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Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)
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xcriteria Offline
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Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)



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05-11-2013 08:09 AM
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RE: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

l want to move to finland.

I like cheese.
09-16-2013 11:42 AM
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RE: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

Ken Robinson is really a cool guy.

But for all the praise his talks get, it still seems like nothing is going to get better for a long time.
We all go, "Hey, yeah, this guy is right!" but that doesn't change anything.

How can we help this guy? What has to be done?
How do we get rid of "No Child Left Behind"? Who do we talk to?
Do senators or mayors or state representatives have influence over education systems? I feel like sending a letter to these people will only result in a canned response, likely from their secretaries or something, which doesn't do anybody any good.
It seems like it should be simple, but the system is so large and tangled and it's hard to find a clear goal to go after.

Right now my plan is to wait for somebody like Ken Robinson to become some sort of politician or somebody who can make real change in education.
And I don't like that plan at all.
09-18-2013 09:02 AM
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Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

Eidolon, I have a lot more hope in things after the past year.

It's complicated, but he's not the only one out there. I've spent the past two years searching for people who get this stuff, and I've finally started to make some inroads.

Last year, I found two open courses, Ed Startup 101 and Designing A New Learning Environment, that have led me to a bunch of educators and others who are on board with changing education from the "factory model" to something learner-centric.

One big find is the term cognitive refugee or "CoRe" learner. Check out this G+ thread for details:
https://plus.google.com/1000025344266283...g6fdN1gAFy

Here's one working definition:

Cognitive refugees are those who are left without an adequate framework for personal development because their processes of thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering lie outside the dominant educational paradigm.

Having a term can help people who really don't fit with factory-model education a voice. That's one step in changing things.

More needs to be done than getting rid of NCLB. Education was factory model long before these "corporate reform" movements came around. Standardized testing causes problems, but it's not the underlying problem.

A lot of "education" comes down to what individual people choose to do in their lives, homes, classrooms, and schools. This is where I think change most needs to happen. The tools and content are now available to do learning in new ways.

One of the people I've found is Justin Schwamm, a high school Latin teacher who writes a daily blog about how to transform the factory model into a truly learner-centric "joyful learning community." He writes in detail about his struggles to do this within a traditional school... and his writing shows where a lot of change needs to happen... in the minds of teachers and even students, perhaps more than anywhere else.

And, as we know from School Survival, parents also need to be won over.

Beyond factory model schools, one of the biggest things we can do to transform learning is to develop better frameworks and methods for us to use. Once people are free from compulsory education, whether it's after a bell rings or after one is free from it, there's the question of what next. That's a question school often doesn't do much to prepare people for.

But, it's an opportunity to do something different.

We need to do more to ask what we can do for each other, and ask for help from the growing number of people who are connecting around the issue of how to change education for the better.

I think Dunjen is on the right track with his site http://whatisschoolgoodfor.com/, and this format of proposing to help people out is what we need to pursue. As an example of how I'm trying to link different conversations together, I linked his site on that cognitive refugees thread above. But we need more layers of discussion.

We also need to do a better job of sharing our stories.

I've been quoting and linking to School Survival in the conversations I've been having, including on G+, but a lot of the stories here could be better written and better explained... especially for the purposes of getting outside help.

That's one thing I've been working on, but I actually need help with it myself. For example, I've been asked to write a chapter for a book on the topic of Designing A New Learning Environment, based on the course. The deadline is actually imminent, and I'm trying to figure out how to structure it.

The topic is basically Cognitive Refugees, a.k.a. people who find their way to School Survival (or not) looking for something different from factory-model education. I've been looking for something different for a long time. It's one thing to make it out... but quite another to actually learn, grow, make sense of life, discover passions and interests and find people to work with in a meaningful way.

And yet, it's possible. I think the biggest thing that needs to change is for new roles, that are more like mentors, connectors, and content curators, who can help present the wealth of resources out there in formats individual learners can make the most of. This requires people to actually get to know each other as people, rather than as cogs in the factory system. And it requires thinking about what really motivates people in a positive sense, not just carrots and sticks.

