"Measurement requires a standard unit, a recognized standard that can be objectively applied in a context. I can measure my bike ride to school in units of length. If I share that measurement with my colleague who also bikes to school, we can objectively determine who travels the greatest distance each day. What isn’t measurable is the peace that twenty minute ride brings to my day.

When it comes to measurement, learning fits into the same category as love, pain, anger, joy, and peace of mind. Learning can’t be objectively measured. There is no standard unit of measurement to apply to learning. A skill can be demonstrated, progress can be noted, understanding can be communicated and shared, but technically this evidence of learning isn’t measurable."

"I design the most beautiful products. Before scrolling down to the pictures, please read our Codes of Practice:

1. Wear the uniform
2. Think long term (like 30 years from now)
3. Build stories and languages, not things
4. Create your own universe (or join ours)
5. Collect samples
6. Be a sample for somebody else 
7. Look for loyalty, not for a skill set
8. Do not build utilitarian products. However, use them as a medium to express yourself
9. Do not exploit introverts — doesn't work long term. Learn to be an introvert yourself 
10. Travel more
11. Do not work for corporations. Old corporations were meaningful when their founders were alive, but now, they have outlived their relevancy. They exist only to keep their numbers growing
12. New corporations are no better. They have scaled up features, and today’s founders want hyper-growth for growth’s sake (it seems like every line of code, every feature deserves its own corporation — it sure doesn't)
13. So, fuck the corporations
14. Tell the truth (bullshit never works long term)
15. Study and research fashion
16. Your phone is a temporary feature — don’t spend your life on it (like you wouldn’t spend it on a fax machine)
17. Fuck likes, followers, fake lives, fake friends
18. Remake your environment. Build it for yourself, and people will come 
19. Only trust those who make things you love
20. Move to LA 
21. Don’t buy property
22. Don’t go to Mars (just yet)
23. Use only one font, just a few colors, and just a few shapes
24. Use spreadsheets, but only to map out 30 cells — one for each year of the rest of your life
25. The next three are the most important
26. The past doesn’t exist — don’t get stuck in it
27. Don’t go to Silicon Valley (it’s not for you if you’re still reading this)
28. Remind yourself daily: you and everyone you know will die
29. We must build the most beautiful things
30. We are 2046 kids"

[via Warren Ellis's Orbital Operations newsletter, 8 April 2018:

"LOT 2046 [https://www.lot2046.com/ ] continues to be magnificent. This is actually a really strong duffel bag. You just never know what you're going to get.

Incidentally, culture watchers, keep an eye on this - the LOT 2046 user-in-residence programme [https://www.lot2046.com/360/11/875c4f ]. This feels like a small start to a significant idea. Vadik thinks long-term. He once had the following Codes Of Practise list from his previous business on his personal website, preserved by the sainted Wayback Machine:"]

[Also here: https://medium.com/the-mission/the-joy-and-sorrow-of-rereading-holts-how-children-learn-ffb4f46485e9 ]

"Holt was an astute and brilliant observer of children. If he had studied some species of animal, instead of human children, we would call him a naturalist. He observed children in their natural, free, might I even say wild condition, where they were not being controlled by a teacher in a classroom or an experimenter in a laboratory. This is something that far too few developmental psychologists or educational researchers have done. He became close to and observed the children of his relatives and friends when they were playing and exploring, and he observed children in schools during breaks in their formal lessons. Through such observations, he came to certain profound conclusions about children's learning. Here is a summary of them, which I extracted from the pages of How Children Learn.

• Children don’t choose to learn in order to do things in the future. They choose to do right now what others in their world do, and through doing they learn.

Schools try to teach children skills and knowledge that may benefit them at some unknown time in the future. But children are interested in now, not the future. They want to do real things now. By doing what they want to do they also prepare themselves wonderfully for the future, but that is a side effect. This, I think, is the main insight of the book; most of the other ideas are more or less corollaries.

Children are brilliant learners because they don’t think of themselves as learning; they think of themselves as doing. They want to engage in whole, meaningful activities, like the activities they see around them, and they aren’t afraid to try. They want to walk, like other people do, but at first they aren’t good at it. So they keep trying, day after day, and their walking keeps getting better. They want to talk, like other people do, but at first they don’t know about the relationships of sounds to meanings. Their sentences come across to us as babbled nonsense, but in the child’s mind he or she is talking (as Holt suggests, on p 75). Improvement comes because the child attends to others’ talking, gradually picks up some of the repeated sounds and their meanings, and works them into his or her own utterances in increasingly appropriate ways.

As children grow older they continue to attend to others' activities around them and, in unpredictable ways at unpredictable times, choose those that they want to do and start doing them. Children start reading, because they see that others read, and if they are read to they discover that reading is a route to the enjoyment of stories. Children don’t become readers by first learning to read; they start right off by reading. They may read signs, which they recognize. They may recite, verbatim, the words in a memorized little book, as they turn the pages; or they may turn the pages of an unfamiliar book and say whatever comes to mind. We may not call that reading, but to the child it is reading. Over time, the child begins to recognize certain words, even in new contexts, and begins to infer the relationships between letters and sounds. In this way, the child’s reading improves.

