Take Out from the Opinion Drive-thru

Shelly Blake-Plock

 "Luckily, we are living at a time when teachers have more ladders available to them to pursue their work in education than perhaps at anytime in the last hundred+ years -- from collaborative community based art projects to social entrepreneurship to the design of new technologies to the dreaming up of new programs that challenge the traditional barriers of time and geography and that will effect a real future."--Shelly Blake-Plock


"The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledege tailored to a new situation, in real time." -- Will Richardson


Richard Vedder, an Ohio University economics professor who heads the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, notes that while we may have replaced millions of filing clerks and payroll assistants with computers, it still takes one professor to teach a class. But he also notes that “we’ve been slow to adopt new technology because we don’t want to. We like getting up in front of 25 people. It’s more fun, but it’s also damnably expensive.” (Megan McArdle)

"We must develop the educational system outside the traditional system because the traditional system is designed to support the position of the wealthy and powerful. Everything about it - from the limitation of access, to the employment of financial barriers, to the creation of exclusive institutions and private clubs, to the system of measuring impact and performance according to economic criteria, serves to support that model. Reforming the educational system isn't about opening the doors of Harvard or MIT or Cambridge to everyone - it's about making access to these institutions irrelevant. About making them an anachronism, like a symphony orchestra, or a gentleman's club, or a whites only golf course, and replaced with something we own and build for everyone, like punk music, a skateboard park, or the public park".  -- Stephen Downes

"The truth is, if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you’re engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules. That’s not a bumper sticker, but we terribly mislead people by saying otherwise." -- Thomas Friedman

“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.” - - C.S. Lewis