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Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift - Part 2 - How To Prepare You For A Meaningful Life?Yesterday

What kind of approach to education and learning must we have, if the end result we want to provide to our kids is to enhance their ability to self-direct themselves into living a sustainable, meaningful and successful life? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov If our goal is the one of truly having our children learn the ins and outs of life and the strategies and skills to challenge them, why are we segregating them out of our world and excluding them from the opportunity of learning from real-life experts the things that they are mostly interested in? If modern life is all about faster change, complexity, diversity and information / communication how can we expect to prepare our kids for the future when all we provide to them is a static and pre-defined curriculum of topics that is one and the same for everyone? Helping me out in this quest are again Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina who have kindly accepted to record a few short, one-minute-long video thoughts on these topics. Here, in Part 2 of this article (Part 1 here) their one-minute views on some these key questions:

What Education Can Prepare You For A Meaningful Life?

The Importance of School - Jay Cross

Duration: 0':38'' You ask how important is school. School, because you're taught things and only part of that is learned, and then most of that is forgotten because there is a lack of application, before you have a chance to really use any of these things. What I learned in school is almost worthless. However, school is a great socialization device. I guess if you think if the learning is not the academics, but learning how to get along with people, I learned some very useful things in school.

Learning to Inquire - Howard Rheingold

Duration: 1':20'' What I learned in high school was how to get into college. When I got into college it just didn't make sense to me to continue to pursue the collection of nuggets of knowledge that I could then regurgitate at tests. At the time I was really interested in learning, so I went to a place called Reed. I'd say that the one thing that I've received in my college education was a real dedication to inquiry. Instead of collecting knowledge, discovering it. Instead of receiving it, trying to seek it, to answer some kind of questions, something that's meaningful to me. Of course, the whole business of "How do you find the answer to questions", back in the old days it was libraries, today it's search engines. And how do you judge what you find, how do you analyze it, how do you know it's for real, how do you fit it together into a structure of meaning? Those were the things that I learned in college that didn't make a lot of sense, then, in regard to what I would do with my life, but actually had a lot to do with what I've ended up doing.

How to Live a Meaningful Life? - Nancy White

Duration: 0':21'' "How to prepare ourselves to live a meaningful life?" Be curious, know how to ask questions, know how to communicate, know how to read, know how to cook, know how to drive, know how to saw a button, know how to balance your checkbook, but I think it goes back to curiosity. You can never ever ever ever stop being curious.

How to Prepare Oneself for a Meaningful Life? Stephen Downes

Duration: 1':03'' Probably the hardest question to answer is: "What can I do to best prepare myself to have an educated, meaningful life?" And there's no simple answer to that question, because it's going to depend a lot on what your own interests, and your own inclinations are. If I had to say anything, I'd tell people: "Follow what interests you! Follow what gets you excited! And pursue that, and not be distracted by the many other things people would tell you that you absolutely have to do." In my own case, it was reading and writing. And while people were trying to get me to do other work, I would be reading. When people were trying to get me to do schoolwork, I would be writing. These are the things that I pursued in my life to make my life better. For you it may be very different, it may be technology, it may be science, may be auto mechanics, it may be industrial design, it may be any of the million things, but whatever it is, follow it.

What to Do to Prepare Your Kids for Life - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0':28'' "What's the best way today if you have kids to prepare them for life?" I think to expose them to lots of different ideas, to have them travel, look at things, and experience things. To have them teach how to use the Web to reach people and to be reached by others, how to connect, and how to interchange. I think one thing that's crucial in today's world is how to learn how to juggle with this huge river, ocean of information. That learning to learn, to me, I think is one of the key things.

What Is Learning For Me? - George Siemens

Duration: 1':12'' What is learning for me? I have to rely on a statement that E.M. Forster famously made, which is "Only connect". I think in a very real sense. For me to learn today is about being properly connected to other people, being able to find information when I want. Having tools at my disposal that allow me to access different sources of information, and also having a network of people that enables me to reach out, ask questions when I need it. These networks are obviously based on trust, these are people that I have followed for a while, who I've been aware of over the last several years. In a real very practical sense, my ability to connect to other people, is learning for me. My ability to find information sources through easy-to-use tools is learning for me. And ultimately, anything whether it's policy, government initiatives, copyright, or any other system that puts up barriers between me and my ability to connect to others and information, it is ultimately a barrier to my learning.