Walking, talking, and reading are skills that pretty much everyone picks up in our culture because they are so prevalent. Other skills are picked up more selectively, by those who somehow become fascinated by them. Holt gives an example of a six-year-old girl who became interested in typing, with an electric typewriter (this was the 1960s). She would type fast, like the adults in her family, but without attention to the fact that the letters on the page were random. She would produce whole documents this way. Over time she began to realize that her documents differed from those of adults in that they were not readable, and then she began to pay attention to which keys she would strike and to the effect this had on the sheet of paper. She began to type very carefully rather than fast. Before long she was typing out readable statements.

You and I might say that the child is learning to walk, talk, read, or type; but from the child’s view that would be wrong. The child is walking with the very first step, talking with the first cooed or babbled utterance, reading with the first recognition of “stop” on a sign, and typing with the first striking of keys. The child isn’t learning to do these; he or she is doing them, right from the beginning, and in the process is getting better at them.

My colleague Kerry McDonald made this point very well recently in an essay about her young unschooled daughter who loves to bake (here). In Kerry’s words, “When people ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she responds breezily, ‘A baker, but I already am one.”

• Children go from whole to parts in their learning, not from parts to whole.

This clearly is a corollary of the point that children learn because they are motivated to do the things they see others do. They are, of course, motivated to do whole things, not pieces abstracted out of the whole. They are motivated to speak meaningful sentences, not phonemes. Nobody speaks phonemes. They are motivated to read interesting stories, not memorize grapheme-phoneme relationships or be drilled on sight words. As Holt points out repeatedly, one of our biggest mistakes in schools is to break tasks down into components and try to get children to practice the components isolated from the whole. In doing so we turn what would be meaningful and exciting into something meaningless and boring. Children pick up the components (e.g. grapheme-phoneme relationships) naturally, incidentally, as they go along in their exciting work of doing things that are real, meaningful, and whole.

• Children learn by making mistakes and then noticing and correcting their own mistakes.

Children are motivated not just to do what they see others do, but to do those things well. They are not afraid to do what they cannot yet do well, but they are not blind to the mismatches between their own performance and that of the experts they see around them. So, they start right off doing, but then, as they repeat what they did, they work at improving. In Holt’s words (p 34), “Very young children seem to have what could be called an instinct of Workmanship. We tend not to see it, because they are unskillful and their materials are crude. But watch the loving care with which a little child smooths off a sand cake or pats and shapes a mud pie.” And later (p 198), “When they are not bribed or bullied, they want to do whatever they are doing better than they did it before.”

We adult have a strong tendency to correct children, to point out their mistakes, in the belief that we are helping them learn. But when we do this, according to Holt, we are in effect belittling the child, telling the child that he or she isn't doing it right and we can do it better. We are causing the child to feel judged, and therefore anxious, thereby taking away some of his or her fearlessness about trying this or any other new activity. We may be causing the child to turn away from the very activity that we wanted to support. When a child first starts an activity, the child can’t worry about mistakes, because to do so would make it impossible to start. Only the child knows when he or she is ready to attend to mistakes and make corrections.

Holt points out that we don’t need to correct children, because they are very good at correcting themselves. They are continually trying to improve what they do, on their own schedules, in their own ways. As illustration, Holt described his observation of a little girl misreading certain words as she read a story aloud, but then she corrected her own mistakes in subsequent re-readings, as she figured out what made sense and what didn’t. In Holt’s words (p 140), “Left alone, not hurried, not made anxious, she was able to find and correct most of the mistakes herself.”

• Children may learn better by watching older children than by watching adults.

Holt points out that young children are well aware of the ways that they are not as competent as the adults around them, and this can be a source of shame and anxiety, even if the adults don't rub it in. He writes (p 123), “Parents who do everything well may not always be good examples for their children; sometimes such children feel, since they can never hope to be as good as their parents, there is no use in even trying.” This, he says, is why children may learn better by watching somewhat older children than by watching adults. As one example, he describes (p 182) how young boys naturally and efficiently improved their softball skills by observing somewhat older and more experienced boys, who were better than they but not so much better as to be out of reach. This observation fits very well with findings from my research on the value of age-mixed play (see here and here).

• Fantasy provides children the means to do and learn from activities that they can’t yet do in reality.

A number of psychologists, I included, have written about the cognitive value of fantasy, how it underlies the highest form of human thinking, hypothetical reasoning (e.g. here). But Holt brings us another insight about fantasy; it provides a means of “doing” what the child cannot do in reality. In his discussion of fantasy, Holt criticizes the view, held by Maria Montessori and some of her followers, that fantasy should be discouraged in children because it is escape from reality. Holt, in contrast, writes (p 228), “Children use fantasy not to get out of, but to get into, the real world.”