Here's the problem: I can write walls of text and links... and I have a big collection of papers, videos, and long wall-of-text conversations here, on G+, and elsewhere, but I need to get better at presenting this information in a way people will want to explore.

And beyond that, we all need to find better ways to have conversations about all of this, including with people who might not be expected allies, including parents, teachers, and administrators. One key is to learn their language, and to learn what they what, what motivates them, and what they believe. Only then is it possible to negotiate different ways of doing things.

There are many examples of people actually doing things differently... I've posted various videos and links lately. I think so much stays the same because people haven't yet got word about how much is changing, and how clearly the limitations of the factory model are being realized in the 21st century. It's just not meeting people's needs in the way it did even a decade ago (when many people, including me, still took issue with it.)

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09-19-2013 04:18 PM
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Eidolon Away
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RE: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

Are you still working on Sympadia or whatever it was called? Are you working with anyone else on something similar?
I'd really like to get involved in something like that, even if it's only by donating money.

I've started taking an interest in community education programs offered by my city, but none of them sound very interesting or useful. It's almost all yoga, knitting, pottery; things like that. Hobbies, not skills. I keep hoping I'll find a calculus course or something, and when there isn't, I start thinking about how I might be able to start one. Do you think that's something a person might be interested in? Paying for a few classes on a subject + a textbook (or two or three?) and then a "syllabus" for self-directed learning after the classes are done?
09-20-2013 05:44 PM
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Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

Sympadia turned into a complete disaster in 2011... it's a long story. Since then, I've been trying to find a bigger network of people to work with.

And, I've done so... but I'm still in the process of transforming conversations into a specific "product" or "service."

And part of that is trying to figure out how to make money in the process... at least enough to live on.

People certainly don't need school to earn a living, but it's a challenge to figure out how to earn a living helping people learn (beyond tutoring school subjects... or specific hobbies or skills.

I've long been interested in designing overall learning environments, and specifically playing a role that I now have a name for... metacognitive coaching. Metacognition is "thinking about thinking," basically reflection about learning and looking at how cognition itself works.

I'm interested in an approach to learning and "teaching" that's about helping people explore, find resources, learn how they learn best, discover interests, meet relevant people, and so on... in a more immersive, ongoing way than particular classes tend to make possible.

(09-20-2013 05:44 PM)Eidolon Wrote:  I keep hoping I'll find a calculus course or something, and when there isn't, I start thinking about how I might be able to start one. Do you think that's something a person might be interested in? Paying for a few classes on a subject + a textbook (or two or three?) and then a "syllabus" for self-directed learning after the classes are done?

Great questions. I've been thinking a lot about this kind of thing. I like the idea of breaking learning outside of "classes" in the traditional single-subject, one-size-fits-all format. Are you familiar with MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses) from Coursera, Udacity, NovoEd, and EdX? And... Khan Academy, especially for math?

All of this open content is there to work with, but many people fail to complete (or even go past signing up) those free, open resources. I think a format where people can more actively engage beyond the course content (perhaps even a combination of in-person and online) could be very useful.

In fact, some people have explored this in a variant of MOOCs called "connectivist MOOCs" or cMOOCs. (Connectivism is relatively new theory of learning based on a more networked approach than traditional classroom instruction: Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age

I've collected so many resources that I think people could find useful to understand more about education, approaches to learning, and various subjects in general, but figuring out how to present them to any given person becomes a challenge. It's easy to get overwhelmed with all of these pieces.

And so, I've been working with a couple of people to figure out what to do with them... and with me... as I'm trying to figure out a path forward for income, and there's the question of what to actually put together.

I think people might well be interested in paying for some kind of bundled learning experience that's different from going to college or other levels of school... something that has elements of what I've found over the past year in bits and pieces... including learning that occurs within extended online conversations. I've found that G+ makes it a bit easier to do that than forums... but what tools to use are just one of the questions in all this.

