A visit to Wooranna Park Primary School in Melbourne shows what it looks like when students truly drive the learning—from designing their own spaces and curriculum themes to running a parliament-style school government and creating original performances, all grounded in inquiry and a belief that learning is nonlinear and self-directed.

This will probably be our last post of 2007, and while we’ve been doing some looking back, our brains have been taking us more into what next year might be like. Our thinking has been framed by Clay Burrell, Doc Searles, and a conversation with a friend, and it has us dreaming about new learning models grounded in passion, small connected groups, and the Live Web—where learning, not grades or tests, is at the heart of everything.

We spent a day in a workshop on the future of teaching, exploring how “learning agents” might work in schools that look very different from today’s. The discussion focused on new roles centered on facilitation, connection, and collaboration rather than traditional classroom teaching, and on the pressures that might drive long-term change in education.

Reflecting on our daughter’s fascination with doll web sites, we think about “social networking with training wheels,” the commercial aspects of kids’ virtual worlds, and how much time children should spend navigating online spaces alongside their offline play.

We’re blog stuck, wrestling with whether “school” itself limits how we think about learning, especially as education increasingly moves beyond physical classrooms.

Since we’ve decided to blow out our aggregator and start over because there’s too much information swirling around and this blog is doing a horrible job of capturing it, it’s time to play: Sunday Caption Contest.

We’ve been growing more frustrated lately and we’re feeling more pessimistic about the prospects for any serious change in how we as an education system see teaching and learning, and we think we’ve figured out why.