creativity

via venessa miemis
http://thrivable.net/2011/10/catalyzing-creativity/

great read on conditions that contribute to creativity
by Jean Russell

the middle part - of uni - the experience
not credit for the content

if just giving content.. silly - already available.
if prescribed content - trying to normalize

bringing a group together - allows other things

online charter - cater to parents that want to protect kids

ashton kutcher

how you can eliminate the space between people.

Seth godin

Seth's Blog: If committees told the truth

krishnamurti

via Adam:


are we not the result of a lot of imitations
acquiring knowledge is a form of imitation

to find out who you are - you have to inquire

conformity exists when there is comparison
but a mind totally free of comparison... that is you. embedded in you.


more from Adam

seth godin

arguing with success

learn from failure.

question success.

seth godin

arguing with success

learn from failure.

question success.

eli regalado

cool jets Eli

bret victor

kill math..
can't grasp it all just yet..
wish i had more time.
very very intriguing.

Which is the premise of this project, of course -- people don't use math. But everyone seems to believe, if only math were taught better, they would use it! And my position (and the entire point of the project) is: No. Teach the current mathematical notation and methods any way you want -- they will still be unusable. They are unusable in the same way that any bad user interface is unusable -- they don't show the user what he needs to see, they don't match how the user wants to think, they don't show the user what actions he can take.

Dale stephens

nice capture Dale
http://halfanhour.blogspot.com/2008/11/future-of-online-learning-ten-years-on_16.html

Apps for Autism

Apps for Autism - A 60 Minutes Story

Steve Hargadon

Steve Hargadon: Live Interview Tuesday October 25th - Mike Marrine...: Join me Thursday, October 27th, for another live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with Mike Marriner co-founder of Roadtrip Na...

wifi

https://twitter.com/mrsenorhill/status/128788258556624896

Seth's Blog: Form and function

Seth's Blog: Form and function

let's go deeper Ed....zoom out. even more than finland...
we talk of the standardized tests...yet single Finland out because of Pisa...help me see the difference...

Finland indeed is doing great things... so are we..

brilliance...freedom...self directed learning..
won't that come from non-compulsory Ed..?
from questioning the publicly prescribed curriculum...?
the function we have so embedded in the word school...?

what if that is the very thing holding us back...?

we've got to quit making our comparisons based on school math..something 80%of people don't even use... while what... stress is related to 99%of all illness...we can't wait till 3 or the weekend ...what's up with all that....

let's pause long enough to ask the right questions...no?

knowmads

revisiting knowmads.. thanks to pieter spinder

new york

just got back from a road trip to new york.

surreal experiences:

walking in new york city. busy-ness abounds. how do people not run into each other when they aren't making eye contact. feeling like i'm in a live web.

a conversation with a wise elder in a beautiful building in the middle of brooklyn. craziness in the building and yet this moment stands alone. it pauses within. talking about zooming out 36,000 feet, to reflect on what's important, what will last, what will make a difference. is that not mathematical thinking.. at its best...?

_____________

cathy davidson

currently reading her brilliant... Now You See It

her ACT story - she got a low score, she didn't finish... because she spent her time addressing, on the back of her answer sheet, the ambiguous questions, and the questions with no right answers. the graders wanted her principal to let her know that all of her responses on the back were spot on.

because of attention blindness, we often arrive at a standstill when it comes to tackling important issues, not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are precisely right in what they see but neither can see what the other does. each side becomes more an dmore urgent in one direction, oblivious to what is causing such consternation in another. in normal conditions, neither knows the other perspective exists. 

if we can learn how to share our perspectives, we can see the whole picture. that may sound easy, but as a practical matter, it involves figuring a way out of our own minds, which as the gorilla experiment so perfectly demos, is a pretty powerful thing to have standing in the way. yet with practice and the right methods, we can learn to see the way in which attention limits your perspectives. 

if you are a successful entrepreneur in the us, you are three ties more likely than the general population to have been diagnosed with a learning or attention disorder.

by one estimate, 65% of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet. 

unlearning is required when the world or your circumstances in that world have change so completely that your old habits ow hold you back. you can't just resolve to change. you need to break a pattern, to free yourself from old ways before you can adopt the new. 

we think we listen to what people are saying, but it turns out we're a little like dogs in that we sometimes hear the tone of voice and don't even pay attention to what that voice is actually saying.

what makes the difference between the forgettable and the important is what i call learning.

infants are not born paying attention. ... they learn what they should be paying attention to, what counts, what is rewarded and how to categorize all that does count into language, the single best organizer of what does or doesn't count in a society. each language sorts and categorizes the world in a unique way...

