colearning

OpenCourseWare Consortium...

Meeting to learning

This research projects explores the outcomes of urban environmental education programs. More specifically, this study will show how these programs influence sense of place in high school students.

This research project is conducted by Cornell University and several community-based organizations in the Bronx. These organizations involve students in learning about the environment through environmental monitoring, recreation, in-class activities, field trips, environmental activism, stewardship and restoration.

The research project will help urban environmental education programs in the Bronx and elsewhere reconnect people with the urban environment and contribute to pro-environmental behavior. Learn more.

Museums are expanding their educational offerings, and finding some very eager students.

This is the 1st Edition of the "One Week, One Book" project led by Jon Becker and Audrey Watters.

HACK(ing) SCHOOL(ing): One Week, One “Book”
edinsanity.com
One of the two blog posts calling for submissions to Hack(ing) School(ing)

Hacking Schooling: One Week, One "Book"
www.hackeducation.com
The second of the two blog posts calling for submissions to Hack(ing) School(ing)

What do we REALLY want them to know?
Kellie80 kellieady.blogspot.com
I think we need to hack curriculum and focus more on teaching kids how they learn vs. what they learn. The focus on the Common Core has been making me think (again) that we are missing the boat by not including metacognition more overtly when we talk about learning. Seems like the best way to prepare students for a world of unknowns is to help them know themselves, how they learn, and how they can help others learn. That's my story. I'm sticking to it.

The World Is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning
www.wfs.org
The education system is very slow to change. For the system to be truly disrupted, a parallel system of learning needs to grow up outside of education, becoming more valuable and useful to those who learn and assess learning. Then, and only then, will education change. This article proposes what that disruptive system will look like.

Broken Educational Metrics: Office Hours
busynessgirl busynessgirl.com
A great deal of the way we evaluate and measure productivity and learning in education is just plain outdated. Here are a few examples and how we could formulate new metrics to improve the system.

Hacking Higher Education
busynessgirl busynessgirl.com
Proposes a curriculum hack for higher education and discusses the shift from learning as a transformational experience to a transactional experience.

Reconstructing Learning
LisaBL arantingmama.blogspot.com
This is a post which outlines problems, predictions and a reconstructed view of learning from my perspective as an autodidact, leader in the homeschooling community and as proponent of disruption in education and a recreated view of learning for the future.

Signposts Along the Roads Less Traveled
deltascape.blogspot.com
The following is a "transcript" of my keynote from the Mathematics Council of the Alberta Teachers' Association (MCATA) Conference. The name of the conference, "Looking for the Road Less Traveled"…It demonstrates my vision that we need to think differently about what it means to teach and learn.

The Three Audience Screens
Travis bit-thinking.com
My post talks about the power of the three screens we use in learning and engagement--the teacher, the teacher's supports (Powerpoint, video, etc), and the peer-driven backchannel. We talk about flipped classrooms and BYOD education--which are important--but they are tools that either support or distract from interaction on one of these three levels. Screen dissonance is when these three screens are misaligned or dissonant to the message trying to be conveyed. This is important in education because students will easily tune out dissonance--or they won't learn as much.

Sunday Soapbox: Let’s Reform Professional Development
bcurran www.engagingeducators.com
This blog post covers three huge issues I have with professional development--cost, relevance, and delivery. It's astounding how backwards PD for teachers can be--there are far too many teachers who make statements such as: "In my ___ years of teaching, I've never had a valuable PD day." I think it's time for this to change. In this post, I tried to share my concerns as well as do my best as to offer up some suggestions. As someone who has led professional development workshops for teachers in the past and who wants to do so for a living AND someone who is currently teaching, I feel I have a unique perspective.

