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

Eight Quotes about Learning

”if you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” – Woody Allen

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” —Adolf Berle

“Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.” —Noam Chomsky

"Assessment should be a continuous feedback loop, one that is integrated into the learning process, and where the feedback improves the competency of the learner. Assessments should be used as opportunities to develop competencies and the related sense of achievement." -- Jackie Gerstein, EdD

"Learning is the creation and removal of connections between the entities, or the adjustment of the strengths of those connections." -- Stephen Downes

"A sense that e-mail and texting are “poor writing” is analogous, then, to one that the Rolling Stones produce “bad music” because they don’t use violas. Note that one cannot speak capital letters or punctuation. If we accept e-mail and texting as a new way of talking, then their casualness with matters of case and commas is not only expected but unexceptionable." -- John McWhorter

You hav 2 disrupt something to move forward. eg Youtube disrupted MTV. 1:1 disrupting teacher as knowledge controller -- Dorothy Burt

"The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." - Cicero”

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Creativ Commons Photo of Cicero bust by art moose

And I Quote . . . .

When we make our learning transparent, we become teachers.

~George Siemens

 But the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level.

~Walter Russell 

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.

~Thomas Edison

Stay ahead of the Culture by creating the culture.

~Hugh MacLeod

We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.

~Stephen Downes

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  

~Sydney J. Harris

If you want to know who’s doing the parenting part right, start with immigrants, who know that learning is the way up. Last week, the 32 winners of Rhodes Scholarships for 2011 were announced — America’s top college grads. Here are half the names on that list: Mark Jia, Aakash Shah, Zujaja Tauqeer, Tracy Yang, William Zeng, Daniel Lage, Ye Jin Kang, Baltazar Zavala, Esther Uduehi, Prerna Nadathur, Priya Sury, Anna Alekeyeva, Fatima Sabar, Renugan Raidoo, Jennifer Lai, Varun Sivaram.
Do you see a pattern?

 ~Thomas Friedman

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"George Simens" Flickr CC Photo by Stephen Downes