more to come as i continue to read.


for peter:

adults looking at infants are in awe of how quickly kids learn language, but, when you realize that every contact they make reinforces language in the most positive and powerful ways possible, with affection and reward being the fulfillment of the baby's basic needs, it becomes clear that language learning doesn't actually happen quickly at all.
at four months, he's already aware that people pay more attentio to him when he cries abou some things than about others.
late 1990's - new audio technologies confirmed that babies can hear from the sixth month of gestation, ....
in 2009 - a study revealed that newborns cry in the language patterns they hear in utero. french newborns cry with an upward inflection, german babies cry with a falling inflection, mimicking the speech patterns of their parents.
his american  parents interact with him with a lot of talking, looking, and smiling - more than parents would in most other countries, in fact. ... american parents rank almost at the bottom on the international scale of parent-infant physical affection, meaning that we just don't touch and hold our babies as much as people do in most other cultures. some people believe that is why american babies are more verbally boisterous, crying, babbling, claiming attention by making noise, using their voices to claim some of the touch they crave.
americans love to name things...we're noun obsessed.
japanese use far more verbs
this is how babies learn their world. they are not simply learning difference. they chart by those they mirror.....
by six months of age babies notice the difference between faces of their own race and those of other races and ethnicities.
he's learning how to pay attention to these, and he's learning the values so thoroughly that they will be close to automatic by the time he starts school, and then formal education will complete the process. he won't know why certain things go with other things, be he will act as if there's not other way for this to be - because that's how he's built.
andrew doesn't understand this in anything like a rational or systematic way, but he is certainly getting the message that he's getting a message.
he's already wondering what everyone is trying to tell hi, what it could possibly mean, and why some things are repeated over and over in so many ways, as if people are afraid he's not going to understand them.

cathy davidson

is so spot on.
i love this interview..
esp her biggest message for her book - relax.

__________

the chestnut story

via @royanlee


we can't not guys.. time is too important. because people are.


_____________

lucy buck

Lucy is a dear dear friend...
please vote for her here if you're so inclined..
she's given her heart and soul to helping orphans in Uganda.
amazing amazing lady.

votes close oct 21
9am, gmt


more about Lucy and Childsi here


gosh i love Lucy



_______


_________________

Seth's Blog: Gala economics

Seth's Blog: Gala economics

public ed is gala economics.. no?

douglas rushkoff

p or be p

success means learning how to behave in the way the program needs her to.

interesting:

states of development: from player to cheater to modder to programmer...

un schooling

from this post
My parents decided not to send me to school because they liked hanging out with me. It sounds too simple. Were they radical anarchists or free-love types? Nope. They were just two brave people who believed that kids are naturally smart, and will naturally learn the things people need to learn to get by. As a result I am very polite and pretty bad at math.


oh my.. the rest is great.. read it..


thank you Lisa

Douglas rushkoff

Life Inc. Dispatch 01: Crisis as Opportunity from Douglas Rushkoff on Vimeo.

get off that platform all together

seth godin

interview with Godin on We Are All Weird    - thanks D

JW: Another angle on the that too, before we hook back into more pure marketing stuff is education and I noticed some of the stuff that you were talking about was brought to my attention in Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk; the hugely popular one there, if you could talk a little bit about those changes and education and how to get away from mass there.

SG: Ok well, whenever I talk about this people look at me like I’m making it up and I’m not. So here’s the story: factories were a revolution in the 1880s because almost everyone lived on a farm, worked outside, made their own hours and had freedom. And factories said: we want you to leave home, move into a crowded apartment and work 12 hours a day in a dark, dangerous facility. And this was massive. Clay Shirkey’s reported that basically in Manchester England, 20 years everyone was drunk. Because it was the only way they could get through the day. They didn’t have coffee carts they had vodka alcohol carts, gin carts going up and down the street. And so several things happened there, one we sent a lot of kids to work because kids were cheaper and more obedient and it took the K1u K1ux K1an to fight this and get kids into public school because selfishly they said “You’re taking jobs away adults”. So that was their contribution but in order to get the industrialists to go along with this we invented basically public school, compulsory education. And it was organized to train kids to sit in straight rows, be treated as a batch, follow orders, do what they were told and conform.

That’s why we invented it, to give people just enough training so they could then leave and go to work for the factory to make the town rich. And we still have that built in to the very nature of school. Well then school gained its own constituents and its own unions and its own money and everything else. And so people look at this school industrial complex and they say “well what would we do if this was a widget factory,” And the answer is we test and measure and improve. And so this whole notion of school needing to be better at turning out testable units is now ingrained into the whole system which could be fine if testable units were what we needed to create value. And in fact it’s not, it’s the opposite, that if we look at the companies that are growing if we look at the individuals who are making a profit none of them, not one, are cheap compliant cogs. We don’t reward that anymore, right? That’s a race to the bottom.

