From the “Shameless Self-Promotion Dept” comes this new book 21st Century Skills: Rethinking How Students Learn published by Solution Tree and featuring a chapter that I wrote titled “Navigating Social Networks as Learning Tools.” I have to say it’s pretty humbling to be in the company of Linda Darling-Hammond, Howard Gardner, Chris Dede, Andy Hargreaves and others in trying to frame a new narrative around student learning with technology. (You can get a couple of sample chapters, the table of contents an more here.) I’ve only had the chance to skim through it since it came in the mail today, but I’m hoping to read through much of it in the next week or so. (Wish I could port it over to my iPad. ;0) )

Here is the gist of my chapter:

One thing is certain: although schools may continue to fundamentally look and act as they have for more than one hundred years, the way individuals learn has already been forever changed. Instead of learning from others who have the credentials to “teach” in this new networked world, we learn with others whom we seek (and who seek us) on our own and with whom we often share nothing more than a passion for knowing. In this global community, we are at once all teachers and learners—changing roles as required, contributing, collaborating, and maybe even working together to re-create the world, regardless of where we are at any given moment.

These learning transactions require a shifted understanding of traditional literacies and the skills they employ, as well as new literacies and practices that learning in networks and online social communities demands. For educators, acquiring these network literacies is a crucial first step in developing new pedagogies and, in turn, new classrooms and curricula that prepare students for the future.

Looking forward to diving in to what looks like some interesting thinking about change.

In response to this comic posted in one of our PLP communities, I left this [somewhat edited] reply:

May come as a surprise, but I continue to be skeptical of Twitter as a “conversation” platform.  From a sharing and finding resources standpoint, I totally get it. Depending on who you follow, it can be a great, great way of finding great videos, articles, news, artifacts, etc. And from the occasional back and forth social banter point of view, ok, I get that too. But I continue to find myself impatient with the extended attempts at conversation. For example, I just cannot do #edchat type of stuff due to how disjointed it feels. And frankly, there is a missing depth to any back and forth on Twitter which 140 characters just can’t convey. I wonder that if we make 140 characters the main part of the way we communicate with one another without spending some of our time in more extended give and take that we will be losing something important in the process. Is Twitter really that powerful, or is it more an easy way to enter into the “conversation,” one that doesn’t require as much time and thought and therefore allows us to check the “connected” box but leave the more difficult, more time consuming participation at the door?

Just questions. Bracing for the replies… ;0)

I’m choosing not to follow the flow as much these days. I’m posting and sharing using BigTweet, and I’m mining Tweets through search feeds, but I’m not spending nearly as much time in TweetDeck as I did in the past. Not saying I never stop by, but I’m going there less and less.

In Linchpin, Seth Godin asked “Where did your art go while you were Tweeting?”(134) And I’ve been wondering the same thing. Is Twitter our art? Really?

Release the Twounds. ;0)

So, let me say at the outset that I love books. All my life, I’ve been a reader of books. I have at least 1,000 of them in my home (on shelves, in stacks on the floor, in boxes in the basement.) I have books of every type; novels, non-fiction, story books, picture books and more. Life feels better when I’m surrounded by books.

And I love the fact that my kids love books, that Tucker spent an hour at the public library yesterday, gliding through the stacks, pulling books down, sitting cross legged on the floor, testing them out, that the first thing Tess wanted to do when we moved last fall was organize her books. I totally understand why living in a house full of books is worth upwards of like three grades of literacy in school schooling.

So, with that bit of context, let me try to explain how my book loving brain got really, seriously rocked the other day, rocked to the point where I’m wondering how many more paper books I might accumulate in my life.

Last year, I put the Kindle app on my iPhone and downloaded a couple of books to read. I was surprised in that the experience actually wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The first book, a great novel by Anita Shreve, was not much different from reading on paper. The story flew by, and other than being surprised when I got to the end (because I didn’t know how many pages I had left to go) it was a great reading experience. But non-fiction wasn’t so great. If you look at most of the non-fiction books in my library, you’ll see they’re totally marked up, underlined, annotated and messy. It’s the way I attempt to cement in those most important points, and it helps me recall the good stuff in a book more easily. On the Kindle, I could highlight, and take a note, but it just wasn’t as useful. The notes were hard to find, and the highlights just weren’t feeling as sticky. I wasn’t impressed; in fact, it was frustrating.

