The knowl­edge nec­es­sary to func­tion suc­cess­fully and fol­low a career was seen to already exist: It could be handed down from experts and lead­ers to learn­ers and work­ers. In the Indus­trial Age, cur­ricu­lum devel­op­ment was a mat­ter of select­ing the most impor­tant knowl­edge to trans­mit to stu­dents; experts decided what knowl­edge to mass-prescribe and in which sequence. Jane Gilbert and Rachel Bol­stad (amongst many oth­ers) ques­tioned the tra­di­tional con­cept of…

In 2010, I published a prose-poem called “I Am Learner,” which was an attempt to distill the fundamentals of my philosophy of education into as few words as I could manage. At its core, “I Am Learner” tells us that the learner, even in the context of the classroom or the lecture hall–in a formal “taught” environment of any kind–will always in essence be a self-directed learner. Therefore, I would…

In a piece in the Independent in 2011, Gor­don Brown wrote: “The inter­na­tional aid sys­tem for edu­ca­tion is fail­ing the world’s children.” He was intro­duc­ing his UNESCO report, Edu­ca­tion for All: Beat­ing Poverty, Unlock­ing Pros­per­ity. On a number of occasions over the past six years, I have been able to watch the work of UNESCO close up–and in the process gained considerable respect for the organization. In keeping with that, I do believe that this report is a…

I often hear faculty debate the challenges of teaching with emerging technologies at the community college level.  Community college classes are the epitome of diversity — in any given class you are likely to find a mixture of students who are learning English as a second or third language, students with known and undiagnosed cognitive learning disorders (dyslexia, dysgraphia, etc.), students who have not yet passed basic skills requirements, students…

In the industrial era, organizations became more powerful by being bigger; in the Social Era, companies can also be powerful by working with others. While the industrial era was about making a lot of stuff and convincing enough buyers to consume it, the Social Era is about the power of communities, of collaboration and co-creation. In the industrial era, power was from holding what we valued closed and separate; in…

A Generation of Personalized Learners   The data from the 2011 Speak Up survey  demonstrates that by very young ages, students are using digital and, more increasingly, mobile technologies to collaborate with their peers. Nearly half (46%) of high school students have collaborated on homework assignments using Facebook outside of class time, and one in ten have tweeted about an academic topic.  And the percentage of kids owning smartphones has…

The medium of video has been through a revolution in the past decade.  How we create it, how we share it, how we access it, and how experiencing it affects our lives has transformed multiple levels of our society, as well as reshaped the values and learning patterns of younger generations.  Yet the way college professors use video to foster learning in their classes has changed much less significantly during…

How does a learning space inspire the creative and collaborative learning needs of Generation C?  The traditional “brick and mortar” defined space, furniture, and flexibility of learning time does not align with the idea of mobile learning, personalized learning schedules, and opportunities to learn beyond the classroom walls. What is quickly emerging is the definition of space — not as the action of what will occur in it, and not…