lisa nielsen

on pd meetings..

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don smithmier

Don Smithmier is the founder and CEO of Sophia, which was created on the premise that there are millions of great ideas, methods, lessons and people who can contribute to society’s goal of spreading knowledge and making education better and more effective. His goal is to use innovation to bring education and technology together in an impactful way for students, teachers, parents, tutors and more.

Previously, Don was an early‐stage employee and ultimately Vice President at Capella University (NSDQ: CPLA), the first fully-online, accredited university. During his 14 years at Capella, Don held a succession of Marketing, Technology and Business leadership roles and was recognized as a pioneer in online advertising and the innovative use of web technologies. Don is a winner of the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” and founder of Matter Worldwide (www.matterworldwide.com), the parent company of three successful start‐ups including GoKart Labs, the digital innovation company that incubated and built Sophia. Don earned his MBA with honors from the University of Minnesota and his BA from the University of Wisconsin.

From the website:  "Sophia enables innovation by connecting learners, teachers, experts and parents. We provide an academic community where everyone has access to learning that surrounds and supports the traditional classroom. We encourage variety and creativity in teaching so that everyone can learn in a way that makes sense to them.

"Sophia is a social teaching and learning platform that taps the teacher in all of us and enhances the learning process by providing access to a wealth of knowledge, help, instruction, standards-aligned content, and expertise available to learners everywhere.

"We want to harness technology for the betterment of the educational system as a whole. We can all help others learn. And Sophia’s mission is to be a catalyst in this educational movement."




Tom Krawczewicz (@tkraz): So learners will get recommendations of content from teachers they have "favorited?"


http://www.sophia.org
creating learning packet


model of site  - at core level - is free


Maria Droujkova: WikiEducator and UNESCO
OER


sweet spot for sophia, grades 11-14, general courses, math science english, it's for college readiness and success


sophia is about tagging and mapping - for future use
no interactive chat at this time

see themselves as being place for courses, tutors, assessments, credentials, etc.
much like amazon or ebay, - take a tax on it for the environment


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chris brogan

why hasn't anyone...
Failures and Success

grace

on Zoe:

Chris and Jacqueline.. you are how grace breathes.
thank you for modeling it so beautifully.
around every corner.

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars."

 Jack Kerouac

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alan november

Alan as a wandering educator

Owning the Learning

tedxnyc - march 5 2011


1975: barber shop
teach practical stuff, too many don't have good medical care and it's free
if you get kids involved in community after class
health - free, and if people knew about it they could access it.. (sounds like ed)
if involvement in community goes hand in hand with class - better off.. school in day, community after school
jackiegerstein: Two new #TED initiatives for education http://bit.ly/hskWuM & http://elev8ed.org/

1984: computer lab
designed community problem solving with technology based after the barbershop
go out in world and find real world problem to solve first
ie: yellow pages for handicapped people -
if a kids is adding value to the world, it's amazing what they will do w/o money, grades, etc
wanted to meet with his student who built the data base
she took the job but not the salary... they are helping me build on my project, i should be paying them
fascinating what you do w/o a grade w/o money if you own it

pink - purpose is what drives, nothing else
a lot of student work, in their minds, does not have purpose
what is purposeful work, what does it look like, how do we manage it, how do we grow it

what if we can make the social interaction fair

are your students leaving a legacy
values all the way across the curriculum...
purpose 2003 - the girl on fan fiction
when i wake up i have to decide, will i do my work for my teachers or publish to the world

mathtrain.tv - tutorials designed by 6th grade kids

(what if the content of tutorial design was based in wikipedia? and/or youtube?)

we've underestimated kids to kids, everything is about teaching, we need kids coming to staff development

need to get to the point where kids are working harder than teachers, shift the ownership

what this means is - teachers are more important than ever.
shift in relationships and rolls and the feeling of empowerment kids have when they form a legacy