Last week, when I downloaded my first book to my shiny new iPad, things improved. The larger screen made a big difference, creating highlights and typing in reflective notes was a breeze, but I was still feeling the same frustration with the limitations; just because the pages were bigger didn’t mean the notes left behind were any easier to find, and stuff just felt too disjointed. I kept searching for a way to copy and paste sections of the book out into Evernote, albeit a clunky process on the iPad, but still worth it if I could make my notes digital (i.e. searchable, remixable, etc.) My searches didn’t come up with anything, and I finally turned to Twitter and asked the question there. Ted Bongiovanni (@teddyb109) came to the rescue:

@willrich45 - re: iPad Kindle cut and paste, sort of. You can highlight, and then grab them from kindle.amazon.com #iPad #kindle

Turns out my iPad Kindle app syncs up all of my highlights and notes to my Amazon account. Who knew? When I finally got to the page Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every highlight and every note that I had taken on my Kindle version of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sudden, by reading the book electronically as opposed to in print, I now have:

• all of the most relevant, thought-provoking passages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own condensed version of just the best pieces
• all of my notes and reflections attached to those individual notes
• the ability to copy and paste all of those notes and highlights into Evernote which makes them searchable, editable, organizable, connectable and remixable
• the ability to access my book notes and highlights from anywhere I have an Internet connection.

Game. Changer.

I keep thinking, what if I had every note and highlight that I had ever taken in a paper book available to search through, to connect with other similar ideas from other books, to synthesize electronically? It reminds me of the Kevin Kelly quote that I share from time to time in my presentations, the one from the New York Times magazine in 2006 titled “Scan This Book“:

Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

And I also keep thinking about what changes now? How does my note taking in books change? (Do I start using tags and keywords along with adding my reflections?) Now that I can post my notes and highlights publicly, what copyright ramifications are there? How might others find that useful? And the biggest question, do I buy any more paper books?

I know others might not find this earth shattering, but this is a pretty heady shift for me right now, one that is definitely disrupting my worldview. And it’s, as always, making think of the implications for my kids. What if they could export out the notes from their own texts, store them, search them, share them? Yikes.

I’m sure I’ll be reflecting on it more as it all plays out.

From Pull, by John Seeley Brown, John Hagel III, and Lang Davison:

The institutional changes ahead will be quite different. These changes will be driven by passionate individuals distributed throughout and even outside the institution, supported by institutional leaders who understand the need for change but who also realize that this wave of change cannot be imposed from the top down. The new institutional model will involve a complete refocusing: Rather than molding individuals to fit the needs of the institution, institutions will be shaped to provide platforms to help individuals achieve their full potential by connecting with others and better addressing challenging performance needs (Location 150, Kindle version). [Emphasis mine.]

Love that part about the “complete refocusing” because it resonates so much with a lot of the other stuff I’ve been reading and thinking. But the part I’m really diving into is that last, the idea of schools providing platforms to help students achieve their full potential through connecting with others. What if we spent the bulk of our planning and visioning conversations in schools around just that one thought?

Great read so far.

[Sidenote(s): How do I cite a quote from a Kindle? And for those of you who, like me, are frustrated by the inability to copy and paste on the Kindle, you can always go to the synced up reading notes and highlights that you've taken when logged in at kindle.amazon.com/kindle/list. Just click on the title. Thanks to Ted Bongiovanni for that little piece of assistance.]

A quick observation:

Invariably, one of the concerns that educators raise when going down the social technology conversation any length is the “balance” issue, as in we need to maintain a balance between our online and offline lives. The concern is usually raised in the context of too many kids are out of balance, spending too much time on the computer and not enough time engaged in skinning their knees or having face to face interactions with real live humans that will let them practice the important social skills that they are in the process of losing. As a parent, I hear that. Many are usually shocked to find out that I limit the amount of time my kids can just surf around on the Web and play games or update their Facebook pages or watch silly YouTube videos. They’re 10 and 12, and at that age, and especially now that the weather is warming up, I want them out and about, shooting hoops, jumping on the trampoline, riding their bikes, building forts, helping to mulch the garden (fat chance) and having “fun”. That’s our parenting choice, and I’m in no way saying it’s the only choice or the right choice for every kid or whatever. It’s just the way we’ve decided to approach it. They get their share of time online, and they can negotiate for more if they are doing something creative or productive. But by and large that’s what “balance” is for them.

