education reform

From DSC:
I ran across Manish Mohan’s blog posting — Seven Survival Skills in Today’s World — which focused on Tony Wagner’s keynote address at the IFC’s International Private Education Conference: Rethinking Education, Shaping the Future.

So I read the blog posting and then I listened to Tony Wagner’s address. Below are my notes from his talk.

What’s the problem we need to solve in education?

Challenges

Education today has become a commodity. Knowledge is free; it’s like water or air. Educators once had the corner on the market. Knowledge had to come through the teacher. Not true today. You can acquire knowledge via the Internet. Teachers are no longer the gatekeepers. Where, then, is the value that teachers/schools are providing?
Work is being transformed around the world. Routine jobs being automated/replaced by computers or in other countries for far less $$. World cares about what you can DO with what you know. Not just acquiring knowledge. Skill and will are other legs of the stool (in addition to knowledge).
The longer students are in school (in the U.S.), the more bored they are. Less engaged as time goes on. The Internet is their preferred source of learning.

Tony focused on skill (adding value) and will in this keynote. Need to be a continuous learner.

Tony talked to senior executives — what skills do you need today? Where are the gaps?

7 survival skills/competencies a person needs before they reach the end of their secondary school:

Critical thinking and problem solving — how to ask the right questions
Collaboration across networks — how are we going to teach
Agility and adaptability
Initiative and entrepreneurship
Effective oral and written communication — need to be able to write with “voice” — own passion and perspective, to be convincing
Accessing and analyzing information
Curiosity and imagination

New achievement gap — these 7 survival skills vs what is being taught around the world.

Growing unemployment of college graduates compels us to look at goals of education. Academically adrift — communication skills not growing in college.

One person to Tony:
“I want young people who can ‘Just go figure it out.'”

Want graduates who have a sense of mission. Autonomy.

How do we prepare kids to “Just go figure it out.”

We need innovators — creative problem solvers. People who ask the right questions.

The teachers (of innovative individuals) who made the greatest difference were outliers in their respective institutional settings but were remarkably alike in their patterns of teaching and learning. The culture of schooling, as we continue to practice it, is fundamentally and radically at odds with the culture of learning to be an innovator in 5 respects:

Culture of schooling is about rewarding individual achievement vs being a team player
Compartmentalizing knowledge; innovations happens at the margins of academic disciplines, not within them; interdisciplinary courses needed
Passivity and consumption — students listen, consume information; only 1 expert. VS creating information. Teacher as coach who empowers students.
How failure is viewed — fear of failure creates risk aversion. But innovation requires risk and failure. Trial and error. Iteration — systematically reflecting on what worked and what didn’t.
Grades and what they represent in school. Often a motivational tool. Rely on extrinsic motivation. But intrinsic motivation is key amongst innovative individuals. They want to make a difference.

Parents and teachers of these innovative individuals emphasized 3 things:

Play
Passion
Purpose

Provided a buffet of opportunities to discover interests. But did not pigeonhole the person.

We have some responsibility to others — to give back — and to make a difference.

So much of our thinking revolves around delivery systems, but what about the GOALS of education? All too often assumed.

Need to be differently prepared vs. students/graduates of 50 years ago.

How do we motivate students to want to be continuous learners?

A merit badge approach to learning. Evidence. Digital portfolios.

In Finland and Singapore one can see the massive importance of — and investment in — teaching as a profession. Elite group of teachers. Trust through professionalism.

Collective human judgement is key. High stakes testing is completely distorting education system. What gets tested is what gets taught.

Preparation for citizenship is equally important (as skills development for earning a living).

Why not specifically teach about entrepreneurship?

Finland — much less homework, and far more opportunities to discover interests and to be entrepreneurial. Start-up like culture.

“Creating a Future Forward College” — an excerpt from the free July-August 2014 issue of THE FUTURIST

On 06/17/2014, in change, colleges, community colleges, education reform, emerging technologies, experimentation, future, future of higher education, pedagogy, teaching & learning, universities, by Daniel Christian

The July-August 2014 issue of THE FUTURIST is FREE online, as part of WorldFuture 2014: What If.

