Alec Couros. Howard Rheingold (hrheingold) Daniel Pink | NYT and WSJ Bestselling Author of Drive. Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation. Larry Lessig: Laws that choke creativity. Lessig (lessig) Lessig.org. Sir Ken Robinson: Transform Education? Yes, We Must. As the new members of 111th Congress wander through the building looking for their desks and lockers, it may feel for some of them like the first day at school. They should hold on to that feeling. One of the biggest challenges they face is sorting out American education. Given the recession, the dire situation in the Middle East and the general state of the planet, education is probably not at the top of their to-do list.
It must be soon. Transforming education has to be at the root of everything the new administration hopes to achieve, and nothing it does in the short term will be sustainable otherwise. President-elect Obama swayed the nation on a promise of change and the renewal of the American Dream. All of this is the work of education. My family and I moved to America almost eight years ago. President-elect Obama has said that NCLB was well intentioned, and it was. I said that the premise of the act is flawed. Ken Robinson | Profile on TED.com. Stephen downes, Researcher at National research council canada | SlideShare. George Siemens. George Siemens - Connectivism: Socializing Open Learning. George Siemens. Clay Shirky | Profile on TED.com. Dave cormier (davecormier) Dave's Educational Blog. Dave cormier - Google Scholar Citations. Downes (Downes) Stephen Downes. Stephen Downes: Fairness and Equity in Education.
The Idea of Fairness If we were asking questions of the children in a classroom, we wouldn't ask just one person over and over, right? We would want to spread the questioning around. Or if we were running a class debate, we wouldn't let just one student speak for the entire session, right? We would want to ensure that a number of different voices were heard. We wouldn't design our tests so that only one person could pass. We wouldn't organize our library so that books were only available to one student. In a social endeavour like learning, there is a principle of equity at work.
There is growing recognition that there might be something to this principle. The United States came out only in the middle of the PISA rankings. As the PISA authors noted, poverty itself wasn't the problem. All of that said, while it is all very well to appeal to some sort of principle of fairness, the fact remains that there is no widely accepted economy of fairness. Network stability and network death. Stephen's Web ~ Stephen's Web. Diane Ravitch's blog. Diane Ravitch (DianeRavitch) Alfie Kohn Homepage. Marc Prensky.
Marc Prensky (marcprensky)