Unschooling, Museums & Learning Models for this Century
futureofmuseums.blogspot.com
This guest post for the Center for the Future of Museums blog is my nutshell manifesto on education: people learn best in their own way, when things are interesting and relevant to them. School is essentially the opposite of all these elements. It attempts to fit every student into one way of learning (lecture), imposes a pre-determined curriculum, and uses many pointless classroom exercises that have no apparent application in the real world. There is general agreement that the American educational system is broken and needs serious reform. My vision for how the educational system COULD be is a world where learning and life are integrated, personalized, flexible, and internally-driven by the learner. The idea of revolutionizing the educational system is vitally important right now because every year the schools are churning out people who only know how to be in school. It is not producing many people who are skilled in thinking independently, teaching themselves, being in touch with their own interests, working collaboratively on real problems, or seeking out the information they need when it is not immediately obvious. The skills I just listed are required for functioning as an adult in this society, yet these are the very things that are NOT generally learned in school. If our society is to move into the 21st century successfully, we need to recognize that individuals are incredibly capable, and also incredibly different, and we need to build a system that not only honors but capitalizes on that diversity.

Where is accessibility/disability in the discourse on learning spaces?
Phillip Edwards wp.vcu.edu
This was a piece I wrote recently related to higher education learning spaces--so maybe it's too "higher education"-y for what you're trying to do with the "book"--but I don't think that learning space design in P-12 settings has addressed the concerns I raise in the post any more effectively than post-secondary institutions have. What I'm calling for in this post is a shift in focus from accessibility as a design-afterthought to accessibility as a precondition for flexible learning spaces. Based on the responses I've gotten so far, there has been some solid interest generated in/around this post among colleagues at work and in the broader twitter/facebook/tumblr-verse

Starting an Open Access Journal: a step-by-step guide.
Martin Paul Eve www.martineve.com
If we are to transform education globally, we must re-think the complex financial entanglement of the education system, particularly at Higher Education level, with systems of big business. Our research, crucial to the education system, is currently locked away. Furthermore, proposals to fix this, such as the recent Finch report, have neglected to mention the third way: the resurrection of the scholar-publisher. Perhaps one of the most problematic aspects of this, though, is that few scholars, particularly in the humanities, know where to start in their fight. These series of posts provide a comprehensive overview of setting up a journal, with DOI numbers and comprehensive digital preservation. It covers the social as well as technological aspects of this process and discusses the mechanisms that build the system of credentialist capital that lies behind our publication system and points the way out of our current mess.

Education 3.0 in a traditional world
Jelmer Evers ictgeschiedenis.blogspot.nl
If you want to change education, how do you achieve that on a large scale? Every student, rich and poor should be able to profit from this vision. A lot of initiatives in secondary education are small-scale, privately funded and private schools. That is really hard to replicate on a large scale and globally. It means that you have to find ways to work within the system, because the system isn't going anywhere soon. That is what UniC is trying to do. Changing an educational paradigm as far as the government and funding is allowing it to go. Those are the first real steps toward real educational change.

One Partnering Project under my belt
V. Furnas mckamyidplc.blogspot.com
Hack the top off a school building and you will see they haven't changed. In a classroom the teachers are at the center of attention, and the students are on the outer orbit. Questions are getting fed to students and they quickly write down the answers. To make sure they have learned it we have them choke those same answers back to us. In some school districts they allow students to use their own technology. With no training teachers use the technology for their e-worksheets. The engagement is not meaningful. It does not force students to prepare for the world after school. Students need to be given situations to ask questions. Not the, "How do you want me to do this so I get a good grade," type of questions. But truly meaningful to their learning. They need to weigh what their research uncovers to what is the goal of the project. Students can text, and IM all night but they struggle to communicate their misunderstandings and what they are learning. They need to work with teams, and larger groups to learn skills like organization of people, motivating others, and expressing themselves to peers and authority figures. Project based learning is the ultimate hack to the system. It puts the students in the center of everything. They are asking the questions. In the mix together they have to figure it out or they all fail together. The teacher is coach monitoring, supporting and encouraging. Project based learning is scary for teachers. With test looming, it is difficult to believe that the little darlings will get the information on their own. But the crazy thing is...they do.

How We Learn
info.p2pu.org
How does learning happen at P2PU? How does peer learning revolutionize a traditional model? "How We Learn" presents a theory of learning that is project-based, networked, distributed and empowering. And I made zippy graphics. Mmmmm, graphics :)

The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture for Tinkering and Maker Education
usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com
"Formal education has become such a serious business, defined as success at abstract thinking and high-stakes testing, that thereʼs no time and no context for play. If play is what you do outside school, then that is where the real learning will take place and thatʼs where innovation and creativity will be found. Our kids can be learning more efficiently—and as individuals. We imagine that schools can become places where students learn to identify their own challenges, solve new problems, motivate themselves to complete a project, engage in difficult tasks, work together, inspire others, and give advice and guidance to their peers" (Makerspace Playbook - http://makerspace.com/2012/05/01/makerspace-playbook/) Initiatives such as the Tinkering School, Maker Education, and Expeditionary Learning are trying to change that. My goal, in line with these initiatives, for proposing The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture is to honor a more natural and engaging process of learning.

