Group items tagged

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.

What If School Was More Like Twitter?

bulk of the information exchange available on Twitter for instance comes in the form of links, or URL’s, which are internet addresses to pages of information.

Twitter offers us is the ability to respond to ideas and have a general discussion about those responses.

At that point I took all the phones away and we had a little reminder chat about when it was appropriate to use your phone and when it was not. Also that it was rarely appropriate to hide under the table.

We were absolutely shocked. We all lost our bets. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task to another.

One of the biggest points here I think is, when I grew up, the greatest gift you could give someone was attention, and the best way to insult someone was to ignore them. ... The greatest gift was attention. Well, if we're in a society where the notion of attention as important is breaking apart, what now is the relationship glue between us? Because it's always been attention.

Twitter was allowing me to share and discuss with hundreds, even thousands, of teachers all over the world - a far cry from those isolated initial years

many majorly successful online teacher communities which provided the sort of positive environment I was looking for.

Pedagogy is more ingrained, and harder to change. For example, it was long thought that the most effective way to teach most subjects was through rote memorization. We now know this not to be true. And while a community may elect new officials every two to four years, teaching methods are developed over decades and rarely change without a fight

Defining what "flipping your classroom" meant was the first topic of conversation, which proved to be somewhat more difficult than you might expect. In fact, the reason the panel consisted of nine educators, instead of two or three, was precisely to demonstrate that there were many different ways to effectively flip a classroom.