A little child can’t really drive a truck, but in fantasy he can be a truck driver. Through such fantasy he can learn a lot about trucks and even something about driving one as he makes his toy truck imitate what real trucks do. Holt points out that children playing fantasy … [more]

"Some variation of adaptive or personalized learning is rumoured to “disrupt” education in the near future. Adaptive courseware providers have received extensive funding and this emerging marketplace has been referred to as the “holy grail” of education (Jose Ferreira at an EdTech Innovation conference that I hosted in Calgary in 2013). The prospects are tantalizing: each student receiving personal guidance (from software) about what she should learn next and support provided (by the teacher) when warranted. Students, in theory, will learn more effectively and at a pace that matches their knowledge needs, ensuring that everyone masters the main concepts.

The software “learns” from the students and adapts the content to each student. End result? Better learning gains, less time spent on irrelevant content, less time spent on reviewing content that the student already knows, reduced costs, tutor support when needed, and so on. These are important benefits in being able to teach to the back row. While early results are somewhat muted (pdf), universities, foundations, and startups are diving in eagerly to grow the potential of new adaptive/personalized learning approaches.

Today’s technological version of adaptive learning is at least partly an instantiation of Keller’s Personalized System of Instruction. Like the Keller Plan, a weakness of today’s adaptive learning software is the heavy emphasis on content and curriculum. Through ongoing evaluation of learner knowledge levels, the software presents next step or adjacent knowledge that the learner should learn.

Content is the least stable and least valuable part of education. Reports continue to emphasize the automated future of work (pfdf). The skills needed by 2020 are process attributes and not product skills. Process attributes involve being able to work with others, think creatively, self-regulate, set goals, and solve complex challenges. Product skills, in contrast, involve the ability to do a technical skill or perform routine tasks (anything routine is at risk for automation).

This is where adaptive learning fails today: the future of work is about process attributes whereas the focus of adaptive learning is on product skills and low-level memorizable knowledge. I’ll take it a step further: today’s adaptive software robs learners of the development of the key attributes needed for continual learning – metacognitive, goal setting, and self-regulation – because it makes those decisions on behalf of the learner.

Here I’ll turn to a concept that my colleague Dragan Gasevic often emphasizes (we are current writing a paper on this, right Dragan?!): What we need to do today is create adaptive learners rather than adaptive learning. Our software should develop those attributes of learners that are required to function with ambiguity and complexity. The future of work and life requires creativity and innovation, coupled with integrative thinking and an ability to function in a state of continual flux.

Basically, we have to shift education from focusing mainly on the acquisition of knowledge (the central underpinning of most adaptive learning software today) to the development of learner states of being (affect, emotion, self-regulation, goal setting, and so on). Adaptive learners are central to the future of work and society, whereas adaptive learning is more an attempt to make more efficient a system of learning that is no longer needed."

"I found the following diagram recently and I thought it was interesting: Unfortunately the source is a single book titled “Restructuring for Caring and Effective Education: Piecing the Puzzle Together” that contains a chapter by Knoster, Villa and Thousand. Apparently nobody quotes the content of it in any way around the web, and it’s without a digital edition, so I wasn’t able to evaluate the proper context and what the authors meant with each terms.

However, I find this valuable even in this unexplained form, so here it is:

[image]

While the original context seem education, the above seems more framed in terms of initial action around complex systems, which makes it interesting.

The aspect I find valuable about this diagram is that it highlights the outcomes of missing a piece, more than saying that you really need all of them. In other words, you can still achieve change without steps, but you have to consider the negative effect that comes out of it and address it."

"Six Declines of Modern Youth

1. Decline of Fitness due to modern methods of locomotion [moving about];
2. Decline of Initiative and Enterprise due to the widespread disease of spectatoritis;
3. Decline of Memory and Imagination due to the confused restlessness of modern life;
4. Decline of Skill and Care due to the weakened tradition of craftsmanship;
5. Decline of Self-discipline due to the ever-present availability of stimulants and tranquilizers;
6. Decline of Compassion due to the unseemly haste with which modern life is conducted or as William Temple called "spiritual death".

Hahn not only pointed out the decline of modern youth, he also came up with four antidotes to fix the problem.

1. Fitness Training (e.g., to compete with one's self in physical fitness; in so doing, train the discipline and determination of the mind through the body)
2. Expeditions (e.g., via sea or land, to engage in long, challenging endurance tasks)
3. Projects (e.g., involving crafts and manual skills)
4. Rescue Service (e.g., surf lifesaving, fire fighting, first aid)

*****

Ten Expeditionary Learning Principles
These 10 principles, which seek to describe a caring, adventurous school culture and approach to learning, were drawn[by whom?] from the ideas of Kurt Hahn and other education leaders[which?] for use in Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound (ELOB) schools.[citation needed]

1. The primacy of self-discovery
Learning happens best with emotion, challenge and the requisite support. People discover their abilities, values, passions, and responsibilities in situations that offer adventure and the unexpected. In Expeditionary Learning schools, students undertake tasks that require perseverance, fitness, craftsmanship, imagination, self-discipline, and significant achievement. A teacher’s primary task is to help students overcome their fears and discover they can do more than they think they can.

2. The having of wonderful ideas
Teaching in Expeditionary Learning schools fosters curiosity about the world by creating learning situations that provide something important to think about, time to experiment, and time to make sense of what is observed.

