redefine space

At the end of Mark Pesce's The Playfold World, he describes his thoughts as he enters Notre-Dame cathedral:

As I crossed the threshold,.. a sudden and unexpected sensation enveloped me. The somber quiet of the cathedral space, soaring upward to the heavens, produced a similar sense of peace within me. In a journey of just a few feet, I found myself, my being, in an entirely new space. It was as remarkable as it was unexpected - but this surely was the intent of the artisans, who, nearly a thousand years ago, labored to build this monument to God's glory. Bachelard, as a Frenchman, understood the power of space to transform human nature; he had a defining example at hand.

Imagining a space such as this.. redefined to it's original intent. And inhabited by people/purpose longing to be awakened by their inner art/genius.

Dear Artspace and et al... please take a listen to our YOUth longing for spaces of permission to be.

Imagining.. how that could change the world.



______________________________

wikipedia

from wired: the book stops here by Daniel Pink

What makes the model work is not only the collective knowledge and effort of a far-flung labor force, but also the willingness to abide by two core principles. The first: neutrality. All articles should be written without bias. Wikipedians are directed not to take a stand on controversial subjects like abortion or global warming but to fairly represent all sides. The second principle is good faith. All work should be approached with the assumption that the author is trying to help the project, not harm it.

Wikipedia represents a belief in the supremacy of reason and the goodness of others. In the Wikipedia ideal, people of goodwill sometimes disagree. But from the respectful clash of opposing viewpoints and the combined wisdom of the many, something resembling the truth will emerge. Most of the time.

But both Sanger's critique and Wales' reaction miss a larger point: You can't evaluate Wikipedia by traditional encyclopedia standards. A forked Wikipedia run by academics would be Nupedia 2.0. It would use the One Best Way production model, which inevitably would produce a One Best Way product. That's not a better or worse Wikipedia any more than Instapundit.com is a better or worse Washington Post. They are different animals.
Encyclopedias aspire to be infallible. But Wikipedia requires that the perfect never be the enemy of the good. Citizen editors don't need to make an entry flawless. They just need to make it better. As a result, even many Wikipedians believe the site is not as good as traditional encyclopedias. "On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Wikipedia a 7.8 in reliability," Kvaran told me in New Mexico. "I'd give Britannica an 8.8." But how much does that matter? Britannica has been around since before the American Revolution; Wikipedia just celebrated its fifth birthday. More important, Britannica costs $70 a year; Wikipedia is free. The better criterion on which to measure Wikipedia is whether this very young, pretty good, ever improving, totally free site serves a need - just as the way to measure Britannica is whether the additional surety that comes from its production model is worth the cost.

What stood in the way of this new approach was precisely what encyclopedias prided themselves on. "Respectability seems safe," he wrote. "But what will be respectable in 30�years seems avant-garde now. If an encyclopedia hopes to be respectable in 2000, it must appear daring in the year 1963."
Jimbo and his minions - from Einar Kvaran in his New Mexico trailer to Lord Emsworth in his New Jersey bedroom - may seem daring today. But they're about to become respectable.

thank you Adam....

programming

from how i failed, failed, and finally succeeded at learning code by James Somers

That's the pedagological ballgame: get your student to want to find something out. All that's left after that is to make yourself available for hints and questions. "That student is taught the best who is told the least.

Kids are naturally curious. They love blank slates: a sandbox, a bag of LEGOs. Once you show them a little of what the machine can do they'll clamor for more. They'll want to know how to make that circle a little smaller or how to make that song go a little faster. They'll imagine a game in their head and then relentlessly fight to build it.
Along the way, of course, they'll start to pick up all the concepts you wanted to teach them in the first place. And those concepts will stick because they learned them not in a vacuum, but in the service of a problem they were itching to solve.

dale stephens

nice Dale.. this bit is huge.. thank you.

A major function of college is to signal to potential employers that one is qualified to work. The Internet is replacing this signaling function. Employers are recruiting on LinkedIn, Facebook, StackOverflow and Behance. People are hiring on Twitter, selling their skills on Google, and creating personal portfolios to showcase their talent. Because we can document our accomplishments, and have them socially validated with tools such as LinkedIn Recommendations, we can turn experiences into opportunity. As more and more people graduate from college, employers are unable to discriminate among job seekers based on a college degree and can instead hire employees based on their talents.

we're thinking the key is the above.
not whether or not a person should learn one way or another.. there is validity in many different ways to go at learning/living. the problem comes when people assume there is only one way..

we don't think ed needs to change much.. what needs to change is who's together in a room, per choice. Dale's above words helps offer permission and choice to some who are just doing what their told at this point.

we need to offer more permission without pigeon holing.
currently.. some people may prefer college, prefer grades, prefer whatever.

where we keep getting in the way is when we have this vision of the world opening up, and then get stuck in our particular version of it, thinking everyone will like our version.

the vision is - nothing is for everyone.
let's facilitate that.


ie: uni of the future - we're doing community as school, how about globe as uni

mark pesce

just finishing up The Playful World...

play = advanced experiment


is Nicholoas Nigroponte a prototype of Joi Ito?

don't care about gizmo's - just want to connect

anything known to anyone, anywhere, has become indistinguishable from what you know.

we are one

the real world, when touched and played with , is the best tutor.

concrescence: the production of novel togetherness. as things grow together, they become a new, unique thing. elements that seem unrelated can though time emerge as a whole.

changing what we know b transforming how we come to know it...

as the children of the playful world grow,... their language and customs may be sgtrange to us - but not because they are bad or immoral; they simply reflect a deeper understanding of the world we have created for them.

for we have given birth to our teachers.