Centering on Essential Lenses
Bud Hunt budtheteacher.com
I think these lenses matter - and I think that getting at what hacking is, and why you might want to teach students and teachers to do it, is wicked important. Agency matters - and we all could use a little bit more of it. Once we believe we actually can solve the problems we face, then we might actually get started doing it, rather than waiting for distractions.

Words Matter: Textbook
Posted | Viewed times davidjakes.com
We continue to look at educational institutions such as the textbook, and simply transition them to digital formats. This is done without truly considering how digital can change everything; we simply look to do old things in new ways and be satisified. Is their anything new? What new ideas take this to a completely new place? Being disruptive around a textbook and hacking what it is, and what it can be, really completely redesigning its purpose and intent, is what this post is about.

Eight and a Half by Eleven
eightandahalfbyeleven.org
The PowerPoint book is a presentation, is a story, is a question. It takes the design language of PowerPoint and moves it into a handcrafted book to explore the significance of “medium”…

Breakthrough solutions
blog.ted.com
Breaker introduces young people to social entrepreneurship by teaching them the skills of design thinking. In light of the current labor market, young people need to be able to engineer their own career opportunities via entrepreneurship. Business incubators have done well to attract young entrepreneurs who enter with nascent business ideas. But what about the untapped potential of the scores of young people who have skills and talent to contribute, but haven’t arrived at the business concept and have yet to think of themselves as entrepreneurs? Breaker organizes small teams of young talent around a specific pro-social challenge, thereby harnessing the millennial generation’s desire to make a social impact, while bringing fresh insight to entrenched social, environmental, and economic problems. We facilitate a twelve-week creative problem solving design process that involves discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation, and the evolution of a commercially viable product or service that contributes to solving the challenge posed. Participants leave Breaker with new perspectives and abilities; products result from Breaker ready to be stress-tested and developed. Our program acts as a pipeline to existing and emerging industries and to the start-up business sector.

Death to the Digital Dropbox: Rethinking Student Privacy and Public Performance
www.educause.edu
This article (which is published under a CC share-alike license) excites or infuriates people. It basically argues against the long tradition of having students turn in work privately and then receive feedback privately. Instead, we argue for the need to have students engage in more public performance and for teachers (and others) to provide more feedback publicly to students.

Make students curators
Leslie M-B www.cluttermuseum.com
The essay falls squarely into the call for articles that explore the hacking of curriculum or professional development. More importantly, however, the essay captures a debate at the heart of many disciplines: What content, concepts, and skills should be at the core of our curriculum? The essay examines the liabilities of traditional content standards in a field, U.S. history, whose teaching is perennially in the crosshairs of political partisans of all stripes. By proposing students learn to curate artifacts and exhibitions, the essay suggests one way to move (at least a little) past the political infighting and--perhaps more importantly--the belief that students are vessels to be filled with knowledge rather than citizens who must learn to engage with others' ideas as they craft and advocate for their own. The use of curation and exhibition development as this method is particularly apt, as it (a) emphasizes the critical and creative thought required by actual curatorial work; (b) connects schools with hidden museum collections that are vastly underused and underinterpreted; and (c) underscores the shallow definition of a current buzzword (curation) in the digital sphere and highlights how actual curatorial skills could enrich education and civic life.

Go Ahead, Be Unreasonable
blog.genyes.org
Hacking school requires teachers adopt new habits that may be uncomfortable for them. This article describes why teachers need to move beyond "nice" in order to do the right thing for kids.

Why Education Reform Will Work This Time
Sylvia Martinez blog.genyes.org
Seymour Papert makes the case that because education reform efforts have failed in the past does not mean they will always fail. There are two things present today that will allow reform 1) technology that directly enables construction, connection, and distributed expertise and 2) kid power - the ability of children and other traditionally unrepresented people to use technology to be heard.

