Who benefits most from the current model of higher education? While the existing model may have served post-secondary students well in times past, there is increasing evidence that we need to rethink the extent to which it is meeting the needs of today’s modern learners. For decades successive generations have accepted and built on what […]
Is Higher Ed Broken? Read More »
A few days ago, a superintendent who I respect very much sent me this Twitter message in the middle of a back and forth about what real, relevant change in education looks like. “Too many look for cookbook recipes to use; unfortunately more educators are cooks than chefs.” That really got me thinking, especially in
Are You a Cook or a Chef? Read More »
Where does school improvement end and transformation really start? I don’t know about you, but more and more I am hearing the terms used interchangeably, and if you throw in school reform the conversation can get very muddy. While reform is a term most often applied to ‘fix’ a school or school system that is
The Science of Transformation Read More »
The future of work for our children can pretty much be summed up as follows: If they’re only ready to do work that is grounded in routine tasks, regardless of whether or not those routines are physical or intellectual, they’re probably not going to have a lot of work to do in the future. And even if
Is There a “Future of Work”? Read More »
In recent times I have become quite intrigued by the impact assumptions have on the effectiveness of our decision making, and sadly our wonderful world of education, and in particular edtech is too often cluttered with a myriad of unfathomable assumptions on which poor decisions are made. As an example we could start with some
The Era of Sanitized Computing Read More »
It’s been about 16 years since I published my first blog post. I was there at the birth of Twitter and Instagram and delicio.us and most of the other social media tools that are in wide use today. And I’m sure I’ll be an “early adopter” of whatever the next great connective tool is. But
Making Modern Learning Read More »
It’s hard to think of many words that are more misused or abused in our schools than “vision,” and even if we discount the number of times it’s confused for mission, its role as the North Star too often seems to be trivialized if not by definition, then certainly by execution. Certainly the article Will
How Bold is Your Vision? Read More »
I have a standing search in Google News that lets me know when there are ever any new stories in the world that contain the following three words: school, technology, and learning. It’s not that I don’t have enough to do already without scanning the usual 15 or 20 articles that crop up on a
How Not to Change Culture in the Classroom Read More »
About two weeks ago, I ran a whole day workshop at a large, high-performing public elementary school. We’d been working for most of the day around their plans to move to a modern learning environment, but as is typical of many schools their use of technology had really only played a marginal part in their
Knowing What You Need to Know Read More »
From time to time, I grow weary of the shallowness of the discussion around education and technology and change. I’m in one of those cycles right now, I think. (It’s in some way attributable to the general emptiness of the current political rhetoric, I’m sure. There’s a picture of Donald Trump in the dictionary when you
Don’t you look forward to those times when you walk into a classroom and the place is alive with learning? It might be kids lying on the floor with their laptops, some connected up to control devices, others remotely running robotics, while over in the corner there is a a cluster of students staring at
Reflections on a Parallel Universe Read More »
Last week on my own blog, I posted an essay by a high school student who was assessing the state of his education. It is marked, he writes, by a state of uncertainty and inconsistency. Here’s a snip: Kids love to learn. They hate school. School has become a life draining institution that takes passionate,
Our Uncertain Moment Read More »
About 5 years ago I worked with a small team to set up a research and development facility known as ideasLab in a Western suburb of Melbourne. It was an exciting project, built around answering a simple question: What’s now possible? The premise of the question followed a national initiative which meant that more than
Captured in Context Read More »
“My students love it,” she said. “It hasn’t changed the content, but it has definitely changed the way I deliver the content.” That from an article on what I consider to be the oh so awful wonders of tablet technology and more in a school as reported by the Houston Chronicle. A sentence that in many ways
EdTech vs. EdLearning Read More »
As we start the new calendar year, and in southern climes a new school year, it’s probably a good time to test our holiday brains with some simple questions around what we call “school time.” Have you ever wondered who actually decided that around 180 days was the perfect amount of time students should spend in
In Changing Times Should We Consider Changing Times? Read More »
