jeffery heil's List: edl630text

• The weird thing is that the word “leader” itself is cliché and boring, but when you come across somebody who actually is a real leader, that person isn’t cliché or boring at all; in fact he’s sort of the opposite of cliché and boring.
• A real leader can somehow get us to do certain things that deep down we think are good and want to be able to do but usually can’t get ourselves to do on our own.
• A leader’s real “authority” is a power you voluntarily give him, and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily; it feels right.
• In other words, a real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better things than we can get ourselves to do on our own

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• We should certainly embrace tools and technologies that will help educators become more impactful.
• But we should do it because it works, not for the sake of modern humanity’s obsession with progress, newness, innovation, and disruption.
• The very notion of education as an industry is problematic.
• Educators need to understand that reading, writing, and arithmetic are primarily just mutually agreed upon languages through which we make meaning out of human experience.
• Thus, running schools according to the wisdom of the business world is precisely the thought paradigm which led to the high stakes testing procedures that currently plague the United States.
• For industry, however, applicability is always prioritized over ideology.
• We account for learning outcomes as if they were profit margins.
• Popular technologies have, in many cases, increased corporate productivity and profitability at the expense of the humans who operate them.
• What works for industry will not work for education because, as one recent New York Times article aptly noted, “teaching is not a business.”
• Studies show that while adults say they value empathy, compassion, and critical thinking, children learn to value achievement measured by grade points.
• Students read systems’ implicit messaging while ignoring the explicit talking points.
• Education becomes the structure within which narratives of personal and collective identity are contextualized using the intellectual structures and academic skills that we’ve inherited from preceding generations.
• Learning games make the question of identity development explicit and therefore truly empower students with the agency to construct their own personal narratives.
• Embedded in every technological solution is a moral/ethical stance, an image of the good life, and a narrative of the idealized self.
• Technologies teach our children how to make sense of the world, how to think about knowledge and information, and how to relate to themselves and to one another.

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