Student Contracts for Digital Projects
Jeffrey W. McClurken chronicle.com
Though this began life as a ProfHacker post about my Digital History seminar, it is really about the potential creative force of students in the digital age if we can get out of their way. It is about project-based learning, about open-ended, loosely structured courses, about struggling a bit to achieve one's goals, about collaborative projects, and about outward-facing work.

Making Games and Making Change
Laura M. globalorialaura.blogspot.com
In this interview excerpt, a 7th grade student describes a shift in his self perception, and a sense of power that he has developed by learning to build games. He also talks about how this new skill is allowing him to try to make a difference in the world- he wants to show kids that using drugs is not cool. The game is relatively simple, but earnest. It represents a lot of hours of work on weekends and after school, whenever there was an opportunity to be at the computer, this student was there. The hack illustrated here is lies in shifting power to kids; power of coding, power of telling a story about an issue that matters, and how it has shown up in the way this student describes himself and the way he relates to the world.

Correcting Einstein - Sorry about that
Mark O'Neil imaginationcreativityandinnovation.blogspot.com.au
This article explains how learning and remembering are not the same - and how Education systems are failing this generation.

A bigger net
Mark O'Neil imaginationcreativityandinnovation.blogspot.com.au
If when fishing we cannot catch enough fish to feed our family because the net is too small, then we have two options. The first is to reduce our expectations. This is the choice we have taken when educating this generation. The second choice is to get a bigger net. Starting from scratch, design a system of education that uses all the resources, technological or otherwise, to create opportunities for all students to engage with their schooling. We have an obligation to transform what is learned, when it is learned, how it is learned, at what pace it is learned so that the people that emerge understand why they have learned.

The Purpose of Education
Mark O'Neil imaginationcreativityandinnovation.blogspot.com.au
There is a disjoint between what schools have traditionally offered and the needs of society. Meeting minimum standards is not much of an aspiration. It leads to a ‘most children left behind’ world where adults miss out on finding their true talents and end up bored or disgruntled in the jobs they have. The goal of Education should be to produce remarkable (not just 'good') adults because ‘good’ is not good enough.

Fear of Change in Education
Mark O'Neil imaginationcreativityandinnovation.blogspot.com.au
None of us would be willing to go under the surgeon’s knife knowing that those operating would not be using the best available technology, yet we send our children to schools that are not effectively using the best available resources. Our children deserve the best opportunities that they can get from their education. This means teachers, principals, governments and businesses taking responsibility for ensuring that technology is used effectively to enhance and improve schooling.

Welcome to My Room - Grab a Seat
Jenny emdffi.blogspot.com
It is easy to get caught up in the technology ways of hacking school or the classroom, but I believe that offering students choice, in as many ways as possible is the most important thing we can do to change the traditional model of school.

Kids in Charge
Jenny emdffi.blogspot.com
Having students write about their learning and schooling for an authentic audience achieves so many important goals for them: it requires they reflect on their learning and their time at school, it offers them the opportunity to write for a real audience which often makes for more thoughtful, careful writing, and it turns over something that is traditionally the teacher's responsibility to the students giving them more responsibility for their own learning.

Occupy Globally Connected Learning
David Potter connectallschools.wordpress.com
This hack is about sustainability and scalability in teaching and learning, but not focused on technology, standards, or assessment. This hack is about engagement and how newly connected people worldwide are going to learn to work collaboratively to address critical global concerns to help future generations be healthier, better educated, and more prosperous. Effective global classroom collaboration is a long-term investment that requires care and nurturing by administrators, parents, teachers, students and community supporters who must commit to building a culture of trust and respect with their peers worldwide. Its hard work, and no one should expect an e-mail message or a Skype call to immediately transform teaching and learning overnight. We need to give schools plenty of opportunities and encouragement to reach out to partners around the world. Connections between classrooms may take years to develop fully, but the benefits of opening up our classrooms to the world far, far outweigh the concerns of those who prefer we raise our children in bunkers.