3. The responsibility for learning
Learning is both a personal process of discovery and a social activity. Everyone learns both individually and as part of a group. Every aspect of an Expeditionary Learning school encourages both children and adults to become increasingly responsible for directing their own personal and collective learning.

4. Empathy and caring
Learning is fostered best in communities where students’ and teachers’ ideas are respected and where there is mutual trust. Learning groups are small in Expeditionary Learning schools, with a caring adult looking after the progress and acting as an advocate for each child. Older students mentor younger ones, and students feel physically and emotionally safe.

5. Success and failure
All students need to be successful if they are to build the confidence and capacity to take risks and meet increasingly difficult challenges. But it is also important for students to learn from their failures, to persevere when things are hard, and to learn to turn disabilities into opportunities.

6. Collaboration and competition
Individual development and group development are integrated so that the value of friendship, trust, and group action is clear. Students are encouraged to compete not against each other but with their own personal best and with rigorous standards of excellence.

7. Diversity and inclusion
Both diversity and inclusion increase the richness of ideas, creative power, problem-solving ability, respect for others. In Expeditionary Learning schools, students investigate value their different histories talents as well as those of other communities cultures. Schools learning groups heterogeneous.

8. The natural world
Direct respectful relationship with the natural world refreshes the human spirit teaches[clarification needed] the important ideas of recurring cycles and cause and effect. Students learn to become stewards of the earth and of future generations.

9. Solitude and reflection
Students and teachers need time alone to explore their own thoughts, make their own connections, and create their own ideas. They also need time to exchange their reflections with others.

10. Service and compassion
We are crew, not passengers. Students and teachers are strengthened by acts of consequential service to others, and one of an Expeditionary Learning school's primary functions is to prepare students with the attitudes and skills to learn from and be of service to others."

"Washington’s Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training Program (I-BEST) is a nationally recognized model that quickly boosts students’ literacy and work skills so that students can earn credentials, get living wage jobs, and put their talents to work for employers.

I-BEST pairs two instructors in the classroom – one to teach professional/technical or academic content and the other to teach basic skills in reading, math, writing or English language – so students can move through school and into jobs faster. As students progress through the program, they learn basic skills in real-world scenarios offered by the college and career part of the curriculum.

I-BEST challenges the traditional notion that students must complete all basic education before they can even start on a college or career pathway. This approach often discourages students because it takes more time, and the stand-alone basic skills classes do not qualify for college credit. I-BEST students start earning college credits immediately."

[via: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/25/8288495/finland-education-subjects ]

[Referenced here: http://stet.editorially.com/articles/attention-rhythm-and-weight/ ]

"For better or worse, we live in a world of media invention. Instead of reusing a stable of forms over and over, it’s not much harder for us to create new ones. Our inventions make it possible to explore the secret shape of our subject material, to coax it into saying more.

These new forms won’t follow the rules of the scroll, the codex, or anything else that came before, but we can certainly learn from them. We can ask questions from a wide range of influences — film, animation, video games, and more. We can harvest what’s still ripe today, and break new ground when necessary.

Let’s begin."

[See also: http://publishingperspectives.com/2013/10/books-in-browsers-iv-why-we-should-not-imitate-snowfall/ and video of Allen's talk at Books in Browsers 2013 (Day 2 Session 1) http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/40164570 ]

"Here is how the internship scam works. It’s not about a “skills” gap. It’s about a morality gap.

1) Make higher education worthless by redefining “skill” as a specific corporate contribution. Tell young people they have no skills.

2) With “skill” irrelevant, require experience. Make internship sole path to experience. Make internships unpaid, locking out all but rich.

3) End on the job training for entry level jobs. Educated told skills are irrelevant. Uneducated told they have no way to obtain skills.

4) As wealthy progress on professional career path, middle and lower class youth take service jobs to pay off massive educational debt.

5) Make these part-time jobs not “count” on resume. Hire on prestige, not skill or education. Punish those who need to work to survive.

6) Punish young people who never found any kind of work the hardest. Make them untouchables — unhireable.

7) Tell wealthy people they are “privileged” to be working 40 hrs/week for free. Don’t tell them what kind of “privileged” it is.

8) Make status quo commentary written by unpaid interns or people hiring unpaid interns. They will tell you it’s your fault.

9) Young people, it is not your fault. Speak out. Fight back. Bankrupt the prestige economy."

[via: http://www.policymic.com/articles/48829/why-you-should-never-have-taken-that-prestigious-internship ]

"When humans first layered fragile paper into heavier sheets, the Cardboarder was born. Light, but sturdy, this creature walks the Earth, making spectacular shapes from what was once trash. The Cardboarder breathes life into simple boxes, rescuing them from the clutches of recyclers."

"A year ago last Friday I left eight years cutting code and plumbing servers to take my very first marketing job.   Prior to then and even before in college and high school, hard skills were what paid my bills - technical work building stuff mostly for the Internet.  Everything I had done up until last year required only the soft skills needed to send a group email or interview a candidate, certainly a pittance to those required to craft a message and get it in front of an audience.