Excerpt:

Creating a Future Forward College: What If. … Collaborations in Transformational Learning — by Benita Budd, Magdalena de la Teja, Butch Grove, and Rick Smyre

Imagine a college classroom where the professor asks students to review the course requirements and then decide, as a group, how to meet those requirements. Imagine the lively discussions as students take ownership of their learning, and the questions to the professor when information becomes “necessary” to the projects. Imagine the professor coaching, guiding, and inspiring each student or group as they need to be uniquely inspired; imagine guest experts visiting the class to mentor and assist; imagine the shift in thinking from “receivers of knowledge” to “creators of knowledge.”

You’ve just imagined a DNA shift in education. And it’s happening now, in Wake Technical Community College’s Future Forward classrooms and at Tarrant County College, through its initiatives supporting transformational learning and its FFC Innovation Forum idea incubator.

…

A time of constant change always hides a developing narrative that often slips past our awareness. The trick is to find the “weak signals” of a new idea in its early stages; then we can witness its development as a force from our position on the cutting edge of thinking and action. Our challenge is to understand what may be occurring and to build collaborative networks, futures projects, and pilot programs that exist in parallel with conventional models and serve as harbingers of a world and society that do not yet exist. The narrative of an emerging Future Forward College is one of these forces pushing the change.

We are shifting from the rigid forms of hierarchies, standard answers, and predictability to an evolving society of interlocking networks, varied solutions, and the need to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity. And we have no models to follow as we explore this unprecedented transformation from an Industrial to an Organic Society.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of education. It is as if we are stepping off the cliff of a comfortable past and falling into an unknown abyss, full of false expectations, failing students, accelerating dropout rates, and paths leading to dead ends. And if we ask for guides to help us with direction, we often hear, “look in the literature,” or “this must occur for your college to be accredited.” Somehow, in this time of exponential change, it makes little sense to look to the past for direction in order to be accredited in increasingly obsolete ideas and methods.

…the following principles are core to the idea of a Future Forward College:

Trans-disciplinary Thinking

Complex Adaptive Systems

Adaptive Planning

And/both parallel processes

Identifying Emerging Weak Signals

Master Capacity Builders

Resilience Centered

Excerpt (emphasis DSC — with thanks to Mr. Joe Byerwalter for this resource):

What is the future of learning? FIRST® LEGO® League teams will find the answers. In the 2014 FLL WORLD CLASS? Challenge, over 230,000 children ages 9 to 16* from over 70 countries will redesign how we gather knowledge and skills in the 21st century. Teams will teach adults about the ways that kids need and want to learn. Get ready for a whole new class – FLL WORLD CLASSSM!

FLL challenges kids to think like scientists and engineers. During FLL WORLD CLASSSM, teams will build, test, and program an autonomous robot using LEGO MINDSTORMS® to solve a set of missions in the Robot Game. They will also choose and solve a real-world question in the Project. Throughout their experience, teams will operate under FLL’s signature set of Core Values.

*9-14 in the US, Canada, and Mexico

Technology is leaving too many of us behind [McAfee & Brynjolfsson]

On 05/16/2014, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, creativity, education reform, innovation, reinvent, robotics, society, staying relevant, surviving, technology (general), the downsides of how people use tech, by Daniel Christian

Technology is leaving too many of us behind — from cnn.com by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson

Excerpts:

Technology is racing ahead so quickly, in fact, that it’s leaving a lot of our institutions, organizations, policies and practices behind. It’s in these latter areas where we must increase the pace of innovation. The solution is not to slow technology down but instead to speed up the invention of new jobs. That requires unleashing entrepreneurs’ creativity. It also requires a host of other conditions.

…

Will our primary education system decrease its current emphasis on rote learning and standardized testing and start teaching skills computers don’t have, such as creativity and problem-solving?

…

The greatest flaw with our current path is the fact that a large group is being left out in every important sense. Too many people aren’t getting the skills and support they need in order to participate in a rapidly changing economy and don’t feel that they have any stake in a society that’s being created around them and without them. As a result, many are dropping out — of education, of the work force, out of their communities and out of family life.

