Falling in love

Kathy at the Creating Passionate Users blog believes most classroom learning sucks. Reflecting on her daughter's early Montessori education, Kathy concluded that classroom learning that doesn't suck:

…took the time to discover what the kids were passionate about, and used that as a vehicle for motivation.

Paul Graham suggests in this undelivered graduation speech (via Gwen) that in this context a better word than passion is curiosity since "Curiosity turns work into play."

Playfulness is celebrated in this Guardian column written by Philip Pullman (via Jean Burgess). Pullman has some serious advice for our education system:

The confidence to do this [to question], the happy and open curiosity about the world that results from it, can develop only in an atmosphere free from the drilling and testing and examining and correcting and measuring and ranking in tables that characterises so much of the government's approach, the "common sense" attitude to education.

Advice with which, as Jeremy points out, many edu-bloggers agree. Indeed, as Pullman so eloquently closes:

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

I have to pin that to my noticeboard!

Stuck in the middle

In the well curve perspective, Rob Paterson links to Daniel Pink’s Wired magazine article on "the well curve"—a 180 degree shift of the normal distribution curve. Rob believes the well curve has implications for schools:

Our school system is firmly rooted in the middle ground. It means that in the middle are only a few kids. Most of the kids are on the wings.

According to Francis Galton, deviations from the normal distribution would occur only during periods of transition—periods like the Nine Shift. Over at the Nine Shift blog William Draves and Julie Coates point out the inherent weakness of an education system that presupposes everyone's normal:

The problem is that schools try to treat everyone as normal, so they can teach one way, fail to respond to each student's unique needs, and do mass education like a factory does mass production.

Boys seem to be more effected by this failure and the explanations offered by both Rob and Draves and Coates point the finger at the normalising culture of school. Quoted in a BBC News article, Draves and Coates argue that boy's underperformance is because boys exhibit behaviours "like taking risks, being entrepreneurial, being collaborative" that while rewarded in the workplace, are punished by school cultures that encourage regression to the mean.

We live to shop

Yet again Jeremy's got me thinking. In The Rebel Sell, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that far from undermining consumerism, anti-consumers actually reinforce the consumerism they so despise—a rather unsettling message for someone who thought they sympathised with the countercultural message.

In This Magazine Heath and Potter attempt to answer the question: "If we all hate consumerism, how come we can't stop shopping?" In doing so they provide a summary of The Rebel Sell thesis:

…consumption is not about conformity, it's about distinction.

We can't stop shopping because, as Jeremy quotes from Hello, I'm Special, paradoxically: "Individuality is now the new conformity." Therein lies the problem:

As long as we continue to prize individuality, and as long as we express that individuality through what we own and where we live, we can expect to live in a consumerist society.

We express our individuality through the brands we buy. As Heath and Potter observe:

Brands don't bring us together, they set us apart.

One answer, according to Heath and Potter, is to disempower the "Brand bullies" by taxing excessive advertising. Another answer lies within ourselves.

Why is it that we feel it necessary to define ourselves through material possessions? Surely the way we act and the way we treat each other are richer expressions of who we are.

Like Barbie said, "You can never have too much stuff."

The learner knows best

Jeremy links to Rob Paterson's frustrations with the current state of education. Rob's plea is for student engagement through choice. He richly illustrates his point, that:

…when kids follow what they want to learn that they do well,

with his son's story and calls for a school foundered on student choice.

Commenting on Rob's post, Cyn provides a link to the type of school he envisions. On the Full Circle Co-operative School homepage, teacher Scott Davidson offers an insightful reflection on his role:

I've learned that each student knows what is best for herself/himself and I can, indeed, must, act as a guide only.

In a timely post, so typical of the serendipity of blogging, Will Richardson quotes Pew Internet's prediction on formal education:

Enabled by information technologies, the pace of learning in the next decade will increasingly be set by student choices. In ten years, most students will spend at least part of their "school days" in virtual classes, grouped online with others who share their interests, mastery, and skills.

and discusses the role of the teacher in such a future. Frank Carver continues the conversation noting that the role and organisation of schools must also change as students spend more time in virtual classes of their own choosing.

