למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

Now, in a little-noticed interview, Friedman actually went on record admitting he advocates for specific trade deals without knowing anything about what’s in the trade deals he is writing about.

David Sirota reports on Tom Friedman's shocking admission that he often writes about trade policy proposals that he knows nothing about. Sirota writes, "... what’s truly astonishing is that Tom Friedman, the person who the media most relies on to interpret trade policy, now publicly runs around admitting he actually knows nothing at all about the trade pacts he pushes in his New York Times column." After reading this article, I can't help but wonder how often we, as teachers, teach something that we know very little about beyond superficialities.

Globalization will flow through the conduit of collaborative tools and new ways of communicating (as in new theories of communication) - both domains in which many educators have already accumulated five plus years experience. Perhaps it is also time to rethink what it means to educate? Maybe educators should be more like connection-makers, and less like content deliverers.

In many cases, students communicate more, construct original content more, and more often collaborate virtually with other people, than do their teachers. Those teachers who pretend to stand on higher ground, appear, to many of their students, to be standing on quicksand.

I wax hyperbole, but the point is that our times require a different kind of classroom, one that can no longer rely on gravity. We must invent a perpetual learning engine.

I hope to spend the next couple of weeks talking through some ideas concerning a flat classroom learning engine, most of which I am still forming. But I would like to begin with a list of characteristics for students in a flat classroom learning engine.

    Curious
    Self Directed Learners
    Intrinsic need to communicate
    Intrinsic need to influence
    Future Oriented
    Heritage Grounded

The keynote by Marco Torres was phenomenal I thought. And I loved the message, which was basically to tell educators that we have tools now that just about every type of learner can flourish with, and we need only to find the creativity within us to make it happen. The examples of student work he showed were nothing short of amazing, and worth sharing to every educator audience out there. His kids come from the most undereducated and poverty stricken areas of LA and yet they are succeeding in multimedia. The big question that we’re going to have to deal with is whether we can teach the fundamental literacies through the media that kids are most motivated and driven by.

Out of curiosity, I’ve done a quick search of the conference program for sessions using some Web-two-point-O’esque terms. Here’s what I found (in parentheses is the number of sessions in last year’s program):
Blog — 35 sessions (15)
Podcast — 31 sessions (3)
RSS — 6 sessions (4)
wiki — 10 sessions (2)

While I'm sure I will enjoy NECC this week in San Diego, it sounds like what is going on in Aspen will be a whole lot more interesting...

What did you read in order to write this blog entry?
What do you think is important about your blog entry?
What are both sides of your issue?
What do you want your readers to know, believe, or do?
What else do you need to say?

These questions assume that blogging is seen as a practice of literacy, accessing, processing, and communicating information. They also serve to help the writer to focus on the broader aspects of the issues being written about, exploring all sides and perspectives, and even exploring the next phase of the communication.