If we needed a job done like that we’re going to get it done by someone far away who works for way less in for worse conditions than the people listening to this are willing to do. And so one way I said in Lynchpin is: if I can write down exactly what you do all day I can find someone cheaper than you to do it. And so using school to churn out competent rules followers is foolish because we don’t have a competence shortage. So what Sir Ken argues is: if what we value is the ability to solve interesting problems and be creative then why on earth aren’t we teaching that? And please don’t tell me it’s not teachable because of course it’s teachable. The reason we’re not doing it is it’s hard to industrialize. It’s really hard to write down a lesson plan and really hard to demand that someone with one year teacher’s college walk into a bunch of kids who probably didn’t get the attention they deserve from their parents and get that group of kids to not only conform enough to be together but also to believe in themselves enough to be creative problem solvers. But that’s the only place value’s going to come from going forward.

https://twitter.com/venessamiemis/status/123726317656080386

the public school

the public school


how cool is this..

thank you Amanda

chris guillebeau

qualifications

temple grandin

thank you Adam.

sierra goldstein

her post on intent.com

chris brogan

your loudest voice

Seth's Blog: Which are you?

Seth's Blog: Which are you?

douglas rushkoff

more from program or be programmed:

time - don't always be on
space - live in person
choice - digital pushes us to make choices, need to remember,

we always have the choice to make no choice at all

our choices arrow our world, as the infinity of possibility is lost in the translation to binary code
withholding choice is not death. quite on the contrary it is one of the few things distinguishing life from its digital imitators

complexity - you are never completely right

in a digital culture that values data points (not everything is a data point) over context, everyone comes to believe they have the real answer and that the other side is crazy or evil. 

Mary Ann reilly

Between the By-Road and the Main Road: To Err is Human, Yet at Schools...: An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. ~Niels Bohr On Gaming and Errors Yesterday whi...

camila vallejo

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/02/camila-vallejo-chile-s-hard-left-heartthrob.html

james bach

paired exploratory survey

It’s all of those things, plus one more thing: the senior tester is the one who takes the notes and makes sure that the right areas are touched and right general information comes out. The senior tester is in charge of developing a compelling testing story. The senior tester does that so that his partner can get more engaged in the hunt for vital information. This “hunt” is a kind of play. A delicious dance of curiosity and analysis.

steve miranda

where do the sidewalks go

your school design it

Seth's Blog: Marketing to narcissists

Seth's Blog: Marketing to narcissists

jeff lebow

on google plus - and hangouts



28 min in - love the idea of your ebook Dave.
and 31 min - love to talk to you about some video word recognition we are trying to automate.

mooc - stopping long enough to have a conversation


i'd like to add this from George Couros:

I have seen schools try to use tools that “look” like Facebook to kids, but at the end of the day, kids go to Facebook (or Twitter, or blogs, etc.) and we need to go past “relevant” and move to “real”.

_________

tent cities

seattle-

Temporary Homeless Encampments

___________________

dave cormier

on moocs

jake shimabukuo

clay

cristian leobardo

two of his latest videos that you can also find here.





oh. and this one of peter:


yeah. he's getting good.


_________

john kay

via umair haque

from the map is not the territory

Rigour and consistency are the two most powerful words in economics today.

They have undeniable virtues, but for economists they have particular interpretations.  Consistency means that any statement about the world must be made in the light of a comprehensive descriptive theory of the world.  Rigour means that the only valid claims are logical deductions from specified assumptions.  Consistency is therefore an invitation to ideology, rigour an invitation to mathematics.  

Consistency and rigour are features of a deductive approach, which draws conclusions from a group of axioms – and whose empirical relevance depends entirely on the universal validity of the axioms. The only descriptions that fully meet the requirements of consistency and rigour are complete artificial worlds, like those of Grand Theft Auto, which can ‘be put on a computer and run’.

For many people, deductive reasoning is the mark of science, while induction – in which the argument is derived from the subject matter – is the characteristic method of history or literary criticism.  But this is an artificial, exaggerated distinction.  ‘The first siren of beauty’, says Cochrane, ‘is logical consistency’.  It seems impossible that anyone acquainted with great human achievements – whether in the arts, the humanities or the sciences – could really believe that the first siren of beauty is consistency.  This is not how Shakespeare, Mozart or Picasso – or Newton or Darwin – approached their task.                   