I knew I needed more than that.  While I was at Boxee working for Avner Ronen I made the determination that I wanted the CEO role for my startup.  Like a lot of folks who spend their career in the high risk, high reward, high laughs world of early stage tech, I’ve long held my own entrepreneurial ambitions, but after working for a programmer-turned-head-honcho, I came around to the notion I could make a greater contribution to that endeavor by pushing the vision and the culture rather than the technology and architecture.  I didn’t want to be the technical co-founder - I wanted to run the circus.

But, I was sorely deficient.  Sales and marketing were skills I just didn’t have and were I to ask others to entrust their livelihoods and their families in such an enterprise, it would be incumbent upon me to learn.  To do such a thing with a knowledge base very nearly zero would just be irresponsible.

So, to get some of those skills while keeping my technical chops up, I hopped onboard Twilio as a developer evangelist.  Like a lot of companies, Twilio’s devangelism program is under the marketing aegis and the gig meant working for one of the best marketers I knew.  I’d still write code, but would do so surrounded by the thoroughly unfamiliar context of message craft and story telling. And through the daily demands of the job and the proximity of those who do it well hopefully I’d learn a thing or two about this marketing thing and ultimately serve those I wish to lead better.

Holy biscuits - did I learn plenty.  A year in, I thought it might be helpful to my fellow developers to share what it’s like to turn to the Dark Side and what I picked up in the process."

Notes here by @tealtan:

"unusual contexts in writing / reading text

“In a hyperliterate society, the vast majority of reading is not consciously recognized as reading.”

“What readers expect is more important than what readers want.”

Bill Buxton: “every tool is the best at something and the worst at something else”

skills, path-dependency, learning effects

“…we actually like constraints once we're in them.”"

And notes from @litherland:

"11:40: “I do things like … just obsess about weird little details. So, for instance … like, how do you do text entry in a Netflix app on the Wii? You know? I think about this a lot.” Your many other talents notwithstanding, Tim, you may have missed your calling as a designer. /

18:30: “I think it’s a tragedy that we have not been able to figure out a good interface for pen and ink on reading devices.” Holy grail. My dream for years. I would give anything. I would give anything to be smart enough to figure this out."

"Undoubtedly libraries are a good thing. The access and training that we provide for technology isn't offered by any other public service (largely because public services are rapidly becoming a dirty word in this gilded age of decadence and austerity), and without our services it wouldn't be the end of the world, but it would be a significant dimming.

If you can take yourself out of your first world techie social media smart-shoes for a second then imagine this… [lengthy case study]

So that little melodrama right there is every minute of every day at the public library…The digital divide isn't just access, but also ability, and quality of information, , and the common dignity of having equity of participation in our increasingly digital culture."

…

"Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive. Forget trying to form grass roots political activism by creating a society of computer users, forget trying to be the 'people's university' and create a body of well informed citizens. Instead I helped people navigate through the degrading hoops of modern online society, fighting for scraps from the plate, and then kicking back afterwards by pretending to have a farm on Facebook (well, that is if they had any of their 2 hours left when they were done). What were we doing during the nineties? What were we doing during the boom that we've been left so ill served during the bust? No one seems to know. They come in to our classes and ask us if we have any ideas, and I do, but those ideas take money, and political will, and guts, and the closer I get to graduation the less and less I suspect that any of those things exist."

"Today's learning happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get credit for it.

Mozilla and Peer 2 Peer University are working to solve this problem by developing an Open Badges infrastructure.

Our system will make it easy for education providers, web sites and other organizations to issue badges that give public recognition and validation for specific skills and achievements.

And provide an easy way for learners tomanage and display those badges across the web -- on their personal web site or resume, social networking profiles, job sites or just about anywhere.

The result: Open Badges will help learners everywhere unlock career and educational opportunities, and regonize skills that traditional resumes and transcripts often leave out."

1. Digital Delivery [explained]

2. Interest-driven: Though students typically have to wait until their third year of college to choose what they learn, the idea of K-12 education being tailored to students’ own interests is becoming more commonplace. Whether it’s through Japanese manga art, Lady Gaga, or the sport of curling, the idea is to grab students where their interests lie and build the curriculum around it.

The idea of learner-centered education might not be new — research from the 1990s shows that students’ interests is directly correlated to their achievement. But a growing movement is being propelled by the explosive growth in individualized learning technology that could feed it and we’re starting to see the outlines of how it could seep into the world of formal education…

3. Skills 2.0 [explained]"

[Related: http://mindshift.kqed.org/2011/02/three-trends-that-define-the-future-of-teaching-and-learning/ ]

"The only way to allow students to assemble this essential toolbelt for information and communication is to to throw open your classroom and let the world in. How will your students know which calendar works for them - the one on their phone, Google Calendar with SMS appointment texting, Microsoft Outlook, or any of a dozen paper systems unless you allow them to try them out? How will your students know whether they 'get' a novel better by listening to an audiobook, or reading it on paper, or using text-to-speech, if you don't let them experience all repeatedly and help them decide? Will their choice be the same when they are reading history texts? Math texts? Again, how will they know? How will they know which is the best way for them to write, by hand (either on paper or on a tablet system), by keyboard (and which keyboard), or by voice, if they do not get to try out all the kinds of writing they need to do with all these tools?"

