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It's not as if our present systems work just fine and there is nothing to improve.  On the contrary, we've inherited a lot of clumsy apparatus that institutionalizes forms of learning and training that are not well suited to the demands of our era.   In fact, most of the institutional apparatus of education (K-22) was designed roughtly between 1876 and 1925 and has evolved since then.  It was explicitly Taylorist, with an emphasis on standardizing what was learned and how, what was taught and how, what was assessed and how, since "scientific management" of knowledge was part and parcel of the assembly-line and corporate-driven Industrial Age.  I'm talking about such things as IQ tests and multiple choice assessment; he idea of "deviation from the mea" which evolved into the concept of the Bell Curve;  disciplinary silos, majors, minors, distribution requirements and even the ideas of "giftedness" and "learning disabilities" all are developed and systematized at this dawning of the twentieth century.  It is about Taylorist "scientific learning management."   I'm not sure it ever worked all that well . . . but I am positive it's time to rethink the apparatus of our educational system---and our funding structures to reinvigorate support of a good, purposive, inspired and inspiring educational system--for the world we live in now, not the world in which most faculty members were trained. 

lives in a moment when personalizing the learning experience is not just a possibility—it's almost an expectation

The ability to learn what we want, when we want, with whomever we want as long as we have access creates a huge push against a system of education steeped in time-and-place learning.

we need to fundamentally rethink what we do in the classroom with kids

When I began to understand who knew what in the world of social media in education, I narrowed my focus to the most knowledgeable and adventurous among them

I paid attention to the people the savviest social media educators paid attention to

teach critical thinking online and had written a blog post about Crap Detection 101,

it may well be the granular level of privacy afforded by Google+ that is the key to making this a successful tool for schools

many schools and teachers have still been reluctant to "friend" students

that "always public" element of Twitter that makes many nervous