A Baker's Dozen Quotes

Creative Commons photo by Sundar1

"I often grapple with the question: 'if we designed education today, what would it look like?'. Would it look like our existing classrooms? Textbooks? Libraries? Or would it look more like the internet? What roles would teachers play? Or learners? What would 'teaching' look like if we had a system that jettisoned the legacy baggage of our current education system?" - George Siemens


"The understanding of the importance of motivation and persistence is growing every day – but not within school." - Yvonne Roberts

"There’s a difference between the kind of problems that companies, institutions, and governments are able to solve and the ones that they need to solve. Most big organizations are good at solving clear but complicated problems. They’re absolutely horrible at solving ambiguous problems–when you don’t know what you don’t know. Faced with ambiguity, their gears grind to a halt (sounds like the current educational system)." - Jackie Gerstein

"There's something unnerving about how much I depend upon one corporation in order to function in this world. I still have a voice, but I'm willingly filtering it through the white noise of Google, hoping that when they claim "don't be evil" as a mantra, they'll stick to it." - John T. Spencer


"While 'technology will replace teachers' seems like a silly argument to make, one need only look at the state of most school budgets and know that something’s got to give. And lately, that something looks like teachers’ jobs, particularly to those on the receiving end of pink slips . . . . . we are laying off teachers in mass numbers. Teachers know their jobs are on the line, something that’s incredibly demoralizing for a profession already struggles mightily to retain qualified people." - Audrey Watters


"I have books on my bookshelf that I've owned across several computing platforms coming and going. I LOVE the idea of having all my books with me, and not having to box and move them, and to be able to search, etc. But, books aren't a 'throw away' item to me, so another thing Apple really needs to consider is how to ensure books I buy are still going to be useable to me after the iPad and OSX have moved on as well." - Steve Wilkinson


"China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed." - New York Times editorial