The issue is therefore not mathematics versus poetry.  Deductive reasoning of any kind necessarily draws on mathematics and formal logic; inductive reasoning is based on experience and above all on careful observation and may, or may not, make use of statistics and mathematics. 

huge.. this is huge. we've lost sight of mathematical thinking...  sold it out to school math. mathematical thinking in its true form is both deductive and inductive. it's thinking.

Empirical work in economics, of which there is a great deal, predominantly consists of the statistical analysis of large data sets compiled by other people.  

The modern economist is the clinician with no patients, the engineer with no projects.   And since these economists do not appear to engage with the issues that confront real businesses and actual households, the clients do not come. 

insert the modern school above for the modern economist

Since the followers of this approach believe strongly in the premise – to deny that there is a single pre-specified model that determines the evolution of economic series would, as they see it, be to deny that there could be a science of economics – they accept the conclusion that expectations are formed by a process consistent with general knowledge of that model.  It is by no means the first time that people blinded by faith or ideology have pursued false premises to absurd conclusions – and, like their religious and political predecessors, come to believe that those who disagree are driven by ‘woeful ignorance or intentional disregard’.

This is not science, however, but its opposite.  Properly conducted science is always provisional, and open to revision in the light of new data or experience:  but much of modern macroeconomics tortures data to demonstrate consistency with an a priori world view or elaborates the definition of rationality to render it consistent with any observed behaviour. 

More eclectic analysis would require not just deductive logic but also an understanding of processes of belief formation, anthropology, psychology and organisational behaviour, and meticulous observation of what people, businesses, and governments actually do. You could learn nothing about how these things influence prices if you started with the proposition that deviations from a specific theory of price determination are ‘too small to matter’ because all that is knowable is already known and therefore ‘in the price’.  And that is why today’s students do, in fact, learn nothing about these things, except perhaps from extra-curricular reading.

There is a – trivial – sense in which the deviations from efficient markets are too small to matter – and a more important sense in which these deviations are the principal thing that matters.

zoom out even more... than economics..

to school. to that thing we spend 12+ years, 7 hours a day on. that thing that not only takes our time, but forms the core of how we think, or in many cases, how we learn not to think. for the rest of our lives.

we need to take notice that this publicly prescribed curriculum, (because we believe anything else is too small to matter), and all our focus of time/energy/people on getting better at delivering this prescribed curriculum, is not the silver bullet we are so desperately seeking. but rather, it has become the thing holding us captive/hostage/addicted to a false assumption that it is the thing that matters. it has become the thing that is keeping us too busy to notice something that would otherwise appear so obvious. we have lost the art of zooming out. we're so inclined toward mindlessness.

we need to realize that our religious following of this publicly prescribed curriculum, and all the verbiage and credentialing, that goes along with it throughout the rest of our life, is creating a world that knows not mathematical/scientific thinking, because it has boxed them up in a predictable and easy to measure form. we are measuring and proving ourselves as if we were living in a fake world. we are not listening to reality, because it doesn't fit our premises and assumptions. this is not only doing less and less good in the world toward efficiency, but it's doing quite extensive damage to the human spirit. we have come to accept such a limited view of normal. and so daily, we succumb millions of fresh minds to that mold.

we simply need to start respectfully questioning everything.

___________________________

douglas rushkoff

more from program or be programmed:

Likewise, elementary school boards adopt “laptop” curriculums less because they believe that they’ll teach better than because they fear their students will miss out on something if they don’t. We feel proud that we’re willing to do or spend whatever it takes to use this stuff—with little regard to how it actually impacts our lives. Who has time to think about it, anyway?

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 158-161). OR Books. Kindle Edition.


We do not know how to program our computers, nor do we care. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to use them to program one another instead. And this is potentially a grave mistake.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 193-195). OR Books. Kindle Edition.


Most of the smart folks who could help us are too busy consulting to corporations—teaching them how to maintain their faltering monopolies. Who has time to consider much else, and who is going to pay for it?

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 217-218). OR Books. Kindle Edition.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 215-216). OR Books. Kindle Edition.

active learning class

via scott mcleod

noah mackie

adam: hey noah, what comes first, the chicken or the egg?
pause
noah: the nest


noah is 2 1/2 years old.

noah mackie

how about no...?


_________

icosa

the title icosa is an analogy for great connections and collaboration. an icosahedron, the strongest of the polygons, combines 20 equilateral triangular faces together. we use this analogy because we believe that if we all work together and collaborate, we too can become stronger - just like the triangles..


thank you Eli.. for this incredible connection

george couros

spot on george
http://www.connectedprincipals.com/archives/4682

esp like this:

I have seen schools try to use tools that “look” like Facebook to kids, but at the end of the day, kids go to Facebook (or Twitter, or blogs, etc.) and we need to go past “relevant” and move to “real”.

