I found this post on Chris Walsh’s Blog Epoch Learning and what I read made sense to me. He basically points out, like many others, that schools can’t sit back and continue the same way of teaching than before. The world around us has changed and is continuing to change at a rapid speed.

The deeper cultural shift towards personalized services will require educators to invent entirely new schools that support truly individualized intruction. [...]
A personalized, flat world has important implications for pedagogy. When students have instant access to the world’s body of knowledge, they’ll be more interested in learning “why” and “how” than “what.” 21st century students will define “school” as any place that they can learn more than they could on their own. Similarly, a “teacher” will be anyone that can help them learn how to navigate through the sea of knowledge and use it to produce something of value i.e. learn how to think for themselves. As a result, “schools” will need to be much more focused on “outputs” than “inputs”, on individualized results rather than the time and place of instruction.
The technological infrastructure to make this happen is already in place. The proliferation of high-speed Internet access, the near ubiquity of mobile communication devices, and the efficiency of today’s collaborative tools make it nearly impossible to reverse these trends. With the help of place-shifting and time-shifting technologies like the iPod, students and teachers now have the ability to learn everywhere, all the time.

The quote that resonated with me the most was “a “teacher” will be anyone that can help them learn how to navigate through the sea of knowledge and use it to produce something of value i.e. learn how to think for themselves”. This goes hand in hand with the imperative for anyone today to know how to continue learning and knowing how to teach students (and other teachers) to learn how to learn on their own. The tools are there. What is missing is the right mindset. Teaching kids, especially elementary school children to learn how to wade through the immense amount of information available, distinguish between legitimate and manipulated, misrepresented or false information is imperative, but opens up a complete different can of worms.

I recently read the article “Global Superpower” by Fran Smith in Edutopia Magazine from the George Lucas Educational Foundation.  It talks about the International Baccalaureate (IB) Programs across the country with its vigorous academics and global perspectives.

The program focuses on getting kids to think deeply about disciplines and about learning and about themselves [...] IB isn’t just about scholarship, however; it also offers a specific worldview. The academic rigor of IB is important, but its humanitarian values are everything, [...] The IBO is unapologetically idealistic in believing that education can foster understanding among young people around the world, enabling future generations to live more peacefully and productively than before.

This all sounds all great to me, inline with global education, teaching kids to think and learn for themselves rather than reciting facts and answering multiple choice questions.

But IB’s global vision nettles critics. In spring 2005, two school board members in Minnetonka, Minnesota, called IB un-American and un- Christian, and tried unsuccessfully to dump it. Last February, five of nine members of the school board in Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania, voted to end the program. Parents protested and the American Civil Liberties Union, fresh from its victory over the teaching of intelligent design in Harrisburg, at the other end of the state, sued. The district reinstated the program until 2008.

Opening someone’s world and broadening their horizon and teaching students to think and learn for themselves needs to be a priority in todays flat world.

Posted: 30. December, 2006 at 10:53 am. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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