Will Richardson's Library tagged no_tag →  View Popular

More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.

In the next 30 years, more people worldwide will gain academic qualifications than since the beginning of history. As a result, the currency value of academic qualifications is tumbling. A college degree is no longer a passport to a job, at best it's a visa. The minimum requirement for many professional jobs is now a Master's degree, even a PhD. What next? Nobel prizes? The value of academic skills is also declining. Companies now face an unusual crisis in graduate recruitment. It's not that there aren't enough graduates to go around, it's that too many of them can't communicate, work in teams or think creatively.

Real creativity comes from finding your medium, from being in your element.

The changes we face are not only economic: in the most profound sense, they are cultural. They infuse every aspect of how we live and relate to each other: what we think about, believe and value. We expect education to give people the skills and qualities they need for this new world. The political response is to emphasize the need to raise standards. Of course we should. There's no point in lowering them. But standards of what? Raising standards is no good if they're the wrong standards.

t's often said that education is the key to the future. It is. But a key can be turned in two directions. Turn it one way and you lock resources away: turn it another and you release them. In education as in business, it's no longer enough to read, write and calculate. We won't survive the future simply by doing better what we have done in the past. In the future, we must learn to be creative.

“The good part of our flexbooks is that they can be anything you want,” said Neeru Khosla, a founder of the group. “You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.”

what's the heart of education?  What is
   the irreducible minimum?  In public education, I
   think we've lost sight of it.  The heart of
   education is what happens in the hearts and minds
   of individual learners.  You cannot make anybody
   learn anything that they're not interested in
   learning, if they don't see and feel the relevance
   of it.

He said, people graduating from school
   now, their goal should not be to get a job; their
   goal should be to create jobs for other people.

It's kind of an intrinsic reward of the
   group to be smarter and to be more passionate in
   some way, to get to Sir Ken's idea, that the group
   really rewarded people who really got obsessed with
   something and has something, whether writing plays
   or write short stories or doing art or whatever it
   was.

And I think that what we are really
   trying to talk about is learning as the space of
   innovation and transformation and not so much
   education.  Because we see innovation in the space
   of learning all over the place today, in terms of
   how people are coming to learn things, how people
   are sharing information.  We are not seeing
   innovation in the space of education because of its
   institutionalization.
               So, I think that the space that we
   really want to begin to understand is how learning
   itself is a form of currency today for young
   people.  It's actually valued, and this is what you
   were talking about.
               Learning is actually valued in very
   interesting ways by young people today; not so much
   in school, but in spaces outside of school where
   they're really learning how to do things.  And it
   goes to the conversation of, if one of our goals is
   to allow people to move into a future; that they
   are able to learn, able to adapt to any kind of
   change, whether they're changing jobs, whether
   they're changing what they're passionate about.
   That, I think, is the best thing that we can do for
   people is to give them that kind of skill set.

But if you talk to educators they say
   they're in the learning business, but it is,
   actually, they are not.

This is something that's
   available to a nine-year-old that wasn't available
   before; that nonlocal reputation, that global
   reputation of a niche reputation on the web.

We pooh-pooh this often as like
   something that's fully irrelevant education, but we
   all, as adults, rely on those skills, those very
   social skills they've gotten us into this room,
   that we have to learn.

And even if they do, they don't really
   have the cultural ability to take the stance,
   express themselves, connect to people below, above,
   and on the side, and build stuff.

The product is becoming
   the credential.  In the old days, I went to school,
   I got a grade, I presented the grade and I got a
   job.  And now, what happens is, you create this
   game; and that game is what creates your
   reputation.  And there's no grade there.

There are several people in the room that are
   really working very hard to create an assessment
   that relates to imagination, innovation,
   creativity, coming up with an idea, beginning a
   project from the beginning, middle, end; delivering
   this in digital form, sharing, exposing,
   presenting.

And so, how do we actually think about
   technology, not just as technologies themselves but
   within that sort of ecology of how you actually
   make this leverage work and to make it work for
   you.  Teachers are critical for this.
               It is actually not learning from
   teachers in another environment, but figuring out
   how teachers can give you and work with you to
   understand how you engage with these technologies
   to do something important.