It's about relinquishing authority and control—becoming a community of learners. When will we learn that sometimes the learner knows best?

It's a brand you world

Worthwhile magazine is a mine of inspiration and a refreshing reminder of what is important in our World. Worthwhile's mission is to put purpose and passion on the same plane as profit.

Tom Peters, writing in Worthwhile's blog challenges us to develop an individual brand. What he calls "Brand You." Your brand is your story, a promise to uphold certain values.

Two quotes from Tom Chappell's Managing Upside Down (also via the Worthwhile blog) inform and add value to Tom Peter's advice:

• To serve best, you should know what is unique about you.
• It is generally your values and your gifts that will help you generate a vision of how you can make a difference in the world.

So decide what you value, what makes you unique, how you can make a difference, and get your story out there first. As Tom Peters says, "Be distinct or be extinct!"

Why should businesses blog?

Simple. No one listens anymore to sanitized marketing messages. If you find the right person in your organization to “blog” about your products or services youʼll brand your company as authentic and knowledgeable. Every company has a closet writer, whether or not thatʼs part of his or her job title.

Via Tom Peter's blog, the latest ChangeThis Manifesto: Beginner's Guide to Business Blogging. A good, clear explanation of blogging and RSS. It's free for 15-days, so get downloading.

How to save your life

Human beings are collectors, in part, because our collections tell stories about ourselves. It will come as no surprise then, to learn that Helen Barrett begins her e-Portfolio workshops by asking her participants to reflect on their collection experience.

Technology now allows us to not only collect the tangible, but to collect the intangible too—to record our life experiences. What Trendwatching.com's Reinier Evers calls “life caching:”

…collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.

Googling "life caching" unearthed this Robin Good article which includes insightful quotes from Terry Heaton who, in this blog posting, interrogates life caching from a postmodern perspective:

Postmoderns (Pomos) reject hierarchical Modernism and its institutions, especially those where authority is granted based on knowledge. They don't trust institutional "experts," because they sense an ulterior motive—the furtherance of the institution. And so Pomos rely on their own experiences or those of their "tribe" members, people they trust based on shared beliefs and experiences.

Anticipating the power of aggregating these life caches, Heaton continues:

Life caching enables the documentation and storage of those experiences, which, I believe, will one day lead to the development of an enormous, experience knowledge base. Experience, as the old saying goes, is the best teacher, and imagine the value of, for example, a health database, where you could search the experiences of anybody who had your malady.

Finally Heaton draws a parallel between the function of television news and life caching:

For those of us in the TV news business, life caching has significant ramifications, for isn't that exactly what we do? Our life cache is that of communities, and perhaps there are business models that could be developed to augment viewers' own life caching.

BBC Wales has just that business model. Capture Wales empowers people to tell their own digital story, a selection of those stories are then screened on television.

Power to the people

Bill Gates may have unintentionally attracted a lot of attention at the recent CES, but Carly Fiorina got me listening (via Smart Mobs). The HP CEO, talking about the convergence of our virtual and physical worlds, announced HP’s resolution to ensure technology is people-centric:

"The digital revolution is about the democratisation of technology and the experiences it makes possible," she told delegates.

"Revolution has always been about giving power to the people."

She added: "The real story of the digital revolution is not just new products, but the millions of experiences made possible and stories that millions can tell."

What better way to place people squarely in the centre of the technology than recognising people as storytelling creatures—by empowering them to tell and share their stories using technology.

Resolution revolution

43 Things is a very timely example of social software, described well by Alan, who wonders about its uses. I'll speculate that it is an example of what Ivan Illich, in his vision of learning webs, called peer-matching:

a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

Illich was ahead of his time, he also proposed networks to allow open access to educational [learning] objects and to recommend freelance teachers and educational leaders. The combination of these four networks, Illich's learning web, amounts to the democratisation of education.

We see the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge falling around us. Are schools to be next? Has Illich's time come?

Update: Want to discuss this some more? Join the conversation over at 43 Things.