Preparation For Life - How To Live Successfully - Jay Cross

Education And Learning: A Paradigm Shift - Part 1 - Is Our Educational System Broken?January 6

It's all so good to talk about new media, 2.0, participation, collaboration, real-time web, mashing-up, agile development, remixing, or lifestreaming but what value do these discoveries have when as soon as we turn our heads home and to our kids we still force them to go through an education system that embraces none of such fantastic discoveries? Photo credit: Dmitriy Shironosov Why has it that advertising, marketing and new media have been able to rapidly deeply transform their own survival paradigms and have embraced principles exactly opposite to those that made them rich before but none of the discoveries and realizations we have made in this paradigm shift have contaminated our world wide educational system? Too early to ask? Why? Is it because we have often no direct business interest in education? Or is it because we have long stopped asking some good questions about what kind of value such school systems really provide? The tacit assumption here is that it is that we have been realizing for a while that true, useful, memorable learning takes place when there are conditions and a setting very different from the one offered by a classroom: Focus on the learning, not on the teaching, getting away from information stuffing and realizing the value of direct understanding and engagement, discovery work, exploration, opportunity to make lots of mistakes, interaction with elders / experts, passionate peers, are just some key elements we have realized make a true difference in creating a setting where true learning can take place. And the internet itself offers so many great opportunities to bring together those who really want to learn with those who know and want to share. Why then do we need to compromise for second-hand experts and hand over the greatest amount of official learning time our kids will spend with someone whose only credentials are mostly made up of certifications of tests sHe has taken? Given the times, wouldn't reputation and work produced be better "metrics"? I think it is about time that each kid wanting to learn something seriously should have the opportunity to do so by accessing the real world, he is supposedly being prepared for, and being granted a passport to access it as an explorer / assistant / lurker / collaborator depending on the situation. Newsrooms can open up to those who want to learn how to online media, just as much as a shoe shop or an auto mechanic can reserve days or time slots for having people who are there to watch, help, learn. For what are more theoretical matters students should be free to choose their teachers, and not be forced to be matched by sheer chance to instructors and peers who have nothing do with their interests and preferences. If the learner is the one who needs to come out with something of value from this long forced confined training, sHe should at least have the option to choose from whom to be instructed and be given the opportunity to do that learning path with other people cultivating the same interest and preference. Or not? Collaboration, conferencing and video technologies offer the opportunity to any student to potentially attend and make up a personalized curriculum of instructors and experts to learn from that doesn't require moving to Stanford, California, nor to wake up everything morning at 5 to take a train and two lousy buses. Or not? So, what's up everyone? Besides the few guys out there spending serious time researching and lecturing on today's educational challenges what are you doing to harmonize a little more what you have learned in the world of media and communication to the universe of learning and education your kids are immersed into? Feel free to shoot me back your criticism or ideas in the comments section of this post, and allow me to share with you a first short set of very brief video clips I have asked a few friends to record while I was preparing my LeWeb08 presentation: Howard Rheingold, Jay Cross, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard and Teemu Arina have all accepted to record a few short videos for me while addressing some of the issues relating to our educational system and its future. In this first part (tomorrow Part 2) my questions are targeted at understanding what kind of education system we have, what do we really get out of it, and whether the infinite exams, tests and pieces of paper we get from them are really useful for living a successful / meaningful life. Well, here are some interesting views to start.

Is Our Educational System Broken?

The Paradox of 2.0 - Robin Good

Duration: 1':16" Most of what I've learned in the formal education system, especially at a K-12 level, doesn't necessarily have a huge impact to where I am and what I am doing today. If I was to say what's the one skill that's most critical, I'd have to say typing. That's the one skill that I learned in K-12 system that, to this day, serves me on a daily ongoing basis. Otherwise, so much of what I need today, I encounter, whether it's a skill that I need to develop, which is driven by passion and interest, sometimes by work requirements, or whether it's knowledge that I need to complete a particular task, whether it's in work or just through my personal hobby or interest, almost everything that I use on a regular basis today has come as a result of me wanting to learn it, rather than being forced to or being put in a position where it was part of a curriculum. So if anything, our schools system today should foster the creation of a passion, it should encourage individuals to pursue what it is that they most love doing and eliminate barriers to achieving what people actually want to do.

Are Schools Useful Learning Environments? - Jay Cross

Duration: 0:44" ..... is what I've learned in school. Schools are for socialization, not for learning. I was happy to have a good sendoff with school, but I have learned more in every six months on the Web that I've learned for instance in Princeton and Harvard, I can tell you that. It's not what people teach anyway, It's what people learn, and learning is the responsibility of the learner not the teacher. I'm a little down on universities, although I know it's good to have resource centers and things like that, but increasingly the knowledge of the past is not the wisdom of the future.

What Interests Do Universities Serve? - Gerd Leonhard

Duration: 0:52" "Whose interest do school and universities currently serve?" I think of course in many cases they kind of serve their own interest and... well, maybe not entirely serving their own interest, but it is something of course that has become a self-perpetuating thing. I think academia general needs to really open up and see what's out there in terms of knowledge and intelligence that's not part of this kind of world yet. To me learning is something that goes on everywhere between people, not between authorized professionals. Of course the question of quality comes up here. I think that is a real concern that we create peer pressure, so to speak, about quality and merit which we have on the Web in many cases. I do think that there's a huge trend towards the Web becoming the open learning platform. I hope it's not going all be about "Google.edu", but chances are that is going to be a substantial part of it.

