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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.

it is not because they had a 1-1 program in itself that made them so, but because they had a classroom culture of student inquiry, of research, collaboration, and on-line publishing, all of which were well supported by the laptops in students’ hands.

  “Laptop computers [would not be] technological tools; rather, [they would be] cognitive tools that are holistically integrated into the teaching and learning processes of their school.”

One of the best sections of this article speaks right to this, as it advocates schools to bring the students to the table: But it’s not just teachers who experts say must be involved in the 1-to-1 planning process—students should be, too.

responsibility of giving students guidance in becoming productive citizens of the web

I asked that they support risk taking by giving their people to opportunity to fail “early and often”

On their corporate web site, Google shares the following “ten things that Google has found to be true”:

“focus on the student and all else will follow” often serves me (and the participants in my workshops) well.

“Adaptive technologies presume that knowledge can be modularized and sequenced,” says Watters, the education writer. “This isn’t about the construction of knowledge. It’s still hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven.”

e latest techno-fad, destined to distract administrators and upset curricula for a few years until the next one comes along. But there are two reasons why adaptive learning might prove more durable than that. The first is that the textbook companies have invested in it so heavily that there may be no going back. The second: It might, in at least some settings, really work.

“I like to think of analogies to other places where science and technology have had an impact, like transportation. We went from walking to horse-drawn carriages to Model Ts, and now we have jet planes. So far in educational technology, we’re in the Model T stage.”

ultimate result with this shift has been increases in engagement as well as a sense of relevancy and meaning amongst learners, all of which are foundations for improving achievement.

some of the reasons for not embracing technology have to do with several misconceptions revolving around fear.

time excuse seems to rear its ugly head more than any other reasoning to not move forward with technology

Classroom, Yeskel says managing classroom assignments will be even easier. Teachers can create a class and enroll students with their Google Apps for Education email, or by sharing a class code. Once the roster is set, teachers can create, assign, collect and grade assignments. They can also see in real-time how students are doing and offer feedback as well.

Did you ever wonder why almost all of Google’s services are free of charge? Well, now you know. That old saying, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” still holds true. You may not be paying Google with dollars (aside from clicking on those Google ads), but you are paying with information. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing, but you should be aware of it.

requires sophisticated searching and processing skills

many users have not been taught how to make appropriate decisions

we must teach everyone to become responsible digital citizens

they’re much more likely to say that spending time interacting with each other online has a positive impact on their social-emotional lives than a negative one.

, we found that for all the public attention to the amount of time kids spend with digital media, parents are logging almost as many hours as their kids

Generally speaking, the press coverage of these issues is not well balanced, and the public mostly hears negative and alarming stories about cell phone addiction and cyberbullying and children holed up alone in their rooms.

“Well, Duh!” -- Ten Obvious Truths That We Shouldn’t Be Ignoring

Common Misconceptions of Educators Who Fear Technology

Control: For technology to be not only integrated effectively, but also embraced, a culture needs to be established where teachers and administrators are no longer fearful of giving up a certain amount of control to students.  T

Lack of training: With the integration of technology comes change.  With change comes the inevitable need to provide quality professional development. 

The formal expression of this is 'technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK),'" Bull says. "TPACK says that you have to know three things to use technology well. You first have to know the content. It's going to be hard to teach calculus if you don't know calculus yourself. You also need to know the pedagogy associated with that content-- the instructional strategies that will be effective. Finally, you need to know the innovation or technology that you're going to then use."

Dr. Papert begins at the 20-minute mark.

Papert explores constructionism vs. instructionsm, the potential of the Internet, teacher "training," the choice between Monday and Someday, as well as what we can learn from watching children play video games OR what children can learn by making video games.

today’s students have the ability to start ripples in society, and a good education leader will know how to give students the skills they need to start those ripples.

kids are really doing is jumping between different tasks and not giving each task full attention.

continual partial attention

While App Tabs can be used with any open tab, this feature is meant for websites that you might keep open throughout the day, like Pandora, Twitter or Gmail.

The transformation is so complete that Mozilla appears to have beaten back the sudden onslaught of competition in the form of IE9. It may even triumph over Chrome 10 — but that fight’s one to watch closely.

“Panorama” feature gives users the ability to group tabs together into manageable groups, which can be named, organized and edited simply.