BYOD – A Blessing or a Curse?
margaret-powers.com
I believe that the issue of BYOD or bring your own device is stil very controversial but something that needs to be defined, discussed, and engaged with by educators across the globe as we work to create digital citizens who are confident and competent in using technology in meaningful ways in the classroom, including mobile devices. This article addresses that issue and tries to prompt educators to think deeply about the potential questions and concerns involved, as well as the potential value of BYOD, starting with young students.

Technology and Interactive Media as Tools in Early Childhood
margaret-powers.com
This article touches on the need to hack early childhood curriculum with children as young as three years old. It discusses the importance of interactivity when choosing tech tools and the idea that early childhood is the age when both educators and students should begin to consider digital citizenship, global collaboration, and a balance of tech integration and other materials in the classroom. I believe this article is relevant and important for Hack(ing) School(ing) because this age range is so often overlooked, but we need to help all educators be aware of what young children are capable of and how they can (and are) using technology so older grades can adapt their practices in response.

proyecto
www.masterdiwo.org
MasterDIWO (Do It With Others) is an independent and nomadic project (though located in Spain mainly) of self-driven and collaborative learning. Transgenerational, transdisciplinar and transexpertise: it reflects from/on the radically contextual practice of cultural mediations. The project arises from a shared detection of certain lacks (both structure and contentwise)within the formal/official/institutional learning system. It is inspired by the FLOSS practices, and its first aim is to sustain its small community upon a set of shared interests.

Intermediae Experimental School for Cultural Producers of the Future
intermediae.es
Intermediae is a program of the Department of Arts of the City Council of Madrid. Its aim is to facilitate the self-management processes of its local community and expand it towards an international network. More concretely, Intermediae is conceived as a laboratory for the production of projects and social innovation, specialized in visual culture driven by participation. It investigates new ways of involving different audiences in the circles of art and culture. It understands creation as a shared learning space and experimentation as a form of involvement in cultural production. It collaborates with projects committed to a view of community work as a practice that serves to produce innovation and transformation. In 2012 it is starting a brand new layer: an experimental school based on the principles of distributed knowledge production, lifelong learning, and collective research. Blurring the borders between in and out, expert and amateur, and old and young, Intermediae's Experimental School for Cultural Producers of the Future launches its first temporary research question: what implications would it have to think of a school as an interface?

We are the impossible boss battle
Chad classroots.org
This post flips teaching and recasts it as a problem to be solved, rather than as a position from which we can solve problems.

Don’t Bring Dangeres things.
Chad Sansing coopcatalyst.wordpress.com
This post recasts culturally-biased rules a obstacles to learning and positive, trusting relationships between students and teachers. The post is meant to prompt teachers to be critical of their participation in sustaining or hacking school rules that are made to create conflict between them and their kids.

Permission to speak: content classes, democracy, and the end of school
coopcatalyst.wordpress.com
Broadcast from a civics classroom, this post shares some of the challenges faced by teachers and students who struggle to reach the ideals of public education because of the way public education operates on a day-to-day basis. The post ends with five suggestions about how to hack public education to make it more authentic and meaningful for learners.

On the Virtues of Not Being an Expert
tsasser remixingcollegeenglish.wordpress.com
I believe that the traditional power structure of teacher as expert/programmer and student as novice/programmed needs to be disrupted. Far too often, our position as expert with years of familiarity with our subject and the texts associated with it create a gulf between us and our students, preventing us from truly connecting with them as learners. We need to start taking the risk of teaching unfamiliar topics and texts--working as knowledge co-creators/hackers with our students--and stop fearing the lack of control that this engenders. There's equal power in not knowing and discovering for the very first time as there is in knowing from a distance. It's this distance that I think needs to be re-evaluated.

Asynchronous Scholars' Fund: A Proven Program Model
asynchronousscholars.org
The Asynchronous Scholars' Fund seeks to help gifted and twice exceptional children in need, but the program model that works for these kids works for all: It's a disruptive model that's proven by years of families hacking their children's education. The approach is child-led, with parents acting as facilitators. It spans location, time, approach and method, and we aim to become a national model for helping these and other kids within 10 years.

Is It Time to Stop Using the Word 'Textbook'?
Matt Greenfield www.huffingtonpost.com
In this piece, Matt Greenfield questions the historical path of the textbook, and where this device truly fits in today's and tomorrow's classroom experience. Throughout the post, Matt argues in favor of the coming content renaissance, and does so with his patented flair for wit and metaphor, like the former English Prof he is.

