Shelly Blake-Plock's Public Library

Ignore authority and go teach.

That's what we should be telling teachers.

There ain't a social studies teacher in the USA who shouldn't be taking every opportunity to teach every angle of this situation; you couldn't have asked for a better lesson in American culture and politics.

After crossing America on a road trip this summer (my first in a decade or so) and staying for a time in Texas (which if I believe the news pundits is the state most completely unlike me, yet which I loved boundlessly), I'd say that the concept of the 'Two Americas' is a farce.

There are not two Americas. There are thousands of Americas.

There's a different America at each truckstop, on each crossroad, and in every diner.

Rather than look at our internal geopolitics as a matter of red and blue states, we should be looking at it in terms of those connected and those not connected and to whom those connected are connected to and for what reasons those not connected are not connected.

More than ever -- as if the NFL season wouldn't remind you -- we are a nation of tribes and tribes within tribes. This is our greatest strength and greatest weakness.

PowerPoint? Really? That's his beef?

Is he also going to ban us from using Windows 95?

Bowen obviously has no idea what's going on in ed tech regarding the integration of active social media, cloud computing, and mobile devices. All of these technologies can be and are regularly used to enhance classroom discussion and student learning.

If so, then it's only because profs aren't bringing social technologies into their classrooms. Does the author of this article understand what's current in ed tech?

The problem with Ravitch's argument is that it's just knocking down the straw pony that P21 represents.

The real 21st century skills have much more to do with instant global communication, shared multiverse realities, and the future of nanotechnology than the trite list of generalities mentioned by both P21 and Ravitch.