But it doesn't by itself change the...
   it expands the possibilities for active
   information, making things in connection with other
   people.  But what the real role of teachers,
   mentors, parents, is to guide -- how do you go
   about active information and making things?  That's
   not obvious.

getting your content here, your research
   there, your help there, your credential over here.

Open source, open
   courseware.  It doesn't make the university tuition
   free.  Basically, everything that is available for
   free.  So, we take the content that is available
   online, and we take open -- we use open source
   technology.
               And I think that what is actually very
   unique about what we do is, we apply social
   networking into that.  So, there are not going to
   be teachers in the classroom.  Students are going
   to teach each other.  If you are teaching -- and
   there will be a forum where they can get help or
   professors.  However, in the classroom itself, the
   studies will be through discussion between the
   students with each other on the topics.

That's where our
   partnerships come in.  So, we have a partnership
   with these school universities, so kids -- and
   we're working there with sets of academics that are
   interested in having young people come for work
   with graduate students.  And then we have a set of
   industry partnerships where kids can --
   particularly in eighth and ninth grade, they're
   going to have to sort of work in groups.  So, we
   can't sort of send sixth graders or seventh graders
   out into the city.  But we're looking at kinds of
   programs that can sit inside some different
   institutions that will support kids in that sort of
   internship.  So, it has to do with partnerships and
   we've started trying to build those early on

Yes.  An alternate model
   around competencies.  So, we have a model where
   kids are earning badges.  And so, it's some sort of
   a portfolio model that by the time they graduate,
   that the evidence of participation and of certain
   kinds of excellence become a measure of their
   success as a graduate.

So, we've been thinking about not
   having grade levels.  So, we're having sort of
   phases that kids can move at their own pace, their
   own pace within.

We have an online social
   network that we built for the school called "Be Me"
   and it's the idea that we want kids to play around
   with multiple identities and to recognize that
   they, at any one time, may be taking on different
   identities.  There's an "at model" in it called
   "The Expertise Exchange."
               We're also trying to get kids to
   understand what they are experts in, what they want
   to be experts in, what they're not good at.  So,
   this notion of how do you find other people to work
   with, other kinds of mentors and that kind of
   thing.  So, the multiple identity thing is a big
   one.  The notion of the curriculum -- and then I'll
   shut up because I don't want to dominate here -- is
   allowing kids to step into identities.

What we are trying to build we think is
   a massive marketplace around things that people are
   passionate about.  And so, a lot of what was being
   discussed today, I hope you all figured it out, and
   it's sort of like the learning up to age 22, 23,
   when you get the confidence to go and learn
   whatever it is that you are excited about.

It is really is about learning --
   that's the difference, the accreditation issue
   isn't something we're trying to tackle.  We don't
   really go after the college education or even the
   grades K to 12.

what's like going to come -- we're
   going to start realizing that we and our kids are
   just realizing that if they're not going to get it
   in school, they'll have to get it somewhere.

I absolutely can, because
   right now we often use Craig's List, honestly.  For
   us, it's economical.  And oftentimes, if we are
   looking for a Spanish teacher -- we've gone to
   Craig's List to find someone good at philosophy --
   like somebody would come in and talk with the child
   about philosophy --

In the State of Utah, I can
   tell you, if we got this curriculum rolled out.
   And the kids will get it this fall and are going to
   make a YP at the end of the year.  The next summer,
   there's conversations about what to do with the
   textbooks we have to replace and with the money
   supposed to be spent on curriculum?
               And there's a completely open source
   curriculum, and we can show kids YP when they use
   it.  It kind of forces a lot of really interesting
   conversations and that is a very strong secondary
   goal.

On the people side, why
   don't you just require as a requirement to graduate
   high school, you have to teach other people.  You
   show that you've learned best when you're teaching
   something to other people.  So, just require high
   school students to teach --

I always ask, why does
   education seem to be the last thing we're going to
   get a handle on?  Technology seems really well used
   in the corporate sector, in health corporations,
   the military obviously knows how to do it, politics
   is starting to totally get it.
               Why, when most of us are parents, we
   care about education, why is it that technology and
   education as a marriage is like the last?

Repeat after me: “If the news is that important, it will find me.” Think distributed