Through the Keyhole

Give them freedom to use their intelligence

The hardest thing to copy at Google is not the free food or massages or parking, which anyone can do. The hardest thing to copy and for corporate leaders to get in their heads is that if you hire intelligent people you actually let them use their intelligence.

- Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford Business School

If you give them freedom, they will amaze you. They'll surprise you with what they come up with.

- Laszlo Bock, Vice President of Google

(both cited in Searching for the Best Place to Work?)

Teaching students how to do everything using technology

The digital revolution in schools is not about teaching students to use technology, it's about teaching students how to do everything using technology.

- Chris Dede, cited in Back to the Books (and Laptops)

A profound struggle

There is a profound struggle between two incompatible forms of instruction: passive teaching and active learning.

– Tadeusz Lemanczyk

This is no way to treat professionals

In the last 25 years, spending has risen 240% while performance has barely changed.

We recruit new teachers largely from the bottom 30% of entering college students, train them, and then assign them to the toughest jobs in the most challenging schools with very low pay. When the results fall short, we tell them, “You just have to work harder.” . . . This is no way to treat professionals.

– William Brock, New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce (in Parade magazine, July 6, 2008)

Everyone can learn from each other

Everyone can learn from each other, independent of time, space and place.

– Ryan Bretag (courtesy of David Jakes)

Discussion of Elmore video clip: Instruction at the core

The Web waits for you

[T]he web waits for you. It will hold the information for you until you are ready to learn it, ready to use it. It waits, patiently, always on, always gathering, categorizing and remembering. I can take a week off because the web doesn’t.

– Jeff Utecht, Back from Digital Darkness 2008

The impoverished imaginations of adults

Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults' inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.

 - Alan Kay (Scholastic Administrator, April/May 2003)

 

Cities in crisis

From America’s Promise Alliance and The San Diego Union-Tribune:

We should be more concerned that children don't want to learn

The primary problem (in the U.S., anyway) is that we still have an education system developed for a technological culture that hit its stride a few hundred years ago, in which only a relatively small number of people received an education and in which information was comparatively scarce and had to be disseminated by an authority like a professional scholar.

That culture began to change abruptly in the 20th century. First, the number of kids getting educated skyrocketed. Then, electronics started moving information around really rapidly, so that kids were already getting a tremendous immediate education outside the schools, and questions like "When was the Thirty Years' War fought?" started to lose what little relevance they'd ever appeared to have. With the rise of TV, especially, kids have gotten a lot more sophisticated; they can't see how so much of what they learn applies to their lives outside of school, and most of the time, we can't really give them a good answer. The ultimate result is that the people who have the most curiosity about the world -- children -- end up not wanting to learn things. That's so telling that we should pay a lot more attention to it.

 – moff