Why are we here?

There's something wrong w/ education -- if there wasn't something wrong, then we wouldn't be here

 

TED talks video --

This TED by Sir Ken Robinson called "Do schools kill creativity" catalyzed EduCamp: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

 

Designing the ideal school

 

Allow students to excel -- allow students to go at their own pace

People are different, and not all the same

 

Is it okay to admit that we're different

 

Home schooling -- what was good? What didn't he like?

Get feedback on different things.

 

Jeff -- Didn't think about education while he was in it.

Hacker culture explore and learning on your own.

Eduction is about learning.

From a systems thinking

 

difference between information and knowledge AND knowledge and wisdom

 

System

mutli-perspective -- it's all relative, and there's many different perspectives and points of view

 

 

The map is not the territory

education bootstraps us to the current state of humanity.

 

 

Exploring what's wrong w/ education

 

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Why do we care about education

Sometimes think -- Not learning by telling other people information -- Try to make it a learning experience for everyone.

A trick is to find education topics that are interesting to you as a teacher, and not stuck in a particular curriculum.

 

In Health care, it's one of the only the places where the rubber of science meets the road. But it's a giant political and social system that's pretty fixed that has lots of moving parts that kind of work -- but which set of moving parts would you change to fix it b/c they're in a giant constraint network.

 

It's hard to say it's broken, but hard to say how to fix it.

 

Opportunity since there's a new space that has less constraints and has lots of space to do new stuff in.

 

Opportunity to break into new space.

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How to teach while learning yourself.

From public school system -- hated it

Now in grad school as a teaching assistant and really loving it

 

Organized differently in college -- Don't know what the magic is yet.

 

It's exciting when the learning works -- especially at the other end of grad school. But what are the universal elements

 

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Facet of education is self-learning

Teachers set up environment

But what can the students do to help w/ the learning process.

 

Insane amount of available info that people can teach themselves -- How?

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From community college perspective, Teachers think of students as cows and hate them.

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Didn't like school until he was asked to teach

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Interested in the tools for learning -- esp from the perspective as a mother who is planning on home schooling.

So much info out there, but would like to see a system or a community that helps a parent and a student form those tools.

Being able to think through things and come up with stuff

Working w/ community group that's very child focused.

What matters is How they look at a subject and get the parents involved in teaching.

Parents come up with some great things

 

Break away from model of institution does things for us, but we have the tools to do it on our own.

 

Other virtual and physical environment for people supporting each other.

Modeling creativity

 

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Straw man question -- Give people the tools to learn themselves, but then think -- 2/3 of the world thinks of creationism. IF you had the right tools, then how do you learn the "right stuff"

Do believe in right and wrong -- but there's a tension between giving the right tools vs. what you want them to actually learn with strengthened

 

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wikipedia on home schooling fears of religious extremism

 

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Raised in fundamentalist home schooling

 

What is the right thing to teach?

Taught to question everything -- went to library to learn things

Public school educators weren't taught to question everything.

In some questions it's b/c "I told you so. Obey or I'll fail you."

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Working on home schooling software.

Not about teaching what's right and wrong, put a lot of energy on what they want to do.

Learn from experience.

 

What about social aspect of home schooling?

What about the social aspect of the Internet?

 

On online, you can start to track what people are paying attention

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Social aspects of online learning -- or social aspects -- something very powerful about group learning.

How can you learn how to constructively interact with large groups of people

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Giving people the tools to learn -- social aspects to online learning

At computer learning / teaching -- gets pretty lonely

Use meet-up groups to meet face-to-face

 

End of life learning -- vast untapped resource of learning

people are healthier when people are learning and teaching

 

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How do you have a multi-generational group that reduces stress on both groups

Interesting dynamics involved here.

Logistically, you want to do it. But how?

 

Both parties have to be willing.

Reminiscent therapy -- tell the story of their lives

 

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Loved school, had lots of advanced classes and had lots of great teachers

Friends who were less driven, they didn't learn as much

 

Incentives to become better teachers -- make the teaching field more competitive

Make pay better --

 

How do you assess the teachers

 

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Went to private school and some kids from public schools were just as amazing

Learning how to learn -- we're not given that.

 

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Lots of innovation and culture in Silicon Valley

 

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• What conditions need to exist for learning to occur

cultural, psychological aspects, learning objects, and other system

 

• informal learning
• Assessment

 

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Assessment -- people don't like to be tested

Redefining exactly how to assess people are competitent

 

But what does assessment actually mean?

Assessment is most valuable to student themselves -- that value isn't in a certification -- it can damage people because it gives a false level of competency.

 

How do you scale up assessment and still be fair to students?

"People who have chosen to quest"

 

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What is conducive to a learning environment?

Lots of books on increasing memory and addressing how our brains work.

Lots of insights, but they're not being integrated or being including.

 

 

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When you're addressing a superset, you have to stay focused on the superset

No formal phonics education -- just has a

 

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To make a metric, you have to have a purpose and an exchange value which only happens afterwards

Which ideas make the metric go up and which ones make the metric go down.

 

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What are the goals for eduction? -- Stem from what are the goals of our society?

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Successful Leadership in Online Learning Environments:

Tips, Tools and Lessons of the Virtual University

 

Maryam Webster:

BG: got into a car accident, and then investigated energy therapy based upon accupressure

 

Mary is an Instructional designer implemented Moodle within learning environments

Working in a DTLC Moodle consortium

Bay Area Moodle meetup

 

How they're using the tool

What about the autodidactic learner?

 

moodle.org implements pedagogic environment

Has helpful forums

Martin Dougiamas

 

"Persony" -- web conferencing -- $299 for 25 people

 

 

It's a static medium -- not face to face -- How do you keep the momentum going?

Energy and excitement on the phone call and live interaction, but then there's a post-class letdown.

Created Mastermind group that meets up on a phone bridge one times a week.

 

 

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data structure toys

smaller set of basic operations

 

 

Three R's of Reading, writing and arithmetic were designed with the constraints of paper. Computers have expanded, but newly limited constraints

 

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Learning is about our ability to model the world in different models that give different perspectives of the same problem.

 

how do we behave on the basic level in society. If society changes, then our rudiments

 

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Concerned about data fidelity over time -- natural language processing -- analagous to microformats within text

 

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Home Schooling discussion

 

HIgh school proficiency exam must take it in CA after you're 16

 

 

as a kid

daily

weekly

pre-debate

post-debate

 

Didn't like

 

 

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Alternative Schools

 

Summerhill

http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/

democratically run, feel free to study whatever wish, when they wish, no curricula, no age segregation

 

Sudbury

42% of graduates become entrepreneurs

 

http://www.mountainlaurelsudbury.org/Rithmetic.asp

3 weeks to learn arithmetic w/ small group of kids

parallelism exponentially makes the feedback loop longer

 

 

quote about 'vision without implementation is ...'

 

 

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What's the most important thing you could be doing right now, but why aren't we doing it?

 

 

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What if we totally fixed the education system, but got same distribution of stupidity? How do we distribute privilege, freedom & opportunity?

 

How to distribute privilege, freedom & opportunity?

 

So what is intelligence?

 

factoryjoe: "If nerds were in charge, they'd extinct us into robots." We need diversity in spreading privilege, freedom & opportunity

 

 

We have a disconnect between priorities

 

Why improve education without knowing how it fits within the larger context?

 

We have most of Maslow's hierarchy needs to take care of, so that we can explore cerebral philosophical

 

We're privileged. How do we spread that privilege, freedom & opportunity?

Digital divide

 

We're privileged white kids

 

if we do engage in knowledge production, then how do we distribute it.