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

A Baker's Half-Dozen

Flickr CC Photo by Lesleyk

"If you're not astonishing the kids, they won't be astonishing you back!"

 -- Stephen Heppell

"The slow adoption of digital textbooks by students doesn’t necessarily mean that textbooks will be the last bastion of print. But it does highlight the ways in which students’ needs aren’t being met yet by digital content providers. That means there’s still a huge opportunity here to reshape what the textbooks of the future look like. Openly licensed content, for example, could address students’ concerns about sharing. Better social tools could help meet their needs for social reading and learning. Open educational resources could provide free content, while an iTunes model of sorts — one that sold the “song” (or rather the chapter) rather than the “album” (the whole book) could save students money." -- Audrey Watters

 "I sense in the dismissal of digital technology not just nostalgia but a firm idea that these people — African Americans, gays, women, Anthony Weiner, theater people, the 'perverts' on Twitter — should not be making culture."--Virginia Heffernan-

In case you haven’t noticed, lots of people want to “blow up education” right now. And the monied interests are going to have much to say about which direction education takes from here. I know I’m sounding like a broken MP3 here, but the question once again is whether or not the focus moving forward will be on learning or test taking. --  Will Richardson

If a student is passionate about a topic, doesn’t it make sense to have that student study, really study, professionals who who are also passionate? -- Jackie Gerstein, Ed.D.

Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.” 

-- C.S. Lewis (via Colleen Rozman)