And let me just say that I struggle with the balance thing in my own life as well. I go through phases where I definitely spend too much time on the computer. (Just ask my wife.) I’m currently in one of my stepping back modes, not playing as much on Twitter, trying to spend more time reading and writing deeply instead of in 140 characters (as evidenced by the recent spurt of posts here.) Plus I’ve got basketball practices and games to drive kids to, grass to cut, etc. Sometimes, balance is forced upon you.

But here is the thing: the reality is that most of those folks who are concerned about kids needing balance are out of balance themselves, just in the opposite way. They’re not online enough, not reading, writing, participating, connecting and creating in these spaces as much as they need to be to fully understand the implications of these technologies for their own learning and for the kids in their classrooms. Lately, when I’ve been responding to people about the “balance” question, I go with “well, actually, you’re out of balance too, you know.” I get this kind of stunned silence. What a concept.

I’m all for balance, but if we’re going to make that a “concern” around technology use, let’s be willing to admit that it goes both ways.

A few months ago Tom Barrett put out a request via Twitter and other places to English schools to co-create a list of what tools are being blocked in which schools across the country. He offered up a spreadsheet for that purpose that attempted to gather that data that got about 25 responses. At the time, I thought it was an interesting idea, and when I heard Jay Rosen’s great talk about  at TedxNYED, I started thinking about how it might be interesting to take Tom’s idea and collect and pool what we know about our approach to filtering on a more global scale and try to make some sense of it collaboratively. What do we block, and where do we block it? And, more importantly, why?

So, here is an attempt to do that. I’ve put up a Google Map where anyone who wants to participate can take a few minutes to add a pin where their school is and add some data about the extent to which they filter. To make it easy to get a visual sense of what the filter looks like around the world, I’m suggesting participants use a green pin for open, yellow for somewhat open, or red for mostly closed. Certainly, those are loose interpretations, but I’m hoping they might highlight some patterns based on geography or politics or culture. I’m also hoping people will be willing to add some context to their level of filtering. Why do you block what you block? Who blocks it? Who can unblock it?

The steps are simple:

• Go to the Map Page
• Login to Google
• Click on “Edit” at the top right of the left hand information pane
• Click on the pin icon at the top left of the map
• Zoom in on the map and place the pin on top of your school site
• Add the name of your school to the dialog box that pops up
• Briefly list what is blocked
• Add any context or interesting info that might be of value
• Click on the pin in the upper right of the dialog box and change the color to either red, yellow or green
• Click OK
• Click on “Done” at the top right of the left hand information pane

A couple of thoughts. First, for this to scale, it will take the spreading capabilities of the network to get the word out. So if you want to participate, please tweet, retweet and spread the word. Second, if this works, it might be interesting to think about what other types of information we can begin to gather at scale. Jay, in his presentation, mentioned knowing what effects NCLB had on students and schools across the country. Maybe, if this works as proof of concept, we can begin to paint a clearer, more accessible picture of what education and learning looks like around the world. Finally, I’m open to suggestions as to tweaks on this particular effort around filtering and blocking, as well as looking for ideas as to what to do with whatever data we collect.

Enjoy!

View What Does Your School Block? in a larger map

The New York Times has its Education Life section out today, and one of the main pieces is titled “An Open Mind,” an article that takes an interesting look at the impact of open educational resources since the advent of MIT OpenCourseWare 10 years ago now. It’s a pretty balanced read, one that makes clear the potential of passion-based, DIY learning, but also gives fair treatment to the difficulties that go along with it, especially if we’re looking to get something more than just a bit more knowledge in the process. For instance, will OER “lead to success in higher education, particularly among low-income students and those who are first in their family to go to college?” Certainly, access to all of these courses (which obviously vary in quality and relevance) may be a boon to third world learners whose only desire may be to pursue learning. But for those looking to credentialize the experience in some way, very few grades are  in the offing.