connect ed

from uni of the future

The web is their classroom, Facebook is their community, the world is their study group. The days of walled gardens are over . . . if universities won't adapt, students will do it without them."

kevin kelly's what tech wants..
....to free us up from all the calculations and policy, it wants to free us up time to actually participate in life as opposed to just studying it.. it wants to free us up to share more.
that participation.. that collaboration.. will get us to more incredible spaces and gatherings and cures and whatevers..
we are more together.

flushing out the individual schools and unis - making it all available to anyone per choice. more options, with a mentor group helping you fine tune, prune, your focus.
the multiple eyes will amp the accuracy and keep an ongoing awareness of inaccuracy. the fact that we don't know..

key will be in our flexibility and open mindedness to new ways of acknowledging people. behance, ratemyprofessors, wikipedia, expositories, reputation currency, eportfolios, video logging..


connect ed

seth godin

Seth's Blog: Irrational vs. unreasonable

born to learn

adolescents crave purpose

Teenagers with age, energy and a delight in risk-taking, together with a sense of purpose in their hearts, are – and always have been – the driving force in a society’s future. But teenagers with nothing to do, and nothing to care for, become threats to themselves and everyone else. To see education as a pre-eminently school-based activity is, and ever was, to miss the point of adolescence.

dean shareski

what about forgiveness
a great opportunity to demonstrate what it means to be a kind and caring society

great end of day.. after following a bit with @willrich45 's tweet:
I agree that teachers especially need to be measured in what they say in online spaces. http://nyti.ms/l1buIk You? #echat 


@mylatinteacher i just think we'd be better off if we quit talking in school vs out of school. try to be good people - wherever we are.




Dean hits it even better.. 
This is,as well, a good argument for eliminating high levels of filtering in schools. It’s our job as teachers to help students learn to live in this world. The ubiquitous nature of information is here to stay and not allowing teachers to deal with this reality is bordering on educational malpractice. We also need to educate parents about this reality. Good teachers handle students finding inappropriate material by turning it into teachable moments. They don’t go into a panic,they don’t call the police,they don’t send the student off to the Principal's office. They recognize that this happens. Even when it’s intentional,a good teacher deals with the situation with a degree of mercy and I dare say forgiveness. Everyone makes mistakes. Let’s learn and move on and help one another do better. 

thanks to @gcouros for @shareski 's post

clark aldrich

clarkaldrich
Schools debating the merits of unschooling is like Sears debating the merits of Amazon.com.

reading unschooling rules
 notice 28: on seat time
and 29: on homework

and then 30: model the learning

change

“The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” – Albert Einstein

from
38 quotes on change

from this list of top 10 blogs on innovation from blogging innovation as shared by bif

adora svitak

Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up

bravo Adora..
breaking down the school and life barrier
 - why such a separation

more diversity in subjects
less age regulation
more open learning.. forms/paperwork/ what classes you need to take... rather than it being a marketing thing

kelsey hemberger

what brilliance.. Kelsey's speech to the her classmates.

There exists the inherent dignity that every human being can achieve through service, a common meeting ground that requires no worldly credentials to enter. Service is a great equalizer that eliminates social division. If we truly believe that everyone can be great, then we must always remember to put this ideal into practice by assuming, finding, and appealing to the greatness in everyone. Everyone has something to offer, something to contribute, even if at first they do not know it, or cannot see it.

Martin Luther King Jr states, “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve. You don't have to have college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” 

chicago and comcast

ah.. very smart.
working on the digital divide..

aaron o'connell

on how connected we are...

Aaron O'Connell: Making sense of a visible quantum object | Video on TED.com



how fitting with Anne's video .. and all

will richardson

his video on mind

excellent 3:48 on change in ed.
thank you Will.

commencement speeches

on mother teresa:
A journalist once asked Mother Teresa how she persevered in the face of all the despair she had seen. Mother replied, "God has not called me to be successful. He has called me to be faithful." Over the years, I've carried in my heart a similar code my parents taught me: You do the right thing for the right reasons, and good things will happen.

on richard stengel:
One of the things I am certain about is that certainty and democracy don't go together. If you look at the leaders of the last 10 years who have had ironclad certainty, who are they? Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, Muammar Qaddafi. Totalitarianism is the place for certainty, not democracy….
Democracy is based on doubt. It's based on wondering. It's based on questioning: Are we doing the fair thing? Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing the just thing? It's not about certainty. So I'm telling you today: Beware of certainty. Beware of ideas and theories that cannot be tested. Beware of people who know that they're right.

entire post
thank you @mrslauer

linda darling-hammond

the service of democratic ed

her address to columbia university's teacher's college

As King reminded us:

On some positions, Cowardice asks the question "Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question "Is it politic?" And Vanity comes along and asks the question "Is it popular?" But Conscience asks the question "Is it right?" And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right.

As one such teacher wrote in The American Teacher in 1912:

We have yielded to the arrogance of "big business men" and have accepted their criteria of efficiency at their own valuation, without question. We have consented to measure the results of educational efforts in terms of price and product—the terms that prevail in the factory and the department store. But education, since it deals in the first place with human organisms, and in the second place with individualities, is not analogous to a standardizable manufacturing process. Education must measure its efficiency not in terms of so many promotions per dollar of expenditure, nor even in terms of so many student-hours per dollar of salary; it must measure its efficiency in terms of increased humanism, increased power to do, increased capacity to appreciate.

Sounds suspiciously like John Dewey and Maxine Greene, doesn’t it?

Seth's Blog: Selling nuts to squirrels

Seth's Blog: Selling nuts to squirrels

just like what ana was saying about change in ed

need to be with the masses or you feel like you're behind

mimi ito

Hechinger Report | Q&A with Mimi Ito: Facebook’s educational potential