When Are We Going to Stop Giving Kids Tests That They Can Cheat On? We’re just askin’…

Reflections on Clay Shirky’s "Here Comes Everybody," the changing role of institutions like schools in an age of easy group forming, and why we need to rethink information, assessment, and our own assumptions in the midst of an epochal change.

We reflect on a recent post about 21st Century Skills for Teachers that drew 130+ comments and trackbacks, what that says about a growing, more connected network, the upsides and downsides of such intense participation, and the many new voices that joined the conversation.

We left the ThirteenCelebration conference inspired by powerful speakers yet deeply concerned that many education reform leaders lack real engagement with networked, Read/Write Web learning. Until we focus urgently on building 21st-century skills for educators—and expect them to publish, converse, and model connected learning—we’ll struggle to take calls for 21st-century skills for kids seriously.

We’ve been watching the flow of content coming out of Illinois, and it’s obvious we’ve reached a tipping point in how conference ideas escape the ballroom and reach the world. Here’s our tongue-in-cheek checklist for the ultimate, hyper-connected conference attendee.

Paul Allison shared an NCTE update that pushes us to think more expansively about literacy in the 21st century, emphasizing multiple, dynamic, and malleable literacies shaped by technology and connectivity.

We explore what we can reasonably assume about our kids’ futures and how that should reshape curriculum and practice: they’ll need to be networked, collaborative, globally aware, less dependent on paper, more active, fluent in hypertext, more connected, and strong editors of information.

Interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by a 30-year English teacher at an Alexandria, Va. school that just spent $98 million on renovations and technologies that none of the teachers want to use.

School librarian Thomas Washington’s essay in the Christian Science Monitor argues that in an age of information overload, knowledge is less about acquiring more and more, and more about becoming proficient at tossing things out. We reflect on our own scanning-heavy reading habits, the guilt that comes with them, and the broader educator unease about what reading is becoming in a test-driven, information-saturated culture.

Reflecting on danah boyd’s distinction between social networks and social tools in schools, and why social networking sites themselves may not belong in classrooms even though social tools and network literacy do.