It’s been a current here of late, but that whole “how do we credentialize informal learning” question has been really tweaking my brain quite a bit. As always, I wonder about this in the context of my own children, trying to imagine ways that they might begin to build something other than a diploma that might showcase their expertise in the same ways that a piece of paper might. Tall order, I know, and probably not doable in the short window that they have (10-15 years). But interesting nonetheless, especially when I read quotes like this one from Neeru Paharia, one of the  founders of Peer 2 Peer University:

She likes to talk about signals, a concept borrowed from economics. “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio. “We live in a new society,” Ms. Paharia says. “People are mobile. We have the Internet. We don’t necessarily need to work within the confines of what defines a traditional education.”

Right now, that is “radical” thinking, but it’s provocative nonetheless. That “signals” piece is exactly where a lot of my own thinking and reading has been centered of late. And while this is about higher ed, a shift like that obviously has big implications for K-12. Not only is it about how we prepare our kids to learn more effectively in informal environments around the things they are passionate about, but also how we help them begin to build those portfolios of work that have real world applications, that can be used to highlight their learning and their ability to learn throughout their lives. I mean how, right now, are schools helping students be self-directed participants in their own learning who are able to share openly the learning they do and connect with others to pursue that learning even further?

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t continue to help our kids aspire to college, especially in the near term. One-third of our kids are still going to get college degrees, and many others will go down that road even though they won’t finish. But when we consider the growing scale of  collaborative study with experts that they are going to be able to do in their lives, we need to help them aspire to that as well, right?

For quite some time now, I’ve been holding up the NCTE definition of reading and writing literacy in the 21st Century and asking educators to measure themselves against it, and every time I read the “Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts” I felt a pang of hypocrisy…I just haven’t gone there much, especially in terms of creation. So, one of my goals for this year is to play more with multimedia, and yesterday, I finally dove into iMovie to make my first real “movie” project. It’s amazing software, and while I know this doesn’t count as a “digital story” or anything especially creative, it’s a start.

The subject is the use of the iPad with young kids, and my friend Warren Buckleitner (whos latest piece on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog is worth the read) is as much of an expert as you’re going to find on the subject. He’s an educator, he’s been immersed in children’s software for over  a decade, and his Children’s Software Review is the industry standard. So here’s an 8-minute or so conversation about what the iPad means for our youngest learners. Enjoy.

So it was my great honor to serve on the 2010 K-12 Horizon Project Advisory Board this year, and “our” report was released a couple of days ago. If you want another piece to add to your “compelling case for change” argument, it’s worthy of your consideration. Obviously, I’m hoping you’ll read the whole thing, but I wanted to pick out some of the pieces that I find particularly thought-provoking.

I’ve used parts of past “key trends” listed in the report in my presentations, and some of this year’s are continuations of year’s past. But there are two parts of this year’s trends that I want to highlight:

• There is increasing interest in just-in-time, alternate, or non-formal avenues of education, such as online learning, mentoring, and independent study. More and more, the notion of the school as the seat of educational practice is changing as learners avail themselves of learning opportunities from other sources. There is a tremendous opportunity for schools to work hand-in-hand with alternate sources, to examine traditional approaches, and to reevaluate the content and experiences they are able to offer. [Italics mine]

• The way we think of learning environments is changing. Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools.

Both of these speak directly to the concepts that Leadbetter and Wong wrote about in the Cisco report I highlighted yesterday. These “radically new ways” of thinking about learning, while no where near mainstream, are unquestionably starting to bubble up, and as more and more people begin to step back from  the seemingly intractable equation that learning=schools, there will be more and more pressure on the system to change. And all of this makes me believe even more that sooner rather than later, we will see families with access and the means to do so opting out more and more from the traditional school structure.

The other piece of the report that I found most enlightening is the section on game-based learning. I’m not a gamer by any stretch (though I love RealRacingHD on my iPad…not a lot of real learning going on there, I know), but more and more I’m trying to get my head around the implications. One part of the narrative here that has me thinking deals with the ways in which we can seamlessly integrate educational content with game play:

What makes MMO games especially compelling and effective is the variety of sub-games or paths of engagement that are available to players — there are social aspects, large and small goals to work towards, often an interesting back story that sets the context, and more. Players dedicate enormous amounts of time on task pursuing the goals of these games. The problem that needs to be solved, and which is being tackled on many fronts today, is that of embedding educational content in such a way that it becomes a natural part of playing the game.

It’s just another way that we are starting to “radically” rethink learning, and I for one continue to find it a totally engaging conversation to follow. Hope you’ll join in.

