And I Quote . . . .

"In an age of specialization, are we destined to know more about less and less, or less about more and more?" -- Annie Murphy Paul

Leo Tolstoy (courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

"Most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as it would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions, which they have delighted in explaining to their colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven thread by thread into their own lives." -- Leo Tolstoy

"The iPhone ushered in an age of all Internet, all the time. For better or worse, it's blurred the lines between work and home lives, made communication a round-the-clock habit and led to a host of new rules about when and how it's appropriate to use smartphones (not while walking, driving, playing trivia or on a date, please)." -- Heather Kelly

"True openness requires data to be not only accessible, but also intelligible, assessable (who produced the data, what are their qualifications, do they have conflicts of interest?) and reusable." -- Geoffrey Boulton (by way of Will Richardson

"Each moment in a classroom is fleeting, precious and unique. But some moments set courses and shape a child's future." -- Sean Junnkins

"Anyone with a cellphone today is paparazzi; anyone with a Twitter account is a reporter; anyone with YouTube access is a filmmaker. When everyone is a paparazzi, reporter and filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure." --Thomas Friedman

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

Quick Take-out from the Drive-thru

"It is true that technology can be dirty. It is true that technology itself isn't going to fix our problems. Technology really isn't a "tool" anymore. Technology is a context. Context produces culture. This happened before back at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The context of industry produced all sorts of pollutions and evils; it also produced the medical revolution and eventually gave lift to the social mobility of the lower and middle classes to attend colleges and universities. In the end, it was the decisions people made that -- both for much better and much worse -- shaped the century that was."  -- Shelly Blake-Plock

"Take-out" by permission of americanvirus

If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up way too much space. -- Anonymous



When I look at my kids, I’m hoping to see entrepreneurs, ready to create and add value and be able to create a living on their guile and grit and passion. Not sure I see that yet. Hoping their mom and I will rub off on them.  But, their schools helpin’ them with that? Uh…notsomuch. They’re preparing them to work for someone else. After all, that’s what they do in class.
Will Richardson

I tend to think that the future of computing devices will be BYOD — Bring Your Own Device. It’ll be that way for businesses. It’ll be that way for schools . . . . But if that’s the case, then schools are going to have to look for digital content that is available across platform. That could mean looking for DRM-free resources, or at least for resources that aren’t restricted to one particular platform or file format. That could mean turning to Web apps over native apps." Audrey Watters

"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." John Cotton Dana



“The question that gets asked about technology, the one that is almost always precisely the wrong question is, “How does this advance help our business?  The correct question is, “how does this advance undermine our business model and require us/enable us to build a new one?”  Seth Godin

Six Short Education Quotes for Your Weekend

Jean Piaget

I think that human knowledge is essentially active.




Cathy Davidson (via Will Richardson):


Learning’ is the free and open source version of ‘education.




Overheard from a "Job Coach":


"Educators like to measure success in activities rather than results."




Gwendolyn Brooks:


A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.



John Dewey:


The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.


George Siemens:


When faced with learning in complex environments, what we need is something more like network-directed learning – learning that is shaped, influenced, and directed by how we are connected to others. Instead of sensemaking in isolation, we rely on social, technological, and informational networks to direct our activities.




Next week the Drive-thru will go on its twice-a-week summer schedule.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

A Baker's Half-Dozen Quotes

"half dozen farm eggs"  Flickr CC by bimurch

The future of Ed Tech is “Bring Your Own Device”, (BYOD), and schools will more than likely move away from providing devices for students sooner than later.  While BYOD is far too radical for many school districts at this time, it is inevitable that this is the future.  The sooner districts embrace this future and begin to plan for it, the more effective this transition will be.   -- Scott Meech


[The] web is the long slow death of the middleman. - Mike Wesch


Unfortunately, the vast majority of teachers are still waiting…for something. What is it? Permission? Direction? Inspiration? Enlightenment? - - Will Richardson


What makes the biggest impact in online classes I believe is how you cultivate a classroom community. Some teachers do that with synchronous tools such as Elluminate, others do that by having students get to know one another asynchronously. One of the best online teachers I know does weekly, if not daily 5 minute webcasts to update her students on how the class is going.   -- Bethany Smith


PowerPoint   . . may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch .  --  Edward Tufte


Information is no longer something humans seek – it is now starting to seek us. -- George Siemens

Today's Take-out from the Opinion Drive-thru

Today, I'm sharing quotes form three of my go-to sources:

Will Richardson

"We say we want our kids to be problem solvers, but all too often, when faced with the challenges of a changing educational landscape, we don’t offer solutions. Instead, we offer excuses as to why we shouldn’t solve the problem, why it’s better to just keep on keepin’ on. And solving these problems is getting easier and easier, actually, as more and more schools have already done the heavy lifting to find and implement solutions. It’s not like anyone needs to reinvent the wheel any more. And it’s also not like you need a solution overnight, either. Frame the problem, create a timeline and a process, and have at it. If you had say, two years, is there really NO way to solve that access problem?"

Shelly Blake-Plock

(About homework) "The key is in having kids do things outside of class that will complement or drive things within class; problem is that too often homework not only fails to do this, but in fact instills bad habits and resentment towards school in general. As the school-day itself is gradually redefined over the course of the next decade, I do think however that our concept of what exactly homework is will change."

Chip Heath and Dan Heath

"Many leaders pride themselves on setting high-level direction: I'll set the vision and stay out of the details. It is true that a compelling vision is critical . . . . But it is no enough. Big-picture, hands off leadership isn't likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of the change-- the paralyzing part-- is precisely in the details."

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

Disruption Versus Inertia

Katie Hafner

Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.

George Siemens

Absent someone being assigned the explicit role of thinking about innovation, most of us spend our time doing our work. And the daily drubbing drives out creativity to reflect on what we could do differently, what we could do better. Which is why we need an explicit focus on innovating the system itself.

2010 Horizon Report
Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools.

Tony Wagner
Virtually all forms of work in American life today, are based to some extent, on team structures-- all work, that is, except in education.

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"113 - Puzzle Texture" Flickr CC Photo by Patrick Hoesly