[See also: http://es.slideshare.net/irasocol/toolbelt-theory ]

"1. Statistical Literacy: Making sense of today’s data-driven world.
2. Post-State Diplomacy: Power and politics, sans government.
3. Remix Culture: Samples, mashups, and mixes.
4. Applied Cognition: The neuroscience you need.
5. Writing for New Forms: Self-expression in 140 characters.
6. Waste Studies: Understanding end-to-end economics.
7. Domestic Tech: How to use the world as your lab."

"traditional and tacit knowledge does not lend itself to being codified, organized by knowledge managers, and put into an encyclopedia. It is is socially-owned and used. Like flowers that wilt when cut and put in a vase, indigenous knowledge tends to degrade quickly when removed from its context...

"Why are kids in Germany paying [union] dues, voluntarily [and in increasing numbers]?
...It’s not Marx but John Dewey whose picture should be in the lobby of...Social Democratic Party. It’s Dewey who believed that schools should not just teach practical skills but explain why kids have to be political, to be citizens, to get into labor movements to protect skills they are acquiring. One can say that union membership is a “tradition” in certain industries. But that’s just an opaque way of saying that kids get politicized both at home & school as they go through Dual Track...

The answer to problems of our country is education, but not the kind we’re pursuing, i.e., jamming more kids into college or even teaching practical skills; instead, it’s teaching them how, politically, to cut themselves a better deal. As long as that’s going on, it’s impossible to write off the European or, more specifically, the German model."

[Quote from page 2. Via: http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2010/07/sometimes-we-try-japanese-model-of-work.html ]

"Individual Excellence: Building Effective Teams, Compassion...Humor, Integrity & Trust, Interpersonal Skill, Listening, Managing Relationships, Managing Vision & Purpose, Motivating Others, Negotiating, Personal Learning & Development, Valuing Diversity"

[via: http://stevemiranda.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/what-big-companies-like-microsoft-are-looking-for-in-job-applicants/ ]

"Hirsch doesn't seem to understand plan being implemented. There's no pretense of going from standards to curriculum to assessments of understanding of the curriculum. There are standards, there will be assessments of standards -- of enumerated standards, not Common Core or anyone else's commentary on standards, not of knowledge of recommended texts. There will be curriculum, textbooks, etc. aligned to assessments. There will be increasing emphasis on online assessment which is detached from rest of curriculum...There will be increasing use of regular diagnostic tests at higher grade levels for specific reading standards, e.g., this group needs to work on comparing structured poems to free verse, while this one works on analyzing how a dramatic production of a work departs from original text. There will be standards-based assessment, where standards are not "understandings," "skills," or "knowledge," but tasks.

"A number of educational theorists are advocating increased attention on teaching students skills, rather than merely focusing on their mastery of abstract content. Influential reports like Henry Jenkins, et al.'s "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" & the New Media Consortium's Horizon Project have outlined the skills that students need to be active participants in new media culture. As educators working with digital media, we need to begin to seriously think of our work as a form of apprenticeship, where we ask ourselves: what sorts of skills are we modeling for our students? And how are those skills preparing them for the future?

...With an educational model based on apprenticeship, educators could deemphasize the role of rote memorization and testing that are now used to rank and sort students, and rather focus on mastering the skills that students need to be engaged citizens in the digital age."

“Leading is a skill, not a gift. You’re not born with it, you learn how. And schools can teach leadership as easily as they figured out how to teach compliance. Schools can teach us to be socially smart, to be open to connection, to understand the elements that build a tribe. While schools provide outlets for natural-born leaders, they don’t teach it. And leadership is now worth far more than compliance is.”

"From the Codex Atlanticus, this is a letter that Leonardo da Vinci wrote in 1482 to the Duke of Milan advertising his services as a "skilled contriver of instruments of war". From the translation:

"Alternately, E.D. Hirsch's proper response to any question about "standards" should be "I don't give a damn about standards. What's the curriculum?" He doesn't really want standards like Finland, which he praises in his piece -- their standards are exactly the kind of thing he hates, all about "skills and techniques in reading," pursuing the student's interests, etc. He may like the stuff other than standards, but basically he's just not into standards and really has nothing useful to say about them. Any more than I have anything useful to say about smartphones."

Hi Katie. Thank you for the mention over at Clay Burell's blog and thanks for all the thought provoking quotes and links. I’ve got a few thoughts directed to you in a comment that doesn't appear to have made it through Clay's comment filter (not surprising given the length). So, I put it together with my previous comment and posted it to my not-quite-a-blog on Tumblr.

[commenting on: http://beyond-school.org/2009/12/29/barbarians-with-laptops-an-unreasonable-fear/ ]

"I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation. ... Whatever your subject matter, I’d love to see specific examples of digital tools and practices that, either through research-based evidence or your own direct observation, you think enhance the learning of content or the development of skills in the classroom."