From the “Must Read 2010 Department” comes this most excellent report I just came across (released a few months ago) from Charles Leadbetter and Annika Wong writing for Cisco about “Learning from the Extremes” (.pdf warning.) It’s an instructive look (at least to me) at what options we face when it comes to the new story we are building about learning. In a nutshell, the authors suggest four strategies: Improve the schools we already have, supplement the learning our kids already do, reinvent schools to make education more relevant, or transform “learning by making it available in radically new ways.” Here’s a graphic that sums it up pretty neatly.

While the first three efforts can have a positive effect, the authors make the compelling case that the bottom right is where the most of our efforts should be spent. Obviously, I’m suggesting you read the whole thing (about 40 pages), but here’s the gist of the argument:

• Improvement in our current schools, on its own, will not be enough to meet the growing and changing demands of governments, parents, and children.
• That is true in the established school systems of the developed world and in the much more recently created mass school systems in the developing world.
• Strategies that supplement and support learning at school by working with families and in communities—to change habits, culture, values and aspirations —will become increasingly important.
• However, in addition, education needs more powerful sources of disruptive innovation, to create different kinds of schools and to create alternatives to school—in other words, to create entirely new ways to learn.
• Disruptive innovation in education is too weak because state regulation, teacher union power, parental conservatism, and political micromanagement create high barriers to new entry. Creating diverse new ways for people to learn is still too difficult. Disruptive innovation needs more support and encouragement.
• A band of disruptive innovators is emerging from within school systems in many parts of the developing world. Yet radical innovation rarely comes from the mainstream. Most often it comes from renegades, mavericks, and outsiders working in the margins. This report focuses on a potent source of such innovation: social entrepreneurs promoting learning in the slums of the fast-growing cities of the developing world.
• These disruptive innovators are creating a new logic to learning that often does without traditional teachers, schools, classes, timetables, and exams.
• These approaches may emerge from the developing world, and may apply just as much in the developed world, especially where schools seem to be failing to crack ingrained cultures of low aspiration, ambition, and achievement, which are main causes of the underperformance of whole education systems.

Certainly, there are echoes of Clayton Christensen in terms of the disruptive innovation piece, and Jay Cross’s great thinking about informal learning, but Leadbetter and Wong take it all a step or ten further by suggesting that at the end of the day, transformation is more, a lot more, than having students take coursework online or pursue their own passions. They say that “transformational learning” will require “transformational innovation” to create “new ways to learn, new skills, in new ways, outside formal school.” I know what you’re thinking; that “transformation” word is way overused and watered down at this point. But I have to say, I don’t think they use the word lightly.

According to the authors, we face two huge challenges right now, one very few of us have a real context for, the other most of us can relate to.

Our biggest challenge is how to provide learning at scale to millions of poor people in places that are ill-served by traditional public services, including schools.

Perhaps the most intractable challenge is the failure of mass schooling to deliver on its promise of social mobility and economic improvement for significant numbers of children. After investing huge hopes in schools in the first half of the 20th century, educational under performance has become a perpetual source of anxiety in many advanced societies.

What I love about this piece is that they wade through a bevy of examples as they walk readers through each of the quadrants above, giving a clear vision of what improvement, reinvention, supplementing and transformation look like already in the world. And for me at least, the diversity of the examples, coming from third world as well as developed countries, is an eye opener. But I have to admit that I am most drawn to the discussion of how disruptive innovation can reinvent informal learning. They go into great depth about “social entrepreneurs” who are looking at ways to reframe learning, as in “learning as problem solving” (like real life problems) or “many places for learning,” “learning without teachers,” and “learning as production. This “new logic for learning” that these social entrepreneurs are compelling, for instance, making learning compelling and attractive instead of compulsory, promoting learning outside of schools, getting relevant information to learners so they can tackle the real problems in their lives instead of imparting a set curriculum, and using play as an organizational tool for learning instead of a respite from it. Really interesting stuff.

And here is the upshot: while much of this radical innovation is happening in the third world, the authors clearly suggest that transformation in the developed world with most likely stem from these efforts. Personally, I love the creativity, the flexibility, the passion and the relevance of many of the examples included. And while technology isn’t found in every example, it is an important piece.