Elucidating blended learning on Khan Academy [Horn]

On 05/05/2014, in blended learning, education, education reform, education technology, hybrid learning, K-12 related, by Daniel Christian

Elucidating blended learning on Khan Academy — from educationnext.org by Michael Horn

Excerpt:

At its simplest, people understand the basic “what”: that blended learning is about combining online learning with traditional schools to create an integrated learning experience, but they too often overlook how important it is to the definition that students have some control over the time, place, path, and/or pace of their learning.

Similarly, too often many people think blended learning is all about the technology and don’t see blended learning as a key driver in changing the education system itself from a factory model that standardizes the way we teach and test to one that puts students at the center of their learning and can personalize for their different learning needs. Misconceptions abound.

…

In our latest effort to provide educators and the public with a meaningful understanding of what blended learning is, what it’s purpose can be, what it looks like, and how to go about designing a robust blended-learning environment that can personalize learning for students, we partnered with the Silicon Schools Fund once again to move the video work we’ve done on blended learning to the Khan Academy platform.

In this “course” on blended learning, we have modularized the video resources; they are now free and discoverable both as part of an integrated sequence as well as in discreet objects organized by topic, so that people can personalize their learning about blended learning to get the resource they need when they need it.

Also see:

7 ways to transform education by 2030 — from edudemic.com by Julie Wright

Here are 7 big ideas for transforming the educational experience before 2030:

Change the focus from rote learning – the memorization of specific facts and figures – to the development of lifelong learners who are able to think critically and solve problems.
Encourage learning through cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that are relevant and useful to their community.
Create an environment where students work in fluid groupings that combine students of different ages, different abilities and different interests.
Shift the role of the teacher from “chalk-and-talk” orators to curators of learning, helping students grow their knowledge and skills.
Measure learning progress using qualitative assessments of a student’s skills and competencies, rather than using high-stakes examinations.
Ensure that all groups – teachers, parents, governments and students – have a seat at the table when building the framework for learning.
Empower students and teachers to experiment with new ideas in an environment where they can fail safely and develop confidence to take risks.

The gradients of life and learning [Christian]

On 03/22/2014, in adult learning, change, Daniel S. Christian, education reform, graphics, heutagogy, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, lifelong learning, reinvent, staying relevant, student-related, surviving, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
I was thinking about how we might help move people from situations whereby their learning is directed by others, to situations where they are owning and directing their own learning. It made me think of a process…a journey…implementing gradual changes over time.

As I like to work with graphics, it made me think of a gradient. A gradient, in the graphic design world, is a gradual change of colors. For example:

DanielChristianExampleOfAGradient-March2014

But then, I thought about how there are gradients of life. Such as:

DanielChristianFromBirthTo-K

DanielChristianFromK-8

DanielChristianFromHS-Student-to-Working-Adult-March2014

DanielChristianFromBegWorking-Adult-AdvancedYrsWorkingAdult

(This image from early years to later years was one that I hesitated to even put on here…
as a smooth gradient is not the case for many of us in our “careers.” But roll with me here.)

So, how can we implement the type of gradient in life whereby we help move people from learning that is directed by others to learning that is self-directed?

DanielChristianFromTo-SelfDirLearning

The reason this is important is that we all need to continually tend to our learning ecosystems. We need to be constantly reinventing ourselves to stay relevant. As such, we all need to be lifelong learners. We all need to own and direct our own learning now. That is, no longer is it the case that a person can go to college for 4-8 years and then be set for life.

How can we best provide the people, content, processes, and tools that provide the scaffolding to help these gradual changes take place?

4 items re: heutagogy and lifelong learning

On 03/06/2014, in 21st century, education reform, heutagogy, learning ecosystem, lifelong learning, pedagogy, traditional / tradition, by Daniel Christian

Heutagogy and lifelong learning: A review of heutagogical practice and self-determined learning — from IRRODL. Vol 13, No 1 (2012) by Lisa Marie Blaschke

Abstract
Heutagogy, a form of self-determined learning with practices and principles rooted in andragogy, has recently resurfaced as a learning approach after a decade of limited attention. In a heutagogical approach to teaching and learning, learners are highly autonomous and self-determined and emphasis is placed on development of learner capacity and capability with the goal of producing learners who are well-prepared for the complexities of today’s workplace. The approach has been proposed as a theory for applying to emerging technologies in distance education and for guiding distance education practice and the ways in which distance educators develop and deliver instruction using newer technologies such as social media.