Fail better
kris.shaffermusic.com
The fear of failure is paralyzing American students, and the increasing focus on testing in public schools only aggravates the problem. As a result, students graduate high school and enter college without really knowing how to learn. They know how to memorize an answer just long enough to put it on a quiz or a test, but the idea of working through a difficult problem with many components to it, with the purpose of learning things for life, is completely foreign to them. In my blog post, I tell a story about how I removed lecture and textbook from the class, and provided my students instead with customized text and video demonstration, as well as the opportunity to make their first attempts at a project with me in the room. The result was less homework paralysis, and less whining, even though the project was very difficult and brand new. By encouraging failure, but in a supportive environment that helps students learn specific lessons from that failure for future improvement, we can help our students not only learn the material at hand better, and in a more lasting way, but we can help them learn how to learn. In life, they will fail. If they don't know how to fail productively, we have not educated them.

Peer instruction, Socrative, and Imogen Heap
kris.shaffermusic.com
Conceptual knowledge and its application is an essential part of education, on any level. Unfortunately, rote memorization and "plug-and-chug" problems dominate much of American education from primary grades to the university. Higher education in the sciences has made use of "peer instruction" techniques and formative assessment to shift the education focus to the conceptual. In this blog post, I describe a way in which I have made use of these same tools to shift the focus of education in one of the humanities to the conceptual. Just like math and physics, courses in music analysis often follow the memorize-then-plug-and-chug model. But with the help of clickers, just-in-time teaching, and in-class formative assessment, a music analysis class can also help students develop conceptual knowledge and learn how to apply it in a variety of real-world situations—all while listening to cool music.

Peer-Driven Learning
collegereadywriting.blogspot.ca
This is my complete rundown of how I have integrated Peer-driven learning in my university classroom.

Pygmalion (and the Common Core)
Ira Socol speedchange.blogspot.com
...this issue lies at the heart of how schools choose to operate. US schools have always been built to "whiten" - first the Irish, then the Jews and other Eastern Europeans, then the Italians and other Southern Europeans, now African-Americans, Latinos, etc. But not even "really whiten," faux whiten, to remove the threat without creating opportunity.

Undoing Academic Time
narrator speedchange.blogspot.com
...because "time is the first technology of school" to quote myself... because few are willing to challenge "school time."

Instructional Tolerance and Universal Design
Ira Socol speedchange.blogspot.com
The other "big unquestioned issue" in schools today, the control of space and behavior. Everybody talks about undoing industrial education, but you can't do that without undoing the expectations of mass instruction.

On Pedagogical Manipulation
www.hybridpedagogy.com
The article takes identity, and the identities we present in the classroom or virtual learning space, as something that can be hacked. We hack ourselves every time we step in front of a classroom, every time we log onto Twitter, every time we create an online profile. Hack(ing) School(ing) begins with Hacking Ourselves. We do this by disrupting learning, disrupting the relationship between teacher and student, and by disrupting conventional power dynamics associated with schooling. The article is about manipulation (coyly turning the word to our own ends); hacking is a sort of manipulation. Finally, the article hacks itself by disrupting contemporary modes of academic writing: through collaborative writing, shifting perspectives, bracketed interior dialogues, etc. And, lastly, this, from the article: "Manipulation is not an appetizing humanistic goal; yet education is sometimes too rife with maxims on encouragement. Defining the overlap of both is an honest recognition of professional hybridity that makes our pedagogical practice more critically voracious." In short, school needs to eat itself. Is that convincing enough? If not, make me convince more.

Occupy professional development with Edcamp
thenotebook.org
Edcamp is a grass-roots movement that is hacking PD across the nation and the globe. It gives teachers a voice, and it empowers them to take control of their professional learning.

Courage, the brain, and curriculum in the 21st century
gfrblxt hyperbolicguitars.blogspot.com
In this post, I'm trying to lay out an argument for an alternative to the (mathematics) curriculum as a linear sequence, as it currently is structured. I'm also sharing my thoughts on how technology (in a general sense) might allow for a change in our model of mathematics education to take place. Finally, I also get to talk about Christopher Hitchens, and how I learned a bit from him about what it means to be courageous. And I believe that what you are trying to do with this project (and the larger goal that it's part of) requires courage on everyone's part - to make real change happen in education these days is going to take some of Churchill's "blood, sweat, and tears".

