What an exciting-mind-blowing week I’ve had! I have “Skyped” with people from all over the world, participated in Google Hangouts, recommended materials for a peace education project in Indonesia, introduced a few European schools to Canadian child advocate Mary Gordon’s Roots of Empathy, tuned in teachers to the work of Sugata Mitra, the 2013 TED award winner, and his experiment, “Hole in the Wall”, and started work with a number of schools who would like to create an action plan to become compassionate schools.

I am part of an organization called the Compassionate Action Network (CAN) International. Our work started in 2008, in Seattle following an event called Seeds of Compassion. “Seeds” was an historic series of public gatherings, discussions, and workshops that galvanized individuals, networks, and organizations around the world. More than 150,000 people participated in the 5-day event, and another 7 million viewed it on line.

Anchored by the deep wisdom of the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and other luminaries, this community-focused event celebrated and explored the relationships, programs, and tools that nurture and empower children, families, and communities to be compassionate members of society. Each of the days provided those present an opportunity to better understand the real benefits of compassion and concrete steps on how to bring compassion into their lives.

“Seeds” morphed into CAN and continued to work on the concept of compassion locally and globally. Also in 2008, Karen Armstrong, the British historian won the TEDx prize wherein she asked TED to help her create and launch a Charter for Compassion based on the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect. In November of 2009, the Charter was born, having grown from contributions of more than 150,000 people from 180 countries, crafted into a succinct, 312-word pledge. Today the work of the Charter is facilitated by the Compassionate Action Network within several sectors: business, cities, education, religion and with a strong growing interest in the health care industry.

At the heart of CAN is our work with partners. We are now over 200—collectively sharing the important work each does individually and with the end goal of partners helping partners build new collaborations. Partners have an opportunity to post information about their work on our website, through our Facebook Partner page, and through partner calls.

My role with CAN is directing the education sector and includes overseeing our primary
objectives of:

1. working with partners so that their work is more broadly known,
2. helping schools, colleges and universities explore compassionate status,
3. sharing research that demonstrates how practicing compassion leads to many benefits for the individual and ultimately for society as a whole—physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially; and
4. sharing the work of educators who are exploring innovative programs that challenge outmoded assumptions of human nature, and provide a new blueprint for creating a more compassionate world.

As Karen Armstrong wished in her TED talk, we want to reach every school and reacquaint ourselves, colleagues, students and parents with the importance of following through on the Golden Rule, rethinking civic responsibility, acting kindly towards others and being open to compassion.

Learn more about becoming a compassionate organization or school.

Follow the Charter and CAN on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Scoop. it!

In this article, the Chronicle points to one librarian from Duke University who mentioned that the popularity of MOOCs has caught people by surprise. Additionally, “She’s been hearing from instructors that ‘the process of preparing courses for this environment made them rethink’ how they teach their on-campus courses. ‘Faculty have said it’s a huge amount of work but that it’s also a wonderful opportunity’.”  Advice for librarians was also provided at this event including the fact that librarians need to anticipate a global audience when online courses such as MOOCs are opened up to the masses. Librarians were also advised to take a MOOC themselves in order to fully understand the perspectives of participants. 

A librarian from Brown University, Sarah Bordac, also noted that traditional librarian tasks are expanding. “Library personnel might need to negotiate with publishers over course materials, help make fair-use decisions, track down public-domain images, provide digital production services, set up teaching spaces and equipment, and/or provide TAs with extra support, especially when the lead professor is also very busy with on-campus courses. At Brown, Ms. Bordac said, she serves as ;a connector’ among many several different offices and groups, including the university counsel’s office, media services, and the university library.”  Clearly, it takes a village to run a MOOC. 

Finally, a librarian from the University of California at Berkeley noted that the rapid profusion of MOOCs also means an opportunity to educate higher ed faculty about content ownership and opportunities for the dissemination of knowledge, “Jennifer Dorner is the head of instruction and user services at the University of California at Berkeley. ‘This is a real opportunity to educate faculty about the need for owning the rights to their content and making it accessible to other people,’ Ms. Dorner said in one session. ‘This is a really good place for us to educate them about open source and push them in that direction.’”

