topics you may not be very good at understanding, but once discovered, you will.