A Hacker By Any Other Name
www.assortedstuff.com
This post tries to relate the concept to several different ideas of learning by experimentation. This is how young children learn about their world (as expressed in the writings of Mitch Resnick and others associated with the MIT Media lab)and how people in the maker movement learn about the technology in which they have an interest, just as much as any professional scientist.

Innovation Requires Failure (and we don’t do failure)
www.assortedstuff.com
The concept of hacking implies that sometimes we will fail, that our best ideas won't work in their current form and will need to be modified (or even tossed out completely). We talk a lot about teaching kids to be "innovative", "creative", and "entrepreneurs", all of which involve a great deal of trial and error, but in practice we don't teach kids learn from their failures and recover from them.

Why Should Fifth Graders Learn to Program?
Tina Barseghian blogs.kqed.org
The future of education includes computing. It includes programs like the one described in this article. Schools should teach kids how to 'write' (create) technology and not just how to 'read' (consume) technology. We must start to use computers in schools like Seymour Papert imagined they would be used one day. Coding skills should be a required class in schools where everyone learns to code. It can not be an extra for summer camps and after school classes. Why do we have to fundraise to teach our kids how to program? We do not fundraise to teach them how to write ? Use school computers, school time, and school funding to teach coding to every student. Start early before it is too late. We teach cursive in 3rd grade, we do not wait till high school! This is the most relevant topic in any book or discussion on the future of education.

Isaac Mao1, empresario, blogger e investigador en el campo de la enseñanza 2.0, considera que la condición de compartir del ser humano forma parte de su propia naturaleza, es decir, en la propia sinapsis neuronal, por lo tanto está codificado en el genoma humano. Existe una predisposición innata que él denomina sharismo2 (del inglés share, compartir). Para Mao el “sharismo” es el “Espíritu de la Era de la Web 2.0” y lo resume en una frase:

“Cuanto menos compartes, menos poder tienes”3. El sharismo será la política de la próxima superpotencia global. No será un país, sino una nueva red humana unida por el software social.

Casi todas las actividades que implican compartir generan resultados positivos, se logra, de acuerdo con Mao una felicidad inmediata que actúa como primera recompensa pero tenemos otras:

Recibir comentarios, sabremos si hemos logrado provocar interés, apreciación, emoción.
Acceso a todo el material que tus amigos están compartiendo en sus redes sociales.
Todo el material compartido puede ser reenviado, puesto en circulación y republicado a través de las redes de otras personas. Este efecto cascada puede hacer que tu obra llegue a las masas en red.
Podemos permitir que los demás creen obras derivadas a partir de lo que compartes. Esta decisión puede dar lugar fácilmente a un efecto bola de nieve que resulte en más creaciones, por parte de la gente que está en los nodos clave de la red y que comparten la misma pasión por crear y compartir.

Cuanta más personas participen en el espíritu del sharismo, más fácil será lograr unos medios de comunicación 2.0 bien equilibrados y equitativos hechos por la gente a su medida. Los medios de comunicación no serán controlados por ninguna persona concreta sino que residirán en la propia distribución de la red social. Los derechos sobre los medios de comunicación pertenecerána todos. Podemos ser productores y consumidores en un sistema de este tipo.

¿Qué ocurre con los derechos de autor? El entorno en el que se comparte está más protegido de lo que se piensa. Muchas de las nuevas aplicaciones sociales permiten configurar fácilmente los términos de uso. Cualquier violación de los términos puede ser perseguida no solo en los tribunales, sino por parte de tu propia comunidad. El público, que se beneficia de la información compartida, puede convertirse también en la salvaguarda de los derechos.

“El sharismo pretende transformar el mundo en un Cerebro Social emergente: un híbrido interconectado de gente y software.

Somos Neuronas en Red conectadas entre sí por las sinapsis del software social. [...]

Cuanto más colectiva sea nuestra inteligencia, más sabias serán nuestras acciones” (Mao, 2008 )4.