[my comments here too: http://robertogreco.tumblr.com/post/309355692/barbarians-with-laptops ]

"Assessment tasks must model and demand important real-world work. Focused and accountable teaching requires ongoing assessment of the core tasks that embody the aims of schooling: whether students can wisely transfer knowledge with understanding in simulations of complex adult intellectual tasks. Only by ensuring that the assessment system models such (genuine) performance will student achievement and teaching be improved over time. And only if that system holds all teachers responsible for results (as opposed to only those administering high-stakes testing in four of the twelve years of schooling) can it improve."

"the skills that are easiest to teach and test are also the ones that are easiest to digitize and outsource"

Two quotes (not the whole story): "When you teach children facts as facts, & do it through a process of study & drill, it doesn't occur to children to question whether or not those facts are true, appropriate, moral, egal, or anything else. Rote learning is a short circuit into the brain. It's direct programming. People who study & learn, that 2+2=4, know that 2+2=4, not because they understand the theory of mathematics, not because they have read Hilbert & understand formalism, or can refute Brouwer & reject intuitionism, but because they know (full stop) 2+2=4." ... "We are in a period of transition. We still to a great degree treat facts as things & of education as the acquisition of those things. But more and more, as our work, homes and lives become increasingly complex, we see this understanding becoming not only increasingly obsolete, but increasingly an impediment...if you simply follow the rules, do what you're told, do your job & stay out of trouble, you will be led to ruin."

[summary here: http://www.daveswhiteboard.com/archives/2818 ]

"If you’re interested in improving the quality of your life and work, there are the 12 primary areas of “Core Human Skill” you should focus on developing…Information-Assimilation...Writing...Reading...Speaking...Mathematics...Decision-Making...Rapport...Conflict-Resolution...Scenario-Generation...Planning...Self-Awareness...Interrelation...Skill Acquisition"

[via: http://www.kottke.org/09/07/core-human-skills ]

"love of learning...pursuit of knowledge...ability to think for oneself (individualism)...work alone (initiative)...stand alone against crowd (courage)...work persistently at difficult task until finished (industriousness/self-discipline)...think through consequences of actions on others (respect for others)...consider consequences of actions on one’s well-being (self-respect)...recognition of higher ends than self-interest (honor)...ability to comport oneself appropriately in all situations (dignity)...recognition that civilized society requires certain kinds of behavior by individuals & groups (good manners/civility)...ability to believe in principles larger than own self-interest (idealism)...willingness to ask questions when puzzled (curiosity)...readiness to dream about other worlds, other ways of doing things (imagination)...ability to believe that one can improve one’s life & lives of others (optimism)...to speak well & write grammatically using standard English (communication)"

[via: http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2009/07/importance-of-19th-century-skills.html ]

"need & desire of students for life-long learning must be reinforced. Cooperation, interaction, communication skills...different forms of collaborative learning...abilities to recognize & deal w/ ethical issues involving communities & individuals...recognize personal uniqueness...stimulate [them] to engage in artistic activities, participate in artistic & cultural life & adopt lifestyles that promote health & well-being...capable of facing challenges presented by changing world in flexible manner, be familiar w/ means of influence & possess will & courage to take action...create prerequisites for experiencing inclusion, reciprocal support & justice...important sources of joy in life...learn how to adapt to conditions of nature & limits set by global sustainability...reinforce students’ positive cultural identity & knowledge of cultures. Technology is based on knowledge of laws of nature...observe & critically analyze relationship btwn world as described by media & reality."

[see also: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html?pagewanted=all ]

"When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. "I was always tired," he writes, "and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all." He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. ... maybe, five years from now, when they [graduates] can't understand why their high-paying jobs at Micron Consulting seem pointless and enervating, Crawford's writing will show them a way forward"

"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries."

"One last point. We will of course continue to talk earnestly about the need for a curriculum that features “critical thinking” skills – by which we mean the specific proficiencies acceptable to CEOs. But you will appreciate the need to delicately discourage real critical thinking on the part of students, since this might lead them to pose inconvenient questions about the entire enterprise and the ideology on which it’s based. There’s certainly no room for that in the global competitive economy of the future. Or the present."

[via: http://education.change.org/blog/view/standardized_incoherence ]

"the retention issues Dan isolates here are in my observation the force that bends teachers in a more progressive direction over a long career (noting that inertia is generally very, very strong in teaching practice). You get down the process of navigating most of your kids through the courses you're assigned to teach, everything seems fine, then at some point you realize it doesn't really stick, and small tweaks don't help. This is when you start understanding how important "less is more" is, question the balance between covering content and things like "habits of mind," see how interdisciplinary work can reinforce and recontextualize important concepts, etc., etc."

"Clarion calls for more attention to 21st-century skills brings to mind a familiar pattern in the history of education: pendulum swings between an emphasis on process (analysis, critical thinking, cooperative learning) which fosters concern that students lack knowledge and generates a back-to-basics movement that emphasizes content, which fosters concern that student are merely parroting facts with no idea of how to use their knowledge, and so on. In calmer moments, everyone agrees that students must have both content knowledge and practice in using it, but one or the other tends to get lost as the emphasis sweeps to the other extreme. To watch a successful balancing act, keep an eye on Massachusetts."