The renewed interest in heutagogy is partially due to the ubiquitousness of Web 2.0, and the affordances provided by the technology. With its learner-centered design, Web 2.0 offers an environment that supports a heutagogical approach, most importantly by supporting development of learner-generated content and learner self-directedness in information discovery and in defining the learning path. Based on an extensive review of the current literature and research, this article defines and discusses the concepts of andragogy and heutagogy and describes the role of Web 2.0 in supporting a heutagogical learning approach. Examples of institutional programs that have incorporated heutagogical approaches are also presented; based on these examples and research results, course design elements that are characteristic of heutagogy are identified. The article provides a basis for discussion and research into heutagogy as a theory for guiding the use of new technologies in distance education.

Learning for Life: Preparing Learners for the Complexities of the Workplace Today and Tomorrow — by Lisa Marie Blaschke:

Heutagogy: It Isn’t Your Mother’s Pedagogy Any More — from National Social Science Association by Jane Eberle & Marcus Childress

Excerpt:

An excerpt from Can Heutagogy Save Education? — from rtschuetz.blogspot.com by

Over the past few years my interest in educational disruption has grown to the point where I have been encouraging my teaching colleagues to shift their teaching pedagogies to accommodate student-centered learning. I now recognize my ignorance with this concept. True educational disruption means accepting and encouraging heutagogical practices for learners of all ages. What will heutagogy look like in our schools?

Learning will be student centered (content, processes, & goals)
Emphasis will be on learning processes over content mastery
Knowing how to learn will be an essential skill
Learning will be multidisciplinary
Learning will be supported by curricular flexibility
Individualized learning
Provisions for flexible or negotiated assessments
Enable rather than control informal learning

The Classroom of 2025 [European Schoolnet]

On 02/22/2014, in change, education reform, Europe, future, K-12 related, learning spaces, teachers, teaching & learning, trends, by Daniel Christian

Technology and jobs: Coming to an office near you
The effect of today’s technology on tomorrow’s jobs will be immense—and no country is ready for it — from economist.com by

Excerpts:

INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.

…

No time to be timid
If this analysis is halfway correct, the social effects will be huge. Many of the jobs most at risk are lower down the ladder (logistics, haulage), whereas the skills that are least vulnerable to automation (creativity, managerial expertise) tend to be higher up, so median wages are likely to remain stagnant for some time and income gaps are likely to widen.

Anger about rising inequality is bound to grow, but politicians will find it hard to address the problem. Shunning progress would be as futile now as the Luddites’ protests against mechanised looms were in the 1810s, because any country that tried to stop would be left behind by competitors eager to embrace new technology. The freedom to raise taxes on the rich to punitive levels will be similarly constrained by the mobility of capital and highly skilled labour.

The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems. One of the reasons for the improvement in workers’ fortunes in the latter part of the Industrial Revolution was because schools were built to educate them—a dramatic change at the time. Now those schools themselves need to be changed, to foster the creativity that humans will need to set them apart from computers. There should be less rote-learning and more critical thinking. Technology itself will help, whether through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or even video games that simulate the skills needed for work.

Professors, We Need You! [Kristof]

On 02/16/2014, in adjunct faculty, education reform, faculty, higher education, society, United States, by Daniel Christian

Professors, We Need You! — from nytimes.com by Nicholas Kristof

Excerpts:

Some of the smartest thinkers on problems at home and around the world are university professors, but most of them just don’t matter in today’s great debates.

The most stinging dismissal of a point is to say: “That’s academic.” In other words, to be a scholar is, often, to be irrelevant.

…

Yet it’s not just that America has marginalized some of its sharpest minds. They (professors/academics) have also marginalized themselves.

…

A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.

“Many academics frown on public pontificating as a frivolous distraction from real research,” said Will McCants, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institution. “This attitude affects tenure decisions. If the sine qua non for academic success is peer-reviewed publications, then academics who ‘waste their time’ writing for the masses will be penalized.”