A couple of years ago, prompted by my studies of Arnold and Huxley as well as the work of Professor Keri Facer, a former colleague and I asked the question to a 21st century audience: just what is the purpose of education? The results were many and varied but, interestingly, few (if any) defended the status quo. In particular, many teachers thought we don’t do a good enough job of treating children as individuals, as holistic people with hopes, interests, dreams and aspirations. Too often, they commented, we see them as means to an end: test results.

Tests, of course, can give us answers – but only if we’re looking for the right thing in the first place. The way that politicians tend to compare the education system in their own country with that of others is through the league tables published as a result of the PISA tests. These tests are taken by a sample of children from countries all around the world focusing on things like mathematical dexterity, verbal skills and logical reasoning. The countries that do well, such as Finland and Singapore, tend to be those that are relatively small in size with a reasonably homogenous culture. However, because PISA is the only measure politicians have to legitimate their educational policies, they tend to wield the results as a large stick to drive preconceived and ideologically-prompted changes.

It may surprise those who haven’t been paying attention to recent changes in education in England that we are on the road to privatising state education. Local authorities are slowly being abolished in favour of academies. These are schools that receive funding directly from the government, removing either a layer of bureaucracy or a method of collective bargaining, depending on your point of view. The remaining ‘legacy’ state schools are being forced to teach an increasingly reactionary and prescriptive curriculum. Academies are free to construct their own. 

There is no doubt about the direction of travel. Any individual deemed suitable by those in charge of an academy, qualified or not, can be a teacher. Teacher training happens on the job and both performance-related and ‘regional’ pay are being mooted in a thinly-disguised move to drive down teacher pay. There are suggestions that the education budget to state schools may not be ring-fenced next year and so could be cut in real terms. It looks increasingly as if Chomsky was correct: right-wing governments defund state education until it breaks under the strain. Private providers coming in and operating in a newly-created marketplace are then welcomed as saviours.

As a parent and as an educator, this concerns me. I believe education to be public good, as something that profits the children’s mind, body and soul – not as something that should lead to financial profit for large corporates. I want teachers to do things in the classroom with an eye on my children’s learning and development, not on making sure they can pass a performance review in order to meet their mortgage payments. 

Schools can, and probably should, be run in line with some business principles. But allowing schools to ‘go to the wall’ (as has been suggested in some quarters) because of the vagaries of the market sounds horrendous. Schools are place where human interactions should take place, not financial transactions. So, while we can (and should) debate at length what should be on the school curriculum, let’s not lose sight of the bigger picture. Education is not something to make some distant shareholders a quick buck. It’s about profiting the people who are going to inherit the earth: our children.

Flickr: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessicamullen/4431643843/]

The principal of the elementary school I attended as a little kid was obsessed with the baking-soda-and-vinegar-volcano “lab.” You know that activity– you spend a ton of time building a volcano out of clay (for best results, add little trees, dinosaurs, etc.), you dump baking soda and vinegar into the hole, and you get to make a mess. It was awesome, and resulted in years of colorful first-grade misconceptions about the chemical structure of lava. Obviously, the real “enduring understanding” of that lesson is supposed to be about chemical reactions: when you combine two substances you can sometimes end up with a very exciting new situation.

This spring, a small team of us at New Tech Network conducted a little volcano experiment of our own. We took two relatively familiar ingredients and combined them to develop and launch two fully online project-based learning courses, offered to students across our national network of innovative high schools. In each course, students were challenged to collaborate virtually with classmates around the country to solve authentic problems.

Flickr: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/25944494@N00/4194944679]

Student teams developed news reports to unpack and analyze unemployment data in their respective regions, planned and mapped sustainable school gardens for elementary schools in different climate zones, and designed and tested parachute prototypes for emergency disaster relief. Just like in our face-to-face schools, learning was driven by student need-to-knows and an authentic purpose, but all of the work was done online, using Echo, our learning management system. And just like in the volcano activity, combining these ingredients led to messy and exciting consequences– and lots of surprising and unexpected lessons.