To bring to life technology’s potential to enable learning, however, we will need a massive wave of social entrepreneurship, in both the developed and developing world. Without that, new technologies will remain trapped inside old institutions, the learning potentially untapped.

Definitely worth the read. As always, would love to hear your thoughts.

Let’s just start with this money quote from Michael Feldstein in a comment on the must read post by Jim Groom titled “Networked Study“:

It’s hard to change the culture of education without getting the kids before their thinking processes begin to ossify, but in order to do that, you have to contend with their parents who, however well-intended, didn’t have the benefit of the kind education you’re trying to provide their kids and often see it as more of a threat than an opportunity.

To me, that’s the most interesting piece of this conversation right now, how to move the parents’ perspective of the nascent, non-traditional models of education to one that really embraces the opportunities that online communities and networks are creating for meaningful learning. I know that when I talk about my aspirations for my own kids, and I start going down the road that the traditional college degree is only one of many options for them, that they may be able to cobble together a more meaningful education (depending on what they want to do) through travel and apprenticeships and self-directed experiences and not end up in mountains of debt, most respond with all sorts of reasons why not going to college is a risk, “especially in this job market.” (As if college grads are stepping into great jobs these days anyway.)

Here’s another quote that speaks to this idea, this time from Anya Kamenetz’s new book DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education:

I’ve had a number of parents tell me that as much as they truly believe the educational landscape is changing, it’s hard for them to sanction their own kids being a part of that change. “To some degree I lack the courage of my convictions…I’m developing very strong convictions that the existing system is fundamentally and probably irreparably broken, but I would not yet take my kids out of their school,” Albert Wenger at Union Square Ventures said. “It’s one thing to experiment by investing money in start-ups or reading books, and it’s another to experiment with your own children.”

There are so many levels to this from a parenting perspective that it’s hard to know where to begin. Most parents think their kids schools are doing just fine based on the assessment systems we currently have in place. Most parents see the traditional track from high school to college as success. Most parents are ok with “online courses” and can use them to check the technology box since they don’t radically disrupt the status quo. Most parents have no clue as to what that change they might be sensing really looks like. They don’t, as Jim Groom writes, see education as “the biggest sham going.”

Whoa.

The roll your own education “movement” is obviously not just a disruption to parents; it’s a threat to educators as well. The question of how to help them find opportunity here is one we’ll be struggling with for decades, no doubt.

But isn’t the bottom line here helping our kids take advantage of the opportunities? This comment by Michael Feldstein about how kids don’t have the ability to direct their own learning echoes the ridiculous expectations floated by Mark Bauerline in the Dumbest Generation, that somehow, these kids today are supposed to learn this all on their own:

It’s not like student-centered education was created by the edupunks. And yet, students fail to learn in these classes all the time. The high drop-out rate in community colleges reflects a lot of different factors, but on major one is surely that many students who go there do not have the skills to take charge of their own education, no matter how much you try to empower them. I have no been given reason to believe that the digital version of this approach will be wildly more successful than the analog version.

Is it any wonder they can’t “take charge of their own education” when that self-directed love of learning on their own was driven out of them by second grade, when no one has ever allowed them to or taught them how do that? And are we at the point where we can begin to give them reasons to believe? Are we? (In fairness, Feldstein accedes to this later in the thread.)

The irony here is obvious: right now, as it’s currently structured, traditional schooling is in many ways the threat, not the opportunity that many still see it as. How we make that message digestable to parents is, I think, the most interesting question of all. And how we do it in ways that don’t drive people to the edges but instead help them work in the messy middle and make sure we ultimately keep in mind what’s best for the care of our kids is the most challenging part of all. To that end, I love this quote from a recent must read Mark Pesce post:

There is no authority anywhere.  Either we do this ourselves, or it will not happen.  We have to look to ourselves, build the networks between ourselves, reach out and connect from ourselves, if we expect to be able to resist a culture which wants to turn the entire human world into candy.  This is not going to be easy; if it were, it would have happened by itself.  Nor is it instantaneous.  Nothing like this happens overnight.  Furthermore, it requires great persistence.  In the ideal situation, it begins at birth and continues on seamlessly until death.  In that sense, this connected educational field mirrors and is a reflection of our human social networks, the ones we form from our first moments of awareness.  But unlike that more ad-hoc network, this one has a specific intent: to bring the child into knowledge.

Yep.