“The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age” [Shirky] — & other curated items re: the pressures for change in HE

On 02/01/2014, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business side of he, changing business models, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, education reform, education technology, experimentation, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, IBM, more voice more choice more control, new business models, online learning, publishing, vendors, by Daniel Christian

The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age — from Clay Shirky

Excerpts:

Interest in using the internet to slash the price of higher education is being driven in part by hope for new methods of teaching, but also by frustration with the existing system. The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.

…

Our current difficulties are not the result of current problems. They are the bill coming due for 40 years of trying to preserve a set of practices that have outlived the economics that made them possible.

…

Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.

…

It will also require us to abandon any hope of restoring the Golden Age. It was a nice time, but it wasn’t stable, and it didn’t last, and it’s not coming back. It’s been gone ten years more than it lasted, in fact, and in the time since it ended, we’ve done more damage to our institutions, and our students, and our junior colleagues, by trying to preserve it than we would have by trying to adapt. Arguing that we need to keep the current system going just long enough to get the subsidy the world owes us is really just a way of preserving an arrangement that works well for elites—tenured professors, rich students, endowed institutions—but increasingly badly for everyone else.

4 platforms that will disrupt higher education — from hastac.org by Kevin Browne

Excerpts:

Straighterline
Udemy
Mozilla’s Open Badges Project
Pearson
The textbook publisher Pearson is now able to offer degrees of its own in the UK. If their venture is a success it will certainly inspire others to petition to do this and it will certainly spread to other countries.

The rise of alternatives to university continuing education (part 1) — from higheredmanagement.net by Keith Hampson

Excerpt:

Let’s be clear, we need these new learning providers. We are living through what appears to be a “jobless” economic recovery and people need a way range of options – at different price points – in order to quickly retrain themselves for a rapidly changing job market. A robust and diverse continuing education market is a priority for the 21st century and our government leaders and regulators should be crafting policy to make it happen.

Higher education technology predictions for 2014 — from masmithers.com by Mark Smithers

Excerpt:

In summary, we’ll have another contentious year. We’ll see big growth in higher education services from outside of the university sector, a continued gnashing of teeth from established providers. Some new services and platforms will emerge to cater for different forms of learning, MOOCs will evolve and improve and open badges will be hot. Look out for rhizomatic learning.

The New Normal isn’t what you think — from nextberlin.eu by Adam Tinworth (the quote below, though targeting at the corporate world, applies to higher ed as well)

Their yearning is doomed. There will be no return to business as usual. We have begun a process of continuous change that will last decades – perhaps for much of the rest of our lifetimes.

Related items:

Watson is coming for your (professional) jobs — from IEEE.org by John Niman
Excerpt:

Published on Jan 17, 2014 IEET Affiliate Scholar John Niman talks about IBM’s computer system, Watson and how AI may be able to take “Professional” Jobs.

Mass unemployment fears over Google artificial intelligence plans — from telegraph.co.uk by Miranda Prynne
The development of artificial intelligence – thrown into spotlight this week after Google spent hundreds of millions on new technology – could mean computers take over human jobs at a faster rate than new roles can be created, experts have warned

Addendum:

Transformational Change: The New Face of Higher Education — from cgi.stanford.edu by Irene Hecht

Excerpt:

Higher education is in the midst of a process of transformational change. For the department chair, leadership today must include breadth of vision and the skill to bring the single individuals who make up a department into a group that can think collaboratively about the questions facing their discipline, department, and institution. Chair leadership now depends heavily on the ability to create collaborative habits of thought and dialogue among a group of individuals, none of whom may have had experience in effective teamwork. Skill in this area will derive in large part from the chair’s ability to structure the department’s dialogue to be conscious of the connections among its members and the links between the department’s work and the institution’s goals. Ultimately, the habits of dialogue must also include consciousness of the transformational
currents in higher education as an enterprise. Subsequent articles will examine these issues as they pertain to faculty, students, pedagogy, and other key topics being remodeled in the transformational process.

Speeding up on curves — from educause.com by Bradley Wheeler

Excerpt:

Higher education faces a number of important curves, but I’ll focus first on just two:

1) The finance of higher education is increasingly moving from a public to a private good, leading to increasing cost and price pressures (particularly for state-supported institutions).
2) The increasing digitization of education and research favors greater scale while it also enables potential new substitutes for colleges and universities.