As for building in-person programs, I've found a number of people doing this, even though I want to do something a bit different. Dale Stephens transitioned his UnCollege concept into a focus on their Gap Year program. Black Mountain SOLE (self-organizing learning environment) is another, that offers a campus-like experience combined with learning coaches, rather than traditional classes. Mycelium is another program intended to provide a better learning experience than college.

All three of those programs are pretty expensive... but they're part of a big map of new business models people are trying out.

One of the founds of Mycelium has a TEDx talk where he explains his search for learning and figuring out life, and the inspiration behind Mycelium:



Watch on YouTube

That's already a wall of text, and I haven't even begun to explain what I have in my mind...

And that's exactly the problem I'm having writing this book chapter.. for and with people that I'm working with... or will be working with more formally if I can deliver on this task.

How do you decide what to include, in an article meant to introduce people to a huge set of examples, stories, challenges, and possible solutions? And, likewise, how do you decide what to include in a learning sequence -- and how to structure it -- when you get to completely redesign what "school" is in any way a group of people can agree on?

That's the challenge. I'm trying to explain what School Survival is about... and the recurrent stories of hopelessness, despair, and misery on here... contrast them with the many examples I've found of people doing things differently... and ask, why the gap? Why can't more people just redesign their learning environments and their approach to teaching?

First, they have to find the inspiration to see what's possible... then get over the hurdle of finding others to work with... then figure how who can and wants to contribute what... then actually make something... and then learn from that and figure out what to do next.

So... yes, it'd be great if you'd like to get involved in all this somehow. I can invite you into some conversations if you're on G+ (or make an account)... I'm on Skype... I've been doing some Google Hangouts, and using this site http://rizzoma.com as well as http://prezi.com -- but so far I don't have any of this packaged into a website that says "here's how to get involved" and "here are the services I offer and the programs you can participate in."

That's really the next step. I've found so many examples of that type of thing, but I have yet to wrangle it into something of my own (or a collaboration that I'm part of.)

I met some of the people I'm collaborating with (including the people putting together this book) through this MOOC Designing a New Learning Environment -- and even though it's over, there's the question of what to do next. There have been several education-related MOOCs like this... and I'm interested in building something like these, but different.

That's where the choosing comes into play, how to do it exactly.

Another approach I've found is CreativeLive, which offers live-streamed 2-3 day workshops that people can participate in by chat. Watching the live-streams is free, but they charge people to "own" the resulting video recordings. It's like a blend between live television, an in-person course, and an online course.

CreativeLIVE gives online education a Hollywood touch

I'm also working on putting together a web/video/strategy consulting firm with a friend, and thinking about a documentary about all this... but I'm still trying to figure out how to put the pieces together. If you want to jump in and help out in any way, go for it.

What else are you up to these days?

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09-21-2013 01:03 AM
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Eidolon Away
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RE: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

Yeah, I'm on G+ under the name Kyle Junes; I don't feel like I have very much to contribute, but I want to stay in the loop and maybe throw some ideas around when I can.

I've always been aware of MOOCs, but the acronym is new to me. I've looked into a few, but I never really go any further than bookmarking them. There's just no drive there, I don't have the motivation to sign up.
Something I've always loved, though, is reading real books. I would MUCH rather learn from a nice book than from an internet page. The problem is that they just don't have the benefits of the internet. You can't see a video of something that the book is explaining, and often, being shown is better than being told. Some combination of books and the internet would be awesome.
I'm imagining a book with QR codes scattered throughout, in places where the internet would provide a helpful avenue for understanding, that you can scan with your smartphone or tablet computer to see videos or listen to a sound clip. Or even something like joining an online conversation. Maybe a forum topic, or something on Google+?

I don't really understand what cMOOCs are; but it puts in my head something like a social network based around learning, like last.fm is for music or Steam is for video games.

(09-21-2013 01:03 AM)xcriteria Wrote:  What else are you up to these days?
I'm in a position right now where I feel like I'm "making it" and becoming what my parents would call successful, and I'm doing it without a high-school diploma.
My life has gotten a thousand times better since I left school. And I would like to go to college or something, but the threat of it being too schooly keeps me away. Not to mention how I'm too lazy to go through the financial aid and enrollment process. What a nightmare that is.
09-22-2013 01:45 AM
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Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

I can pull you into some conversations if you're interested. A lot of my posting there is in the form of comments on other people's threads.