What Kind of Education Do We Get in Schools? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:21" "What kind of education do we get in today's school?" I think I'd have to turn the camera around at my son to answer that question, but I know that by watching as a parent, I'm worried about what I see in school, I see people trying to get in the "test score mode" rather than really learning. And if learning is to become a life-long practice, which I believe it is, we need to change the way we're teaching in schools.

Whose Interests Are Universities Serving? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1':21" "Whose interest schools and universities serve?" I think that schools who have adapted something like learning management systems, are not really serving learning, but they're serving teaching and control. And from that point of view, these systems are none the best methods for learning. There are more like good methods for managing people, courses, information. But not learning. On the Web people have been talking about personal learning environments. That's the idea that you construct your own learning environment. And in that world I see the future of these institutions and universities to be more like learning resource centers. Where you go, it provides a meaningful environment networks, and the people who are working on these things, may be even coaches who can help you to find the right communities, sort of tap into the right information. This come up with your own way of understanding these things. It's about scaffolding. These institutions will be about scaffolding, and it's not a tight-up environment with walls, but rather part of a network itself and interacting with the networks at the same time.

Do We All Need a Degree to Be Successful? - Nancy White

Duration: 0:35" My son's going to take this video, so he's going to love this one. The question is: "Do my sons need a degree and why?". This is a really interesting question because both my sons stepped out of schools and one is going back. I think there's this push in the US that you need a degree in order to make a decent wage. But I look at what I do now, and a lot of what I do now has been formed by things I've learned since I left school. So, I think it depends on how motivated you are and how much you're an ongoing learner. I think there's definitely a place for certain kinds of degrees but... everybody? I don't know!

Will We Need Degrees in the Future? - Teemu Arina

Duration: 1':17" "Would someone need a degree in the future?" I think in the future we will learn from multiple sources, from multiple people, from multiple information systems, and also from the past as well as current future. In that world we will also provide degrees not based on one single source: the university. But we will gather these fragments which happen in interactions online. When I'm going to one school, to one course, to one conference like LeWeb, or I'm blogging, whatever these different events are, someone could go through that and provide me some kind of evaluation for my future boss: "This guy has been really thinking about these things many years." It's not just what he's done and written down, and what kind of numbers you got in tests, but also what other people are saying about him. It's also about what other people say about you, what is your impact on the network, and how you manage to do that impact, that is going to get you forward.

Will We Need Degrees and Certificates? - Stephen Downes

Advertising Exchange: Ad Exchanges Open Up Your Ad Inventory To Real-Time Bidding - Best Ad Exchanges ReviewedJanuary 5

When ad networks alone are not enough to sell all of your ad inventory, ad exchanges step in to help you maximize the money you make. Put simply, ad exchanges work on the same idea as stock markets. They allow buyers to bid on your inventory, and the demand for your inventory determines the price at which you can sell it. Photo credit: Travel Aficionado edited by Andre Deutmeyer Making a living as an independent web publisher means that you have to do one thing very well: monetizing your content. Google AdSense is where most publishers start because it is easy to set up. But how do you do ensure that you are getting top dollar for your ad inventory? Joining a vertical ad network to sell your inventory is a good idea. But the problem with ad networks is that even if they are good, you will have a hard time selling 100% of your ad inventory all the time, and there is no easy way to know if you are getting the most you can out of your available ad inventory. Ad networks play an important role in bringi

Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Guide Jan 04 09January 4

Coordinating assignments and collaborating effectively on your projects can be a huge pain without the right tool. You need to have an efficient way to communicate, share notes, share documents, share files, and more in order to work together effectively and maximize productivity. Photo credit: Irochka edited by Andre Deutmeyer Here for you today I have selected a set of interesting new tools that bring all those features together into one easy to use interface as well as a new innovative independent platform for teaching and learning. In today's issue of the Sharewood Guide, I have brought together eight new hot online collaboration tools. From new Skype alternatives to file sharing services, the online collaboration tools showcased here today were selected with one thing in mind: to make your job easier by facilitating communication and information exchange between you and your team. This is my list of selected online collaboration tools for this week:

• WizIQ - independent online learning and teaching platform integrates audio and video
• Collanos - provides a free project management platform for you and your team
• Broadchoice - enterprise level project management platform that offers a free 30 day trial
• eLecture - a

Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens - Jan 3 09January 3

In this first 2009 issue of Media Literacy digest George Siemens focuses on cloud computing, connections in social networks, changes in education, and on a cool resource for education technology-related conferences. Photo credit: Cyprien Lomas And to make 2009 an opportunity for personal change and innovation, George Siemens has decided to experiment a new way of dealing with his everyday tech life by embracing the cloud computing lifestyle. What does that mean? Cloud computing is a way of referring to using software and data that do not reside locally on your computer, but which reside on public commercial services accessible from anywhere you have an Internet connection. So, no need to be confined to your own machine to access your data, you just can use any computer connected to the Internet et voilà, you're set. The jump to cloud computing is often much smaller than one would think as many have already adopted web-based software and tools which are now integral part of their workflow. Take Gmail, Flickr or YouTube; both the software and the data in these cases are all in the cloud.