__________

chris brogan

on time

This doesn’t mean “hurry.” This means “live.”

_______

antero garcia

privatizing-public-education-and-learning-cheat-digital-literacy

valerie burton

aka @MsBisonline

was on ttt last night..
she shared her desire for more tech tools, talked about how bleak her district budget was, how desperate her kids are.

i asked how many have cells.
she said cells are banned.
i said i know, but how many have them.
she said all.
i asked how many have web access on those cells.
she said 95%


dang people.
what are we doing...
what are we thinking....

time is slipping by as we wait on other people to decide what's right for us, for out kids.

douglas rushkoff

more from program or be programmed:


anonymity breeds mob behavior, merciless attack, and thoughtless responses.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 100-101). OR Books. Kindle Edition.


It doesn’t have to turn out this way. And it won’t if we simply learn the biases of the technologies we are using and become conscious participants in the ways they are deployed.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 104-105). OR Books. Kindle Edition.


But the cybernetic organism, so far, is more like a cybernetic mob than new collective human brain. People are being reduced to externally configurable nervous systems, while computers are free to network and think in more advanced ways than we ever will.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 112-115). OR Books. Kindle Edition.



The human response, if humanity is going to make this leap along with our networked machines, must be a wholesale reorganization of the way we operate our work, our schools, our lives, and ultimately our nervous systems in this new environment. “Interior

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 115-116). OR Books. Kindle Edition.

giovan

http://youthvoices.net/discussion/why-do-people-fight

steve jobs

i just heard - from Cristian.
and then read this.
what a loss.

Jobs spoke of his desire to make "a dent in the universe," bringing a messianic intensity to his message that technology was a tool to improve human life and unleash creativity.

what an inspiration..

in the annals of modern American entrepreneur-heroes, few careers traced a more mythic sweep. An adopted child in a working-class California home, Jobs dropped out of college and won the title "father of the computer revolution" by the age of 29. But by 30 he had been forced out of the company he had created, a bitter wound he nursed for years as his fortune shrank and he fought to regain his early eminence.
Once out of the wilderness of exile, however, he brought forth a series of innovations — unveiling them with matchless showmanship — that quickly became ubiquitous. He turned the release of a new gadget into a cultural event, with Apple acolytes lining up like pilgrims at Lourdes.
Jobs was born in San Francisco on Feb. 24, 1955, to Joanne Carole Schieble and Syrian immigrant Abdulfattah Jandali, unmarried University of Wisconsin graduate students who put him up for adoption. He was adopted by Paul Jobs, a high school dropout who sold used cars and worked as a machinist, and his wife, Clara. 

"Death is very likely the best invention of life," he said in the speech. "All pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important."

your time is limited, don't waste it living someone else's life.

stay hungry. stay foolish. 

via seth

A eulogy of action

I can't compose a proper eulogy for Steve Jobs. There's too much to say, too many capable of saying it better than I ever could.
It's one thing to miss someone, to feel a void when they're gone. It's another to do something with their legacy, to honor them through your actions.
Steve devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you're reading this on.
What are we going to do with it?

via jackie gerstein

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."   - Steve Jobs

via Cathy Davidson
__________

king middle school

in maine..
cool stuff. not just one thing.
i love at the end
when DAvid Ruff of Great Schools Partnership says...

sometimes we get too concerned of the standards, and there's an assumption behind that that we know what are kids are going to face in the future, and i'm not too sure about that...

janette

thanks Peter

douglas rushkoff

program or be programmed:

thinking itself is no longer—at least no longer exclusively—a personal activity.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 111-112). OR Books. Kindle Edition.

People are being reduced to externally configurable nervous systems, while computers are free to network and think in more advanced ways than we ever will. The human response, if humanity is going to make this leap along with our networked machines, must be a wholesale reorganization of the way we operate our work, our schools, our lives, and ultimately our nervous systems in this new environment. “Interior
Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 113-116). OR Books. Kindle Edition. 

There is a place for humanity—for you and me—in the new cybernetic order.

Rushkoff, Douglas; Leland Purvis (2010-11-01). Program or Be Programmed (Kindle Locations 122-123). OR Books. Kindle Edition. 

clay

cool jets clay

Seth godin

Seth's Blog: What to do next

dance with opportunity

thomas steele maley

the exchange lab
how cool Thomas.. you go.


________