(09-22-2013 01:45 AM)Eidolon Wrote:  I've always been aware of MOOCs, but the acronym is new to me. I've looked into a few, but I never really go any further than bookmarking them. There's just no drive there, I don't have the motivation to sign up.

The concept of MOOCs is pretty new. This article has some good background:

The Ultimate Student Guide to xMOOCs and cMOOCs

The mainstream push for MOOCs really started in 2012, fueled partly by the success of Sabastian Thrun's Stanford AI course. His talk where he describes this is one of the most inspiring talks I've found... and it shows how even many within higher ed are completely rethinking how college should work:



Watch on YouTube

(09-22-2013 01:45 AM)Eidolon Wrote:  Something I've always loved, though, is reading real books. I would MUCH rather learn from a nice book than from an internet page. The problem is that they just don't have the benefits of the internet. You can't see a video of something that the book is explaining, and often, being shown is better than being told. Some combination of books and the internet would be awesome.
I'm imagining a book with QR codes scattered throughout, in places where the internet would provide a helpful avenue for understanding, that you can scan with your smartphone or tablet computer to see videos or listen to a sound clip. Or even something like joining an online conversation. Maybe a forum topic, or something on Google+?

That's interesting! This is easier than ever now that books can be printed on demand so cheaply and easily, for example, through Amazon's CreateSpace.

A lot of what I've been doing... and I'm interested in facilitating, is using online conversations (text-based, or even through Google Hangouts or Prezi), to facilitate learning. When multiple people are sharing ideas, stories, and links, a kind of learning is possible that doesn't happen with top-down spoon-fed delivery.

Combining physical books (or even notebooks, cards, or sheets of paper) with online media could make for an interesting "new learning environment." I can imagine this being turned into a game.

(09-22-2013 01:45 AM)Eidolon Wrote:  I don't really understand what cMOOCs are; but it puts in my head something like a social network based around learning, like last.fm is for music or Steam is for video games.

Yeah, it's something like that. Usually they're still run with specific start and end dates, but basically people tend to post assignments to blogs or social media, and the focus is more on conversations, and participants bringing their own content into the course, than top-down delivery of lecturers.

In Ed Startup 101, participants posted assignments to tagged blog entries, and the course pulled them all into one stream. The assignments were about helping flesh out participants' own ideas for businesses and projects, so it was pretty open-ended in how people could respond, and there was no grading or certificates. Instead of lectures, they had weekly Google Hangouts with guest experts.

Some of us have talked about how to make a more ongoing form of MOOC, more like an "ongoing community" than an "online course." And that would be more directly similar to the examples you referenced. The conversations on G+ are an example of that already, but not many people know how to find those conversations. And then it takes time to dig through things, if someone doesn't curate and narrate the overall progression of events to a larger audience then the specific conversations.

(09-22-2013 01:45 AM)Eidolon Wrote:  I'm in a position right now where I feel like I'm "making it" and becoming what my parents would call successful, and I'm doing it without a high-school diploma.

Ahh, yeah, I've been in that position. It feels great to succeed without having needed any of that. Then I started thinking... I want to focus on this education problem... and making sense of the nature of knowledge, and all these things... and all of that has taken a long time. But I think things are changing.

With college, I've gone and dropped out multiple times. I really want to develop something different than traditional college... like some of those examples I cited above are doing... and like these MOOCs... but a bit different. Figuring out how to do that is the tough part.

But, basically, the idea is to facilitate conversations, get people talking about their learning preferences and life goals, and finding ways to meet people and make things happen... in ways beyond the "jumping through hoops" that so many are used to.

One of my sources of inspiration has been Michael Wesch, an anthropologist who has raised this issue of how disengaged so many college students are, and how college needs to be done differently.