"New assessments like the CWRA, however, illustrate that the skills that really matter for the 21st century—the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information—can be measured accurately and in a common and comparable way. These emergent models also demonstrate the potential to measure these complex thinking skills at the same time that we measure a student's mastery of core content or basic skills and knowledge. There is, then, no need for more tests to measure advanced skills. Rather, there is a need for better tests that measure more of the skills students' need to succeed today."

"Yet referring to my original question again, how many schools actually teach students to do effective note-taking? Note-taking is a basic skill that everyone needs if he is to be able to learn effectively. Through effective note-taking, the student learns to make decisions about what is important about th learning that he is undergoing. Effective note-taking implies that a lot of thinking is done by the student to help him sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and to get the information into some organized and effective structure. A student will also be a very much more active learner if he makes his own notes. Independent learners need to be active learners, in fact they have to be pro-active about their learning."

"At highest level...looking for non-routine problem-solving skills...primarily look for...analytical reasoning...communication skills...willingness to experiment...team players...passion & leadership...Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major."

List of outrageous (for then, not all now) scenarios imagined by Kevin Kelly & Brian Eno in 1993 including several some school related: "American education works" "Schools abandon attempt to teach 3 Rs" "Schools completely abandon divisions based on age"

"ability to listen; ability to read for comprehension; ability to speak, spontaneously, specifically, and with concrete examples; ability to write down what they just said above, and add a parenthetical citation; understand you still can learn"

"Our aim is to provide simple, fun, competitive games that help children learn and gain confidence with Maths, English and other key skills and knowledge."

""how can we talk seriously about 21st Century skills for kids if we're not talking 21st CS for educators first?"...exactly why I have been much more interested in teaching people about personal learning and how to be a good learner"

.

"research...challenges conventional assumptions...about technological sophistication of teenagers...spend far less time online than adults...very limited number of activities...attitudes surprisingly unsophisticated"

"With few exceptions, when book or exhibit highlights great product design...sketches associated with them are brought out sparingly...partly because design...realm of general public awareness...also because a lot of them aren't that good."

"Forget transcripts, multiple-choice tests or institutional scores. The surveyed business leaders want faculty assessment of internships, senior projects or community-based work."

"I suspect it's my unconscious telling me that I'm not equipped for the world we're going to be living in. My core skill is probably using PowerPoint to persuade people and businesses to do their advertising slightly differently. That's an increasingly ab

[also here: http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/11/how_to_be_successful_stephen.htm ]

"How to predict consequences; read; distinguish truth from fiction; empathize; be creative; communicate clearly; learn; stay healthy; value yourself; live meaningfully" - resonse to Guy Kawasaki's 'ten things you should learn this school year'

"Storytelling is the skill. Everything else is just its instrument."`

"*more fun, in most serious existential sense
*Diversity of intellectual playgrounds breeds confidence, not fear of unknown
*Boredom is failure
*In world of dogmatic specialists, generalist runs show
*Jack of all trades, master of none = artificial pairing"

"I’ve been trying to pin down what is driving the increasing popularity of crafting for a while now. This is what I’ve got so far"

"1. Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop 2. Operator lock-in 3. Input methods 4. Battery life 5. The mania for speed 6. Intellectual property law 7. Skills inequalities 8. Web 2.0 9. National interests 10. The current lack of global wars and/or disaste

"My handwriting skills have decayed. My ability to communicate without editing has decayed. My patience for creating text at a rate slower than I think has decayed. Typing is fast, handwriting is slow. So is handwriting all that important?"

'I think we have a complete mismatch between the education establishment and the kind of people we will need to get through peak oil, overpopulation, all those kind of things."

"More states are requiring 'career pathways' to lower dropout rates and engage students better."

"Trying to plan your career is an exercise in futility that will only serve to frustrate you, and to blind you to the really significant opportunities that life will throw your way."

"This post discusses skills acquisition throughout your lifetime, including your formal education. So I will start with college and move on from there."

"Report reveals a disconnect between what policy makers believe is important for students--and what parents and kids think they need for themselves"

"What follows is a basic curriculum in life that a child should know before reaching adulthood. There will probably be other skills you can add to this list, but at least it’s a starting point."

"The idea of a studio school hangs on the central feature of a series of operating businesses run by the students themselves. As small schools closely linked to particular industries, participant numbers would be capped at 300 14–19 year olds per school

"Hijacking Taleb’s interpretation it seems entirely plausible that that the few “life long learners” amongst us are mostly a product of happenstance, of luck and nothing to do with the key competencies."

play, multitasking, networking redifined

"moving away from school reform conversation...not so interested in figuring out what School 2.0 means/is...just looking at my own kids and asking what are the skills and literacies that they are going to need...and what’s the best way to help them acquire them."

"Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can't be learned from reading a manual."

"Our goals should be to encourage kids to develop the skills, knowledge, ethical framework, and self confidence needed to be full participants in the cultural changes which are taking place in response to the influx of new media technologies."

"a set of preliminary and emerging skill sets that they feel “kids” need in order to be full participants in the new media ecology"

"Enrollment soars in 'career technical ed,' as demand grows for workers with specific skills."