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steven johnson

where good ideas come from now on rsa


all about spaces

slow hunch - most important ideas take a long time to evolve and spend a long time dormant...
good ideas come from the collision of smaller hunches
need incubation, in this partial hunch form
they need to collide with other hunches

chance favors the connected mind



thanks @joe_bower

my notes on the TED
and others

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mash up

twitter or television
hey John..
1. do you skype much? that's where i feel the most connected. that's where i'd say i recover or even breed space.
2. i often feels holes, or incompletes on twitter. like you say, a loud party and sometimes you can't really hear. but - i'm relatively new to all of this. it may be an art i don't yet fully understand.
3. i don't think we're forever altered, i think that's a choice. perhaps forever misunderstood. like Bernard Shaw's quote: The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. i think we're good as long as we realize there's always more than what we gather in that moment of time. it actually magnifies this truth for face to face, makes it clearer there, because it's so obvious on twitter. to me.
4. balance in everything, no?
5. i don't watch tv. but i did growing up. in the moment i might have felt less lonely. but comparing afters, tv made me feel more lonely. twitter is a connection with real people, real stories. some that i just can't wait to meet face to face or hear more of the next day. i like that feeling.

i'm wondering about the potential of our connectedness

+ 

why the ipad is diff..
dean
my love is the web/connections, so i'm intrigued as tech and the space it creates become more web-like. more flexible. more malleable. more ubiquitous. (funny how we're creating/validating what kids have been hiding in their pockets upon entering places of learning.)
like your scene at the coffee house Tom, i'm longing for the day we can have those coffee house convos anywhere with any gathering at any time. with video and audio so seamless we feel we're in the same space.
i think those intimate conversations will prove bigger than anything else. i think they will provide the dimensionality of innovation/learning/connectedness that we all crave. and i think they are what tech wants/has to offer us.


i'm wondering about this new dimension in conversation

+

Ian, what i currently love the most about this, is that it approaches what i think tech through the web is trying to provide for us.

intimate conversation with any gathering, anyone, anywhere, at any time.

i think we are approaching a dimensionality in our conversations we've not yet experienced. one where we not only come together per passion, but also in grace and deep respect. one where more can be said, because in our new found security of intimate community, we spend less time with defense. ( http://pds8.egloos.com/pds/200... ) so more can be understood. one where less needs to be said, because more is understood. (http://www.ascd.org/publicatio... )

i'm wondering how deep we can take this



+

seth godin on measurement/important

i'm wondering with our new abilities with web connections, do we even need measurement?..

=

does conversation trump and change everything?

is now the work - we used to go to 9-5 - to get our monetary reward...
the work of being a part of something?


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shelly terrell

Considering the Curriculm: TeachMeet Newcastle Keynote | Teacher Reboot Camp

bob marley

article

ryan bretag

who is watching out for the learner

chris brogan

Persistence

michael wesch

VOST2011
mediatedcultures

nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. Oscar Wilde



via:
teaching in an age of particpation


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art can change the way we see the world

i wish for you to stand up for what you care about by participating in a global art project, and together we'll turn the world ... inside out.

insideoutproject.net

trust

They just need space, time and resources.    And most of all, they need our trust in their ability to discover their own path.

context first


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james paul gee

video games good for kids brains?

Your brain's important, but not all that important," said Dr. James Paul Gee, a professor at Arizona State University and a leading authority on literacy and the potential of educational games, during a talk at the Learning and Brain conference last week.

By that he means the following: What we'd assumed about the importance of brain functions -- following rules and logic and calculating -- are no longer relevant. There's been a revolution in the learning sciences and the new theories say that human beings learn from experiences -- that our brains can store every experience we've had, and that's what informs our learning process.

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clay shirky

great post Chad. so spot on here:
but our kids need an ocean of information into which they can dive and from which they can drink in huge, slurping gulps that look somehow vulgar or excessive to us.

i'm reading Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. i thought his TED on it was enough. silly me. there's so much i needed to hear from his book.
when he talks about the mad cow protest in Seoul, where the teenage girls took over, he quotes Mimi Ito, and i'm going to blatantly quote it all here, it's that huge:

Their participation in the protests was grounded less in the concrete conditions of their everyday lives, and more in their solidarity with a shared media fandom... Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately, to mobilize. From Pokemon to massive political protests, what's distinctive about this historical moment and today's rising generation is not only a distinct form of media expression, but how this expression is tied to social action.

Shirky goes on to say:
Digital tools were critical to coordinating human contact and real-world activity.. when communications tools are in new hands, they take on new characteristics.
and earlier Shirky writes:
During the protests in South Korea, though, media stopped being just a source of information and became a locus of coordination as well.
The atomization of social life in the twentieth century left us so far removed from participatory culture that when it came back, we needed the phrase "participatory culture" to describe it.