I'm planning on using this quote in my chapter to establish how many people are looking for change even at the college level:

Last spring I asked my students how many of them did not like school. Over half of them rose their hands. When I asked how many of them did not like learning, no hands were raised. I have tried this with faculty and get similar results. Last year’s U.S. Professor of the Year, Chris Sorensen, began his acceptance speech by announcing, “I hate school.” The crowd, made up largely of other outstanding faculty, overwhelmingly agreed. And yet he went on to speak with passionate conviction about his love of learning and the desire to spread that love. And there’s the rub. We love learning. We hate school. What’s worse is that many of us hate school because we love learning.
A Vision of Students Today (& What Teachers Must Do)

And this is a great talk... you're right, being able to hyperlink from books to these online media items could make for an interesting learning experience:



Watch on YouTube

(09-22-2013 01:45 AM)Eidolon Wrote:  My life has gotten a thousand times better since I left school. And I would like to go to college or something, but the threat of it being too schooly keeps me away. Not to mention how I'm too lazy to go through the financial aid and enrollment process. What a nightmare that is.

Maybe you'd like to enroll in this ongoing connectivist learning thing that seems to be emerging? I've collected so many resources, and there are so many out there... the key is setting an ongoing learning environment that is based around real human motivation principals, not just carrots and sticks.

Do you like watching talks? I've collected a bunch of them... and I'm trying to figure out how to arrange them into something like a metacognitive course... a course about learning and education, that helps people think about their own learning preferences, interests, and life... as well as those of others.

That doesn't tend to happen in most classrooms, in my experience.

Here's one more talk that illustrates some of the issues with higher ed, and the things people are doing to question how people think about "education."



Watch on YouTube

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Post: #9
RE: Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

Xcrit, do you have a blog or a site?

If not, it may be time to take all these walls of text and build a text castle wih them...

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(06-14-2013 08:02 AM)Potato Wrote:  watch the fuq out, we've got an "intellectual" over here.

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Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley (new TED talk)

brainiac, I've mostly been writing on G+, as Brendan Storming. Most of my walls of text there, like here, are responses to other people's posts.

A castle of text sounds like a fascinating concept. I've been thinking about how to build something bigger, and more interactive, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do it. I've thought of making a course out of the things i link, but all of these threads I've been participating in, and the various MOOCs, and up to a sort of ongoing connectivist MOOC already.

But, how to invite other people into all of that, and do it all better, is a bigger challenge.

I just quoting your text castle comment in my latest wall of text on G+... on this thread about writing the DNLE book I referenced above. If your looking for more walls of text, check it out. I'm curious what you think.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/100002534426...XC9baLc8sy

If I wrote a blog post, it'd probably go something like this one from Michael Wesch in 2011:

1991: Who we were and Who we need to be

"Every year at this time I do a little soul-searching. I ponder the semester to come – the 400+ young minds I will encounter – and wonder, “What do they really need to learn?” I try to look beyond the textbooks and standard curriculum (i.e. “what I am supposed to teach”) and think deeply about what students really need to be significant, intelligent participants in today’s world. It does not take any miraculous feat of reflexive speculation to find that the question pertains to me as much as it does to them. And so I’m really sitting here wondering, what do *I* need to learn, and indeed, what do *any of us* need to learn in order to lead happier, healthier, richer, more ethical, and more meaningful lives."

Those questions can be cross-referenced with various threads here, like Desu's Necessary Knowledge? and a book for teens by former teens...

...and Trekkie's "Improving Learning" = Higher test scores...

...and DoA's School and the Allegory of the Cave...

As I'm thinking about how to do this chapter, I'm wondering, what do you all think? How to explain these forums, and the stories that keep coming up on them, to a global audience... while also trying to figure out how to design new learning environments that aren't either factory model, or endless content binges?

All this reminded me of Doc Johnson's chapter about School Survival in his book, What about Us?: Standards-based Education and the Dilemma of Student Subjectivity (check page 128 in the preview.)

[Image: Screen_shot_2013_09_22_at_1_20_43_PM.png]

What will it take to change things? And what can each of us do, to find more relevant, meaningful, and interesting learning experiences, than just surfing content? I'm thinking some kind of learning conversations.

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