I don’t want to sugar-coat this– none of us had ever done this before, and our staff, students and teachers struggled. Kids got frustrated when they couldn’t coordinate with teammates across time zones, teachers got discouraged when students’ virtual project presentations crashed and burned, and our national staff had many “how-the-heck-is-this-going-to-work” moments? But students also shared how much the courses taught them about working with people from different communities and using technology to collaborate. They commented about how the projects challenged them to manage their time and communicate problems and tasks really clearly– and how much these skills would benefit them in life beyond high school. Our teachers frequently reflected on the transformations taking place in their face-to-face classrooms as result of their experiences teaching PBL online.

This process has been bang-your-head-against-the-wall-frustrating and heart-exploding-exciting all at the same time. We all get to spend time exploring questions that feel entirely new: What does a developmental rubric for Virtual Teamwork look like? How do we help a 14-year-old develop the kinds of life and work skills that challenge us in our 30s and 40s? What can we learn from our pilot to make the experience better next year? How do we plan and innovate at the same time?

I’m excited about what we’ve learned from our first implementation, and am looking forward to continued learning and refinement in the years to come. I’m also incredibly grateful that this work has given me an opportunity to put on my Curious Second Grader Hat, and remember that new combinations of familiar ingredients can create all kinds of magic.

About the Author: Sarah supports New Tech Network’s team of digital facilitators in the design and development of project-based online courses for students. In 2011, Sarah joined New Tech Network as part of the Network’s virtual professional development initiative. Prior to joining New Tech, Sarah developed curriculum and professional development resources for Teachscape, Kaplan K12, Scholastic, WIDE World, Harvard Law School, and the Smithsonian Institution, and taught bilingual third and fourth grade on the Texas/Mexico border and in New York City. She holds a BA in American Studies and Spanish from Smith College, and an EdM in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This year’s event will feature frequent GETideas.org Hangouts on Air guest Don Buckley, Director of Innovation at the School at Columbia University. 

What is TEDx?

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TED has created a program called TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is called TEDxNYED, where x = independently organized TED event. At our TEDxNYED event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events, including ours, are self-organized.

Registration information is available here. 

Key Findings from this year’s report include:

• Today’s teachers, administrators and parents are increasingly mobile-using, texting, tweeting social media devotees whose personal and professional lives are dependent upon Internet connectivity and online collaborative learning environments. A majority of teachers (52 percent), parents (57 percent) and district administrators (52 percent) are now regularly updating a social networking site, and many are using a personal mobile device such as a smartphone to do that. 
• Four out of ten district leaders (41 percent) in 2012 pinpointed achievement measured by test scores and closing the achievement gap as top concern points for their district, a growth of 21 percent over 2011 responses.
• Teachers are increasingly interested in leveraging technology for activities with students and many are modifying their instructional plans to incorporate more digital experiences. Nearly a majority of classroom teachers (45 percent) noted in 2012 that they were creating more interactive lessons because of having access to technology, an increase of 25 percent in just the past two years.
• A continuation of the multi-year stagnation in funding for new education technology investments is finally forcing school and district leaders to scrap the plans they have on hold, and to test new ways to leverage technology to increase revenue or decrease costs even though some of these approaches challenge conventional wisdom and long held policy positions. In 2012, we see proof of this digital conversion happening right in the principal’s office.Today, over a third of principals (36 percent) say that a new Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) to school policy for students is likely this school year.
• Social media and digital tools and resources have transcended the classroom and are emerging strongly as key components of 21st century school to home communications. 37 percent of parents wish that their child’s teacher or school would communicate with them via text messaging,less than one-quarter of teachers (23 percent) say that texting between parents and teachers is a common practice today.”

Download the PDF of the full report here or view the HTML version. 

In related news, ISTE has also launched a petition calling for an investment in classroom broadband connectivity. Please consider lending your name in support!