What’s the point of academic publishing? [Kendzior]

On 01/28/2014, in education reform, faculty, higher education, publishing, by Daniel Christian

What’s the point of academic publishing? — from chroniclevitae.com by Sarah Kendzior

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

In December 2013, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs made a startling announcement. “Today I wouldn’t get an academic job,” he told The Guardian. “It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough.”

Higgs noted that quantity, not quality, is the metric by which success in the sciences in measured.

…

In order to maintain her professional viability, Day stopped work that she and the public found meaningful—work that directly relates to her role as a teacher—in order to have time to produce work that “counts” to a small number of academics. To “count” is not to spread knowledge, as Day did, or develop new ideas, as Higgs did. To “count” is to preserve your professional viability by shoring up disciplinary norms. In most fields, it means to publish behind a paywall, removed from the public eye—and from broader influence and relevance. To “count” is to conform.

…

Making your work “count” on its own intellectual merit helps rescue you from the sense of personal failure that accompanies loss on the job market. When you orient your scholarship toward a future that never comes, it can start to feel like you have no future. When you orient your scholarship toward its obvious yet overlooked purpose—furthering human knowledge—its value does not need to be determined by others, because the value lies in the work itself. This is what counts.

Academic publishing is no guarantee of anything, except possibly the paywalled obsolescence of your work.

Also see:

Excerpt:

This is why it makes sense to create a Twitter-only journal, which would publish original, peer-reviewed research, direct to the reader. And that is what I have done: introducing the world’s first Twitter journal of academic research, aka @TwournalOf. Part philosophical provocation, part genuine intervention, I want to explore the willingness of researchers to share their original findings in a new format.

From DSC:
This Twitter account is just getting started. So there’s not much to see there…yet. I subscribed to it though, because it’s a potentially very useful idea; I like it because it takes education to where it belongs — to the public.

My thanks to Sidneyeve Matrix
(@sidneyeve) for the Tweet on this item.

Announcing: Educating Modern Learners [Richardson, Dixon, Watters]

On 01/22/2014, in education reform, education technology, K-12 related, United States, by Daniel Christian

Announcing: Educating Modern Learners — from Will Richardson

Excerpt from yesterday’s posting:

I’m happy to announce that my friend and colleague Bruce Dixon and I are starting a new membership website, Educating Modern Learners (EML). It’s a site and an accompanying newsletter that’s aimed specifically at helping school leaders and policy makers from around the globe be better informed about the huge technological changes that are impacting education, and to help them make better, more pertinent decisions for the students they serve. And I’m equally excited to announce that we’ve hired one of the best education bloggers / thinkers we know, Audrey Watters, to be the editorial director / lead writer for the site. Our official launch is scheduled for mid-February.

Announcing “Educating Modern Learners” — from Audrey Watters

Excerpt:

See, we desperately need a new narrative about future of teaching and learning. We need that narrative amongst educators and parents and politicians, sure. But we need that narrative articulately loudly and clearly in the media. We need it told and explained convincingly to education leaders.

We need a narrative that isn’t about education reform as privatization. And we need a narrative that doesn’t insist that school as-is is actually “just fine.” We need a narrative that merges progressive education and progressive politics and progressive tech. That’s the niche that Educating Modern Learners will fill.

From the EML website:

Our Philosophy
Transformation. Disruption. Opportunity. Challenge…

Welcome to the Changing World of Modern Learning.

The past few years have seen a renewed interest in education technology — among educators, tech entrepreneurs, politicians, parents, and kids alike (and, for better or worse, in the popular media too). Some say we’re in the midst of a “transformation.” Others call it a “revolution.” Whatever you call it, there’s no question technology–particularly the World Wide Web, is fundamentally changing the way we connect with one another, the way we access and share information, the way we build communities and build knowledge, and the way we teach and learn.

Learning Ecosystems

“Creating a Future Forward College” — an excerpt from the free July-August 2014 issue of THE FUTURIST

4 items re: heutagogy and lifelong learning

Professors, We Need You! [Kristof]

What’s the point of academic publishing? [Kendzior]

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