Tyler - your Nietzsche quote nails it.
are we intoxicated by memory? too drunk to see what we're missing... what we're, often unintentionally, keeping from our kids?
we should detox, and fast.
the ocean is amazing.

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#TED launches exciting new educational initiative! Educators, students, & creatives, learn more here: http://bit.ly/ggUKNN @TED_ED

#TED launches exciting new educational initiative! Educators, students, & creatives, learn more here: http://bit.ly/ggUKNN @TED_ED

cool jets... no?

Jason Fried

Jason Fried Skype Interview for the BIF Book Group | Business Innovation Factory

chris argyris

reading teaching smart people how to learn

because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure. So whenever their single-loop learning strategies go wrong, they become defensive, screen out criticism, and put the ‘‘blame’’ on anyone and everyone but themselves. In short, their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the mo-
ment they need it the most.

The propensity among professionals to behave defensively helps shed light on the second mistake that companies make about learning. The common assumption is that getting people to learn is largely a matter of motivation. When people have the right attitudes and commitment, learning automatically follows. So companies focus on creating new organizational structures—compensation programs, performance reviews, corporate cultures, and the like—that are designed to create motivated and committed employees.

the moment the quest for continuous improvement turned to the professionals’ own performance, something went wrong. It wasn’t a matter of bad attitude. The professionals’ commitment to excellence was genuine, and the vision of the company was clear. Nevertheless, continuous improvement did not persist. And the longer the continuous improvement efforts continued, the greater the likelihood that they would produce
ever-diminishing returns.

But they talked past each other, never finding a common language 

The problem with the professionals’ claims is not that they are wrong but that they aren’t useful.
By constantly turning the focus away from their own behavior to that of others, the professionals bring learning to a grinding halt.

people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use, between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.

There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:
To remain in unilateral control;
To maximize ‘‘winning’’ and minimize ‘‘losing’’;
To suppress negative feelings; and
To be as ‘‘rational’’ as possible —by which people mean de ning clear objectives and evaluating their behavior in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.

The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent. In this respect, the master program that most people use is profoundly defensive.

Nearly all the consultants I have studied have stellar academic records. Ironically, their very success at education helps explain the problems they have with learning. Before they enter the world of work, their lives are primarily full of successes, so they have rarely experienced the embarrassment and sense of threat that comes with failure. As a result, their defensive reasoning has rarely been activated. People who rarely experience failure, however, end up not knowing how to deal with it effectively. And this serves to reinforce
the normal human tendency to reason defensively.

‘‘Here are the features of a fair performance-evaluation system. You should abide by them. But we don’t have to when we are evaluating you.’’

The problem is that even when people are genuinely committed to improving their performance and management has changed its structures in order to encourage the ‘‘right’’ kind of behavior, people still remain locked in defensive reasoning. Either they remain unaware of this fact, or if they do become aware of it, they blame others. There is, however, reason to believe that organizations can break out of this vicious
circle. Despite the strength of defensive reasoning, people genuinely strive to produce what they intend. They value acting competently. Their self-esteem is intimately tied up with behaving consistently and performing effectively. Companies can use these universal human tendencies to teach people how to reason in a new way—in effect, to change the master programs in their heads and thus reshape their behavior.

Until senior managers become aware of how they reason defensively and the counterproductive consequences that result, there will be little real progress. Any change activity is likely to be just a fad.

seth godin

who will say go


i talked to a student yesterday about this issue, before Seth's post. the student said: it’s a lot of work to be a part of something. 

i think this is huge via Seth:
I don't think the problem has much to do with the innate ability to initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it's possible and acceptable for you to do it. We've only had these doors open wide for a decade or so, and most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the world, not to design it.



how do we get ourselves beyond this.. esp when we are in such a busy lifestyle. it's like we need time off for detox, or the process might drag on forever..


some convo in class today:
on what keeps us from doing things, even when we are passionate about them..
thinking we are just kids, can't change the world
[from shirky's cognitive surplus: the mad cow riot in south korea, teen age girls made up half the protesters]
adults get in the way.. they are used to old ways
too busy with school stuff
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