Fighting Management Preconceptions about Social Learning

I just found this wonderful preso on Social Learning. I kept on slapping thigh laughing as I read… “Oh yeah, that’s a good one!” For me the highlights were:

Yes, Play is OK - you need it to grow innovative, collaborative and fast-adapting employees.

“Control is an illusion” – Okay… this is where I slip into incredulous teenager mode: Duh! You can control what people are learning and sharing about as easily as you can keep water in a sieve.  The presenters note that “80% of learning happens outside” of formal learning systems in their control. This is “Informal Learning” in action. The faster leadership realizes that building a company culture where learning is valued, the quicker they will start fostering a truly effective organization. Also, it’s very important to build the expectation that employees are really responsible for learning (their job and how to enhance their work).

People already share bad information - no kidding. Everyone has experienced the grapevine effect in a workplace. Human beings honestly seek knowledge about the goings on, some need it to function and work effectively without fear. They will even speculate on management’s behavior when they have no information, which is why transparency is less dangerous than keeping your lipped buttoned.

I also really liked the fact that they provided some solutions for measuring ROI (Return on Investment).(CRUD: I actually wrote this section but it got lost in the blog ether when I was trying to save my post)  I think it’s possible to tie a company’s increased success to social learning initiatives through anecdotal stories.  Also, connecting increased levels of innovation could also be possible. Think James Burke’s Connections (the show from the early eighties). Much of the show argued that the worlds most famous and influential innovations such as the combustion engine would not have happened if people did not make connections with each other.  I think if you analyzed the history or development of a particular innovation at your company you can actually trace the connections that were needed to make the innovation happen. You may be able to identify whether or not these connections would have happened with the social networking  efforts in place.

Some excellent points were made, but I suspect that no amount of brilliant arguments will convince the hardcore curmudgeons that insist that Social Learning/Networking is bad and evil. My only question… Can I work for the folks who made this presentation?

Overcoming Top 10 Objections To Social Learning V2

View more OpenOffice presentations from Mzinga .

Schools, Please Don’t Kill Our Creativity

At a workshop I attended yesterday, Barry Dahl mentioned this unforgettable lecture by Ken Robinson at the TED conference. In his incredibly adroit and humorous talk, Robinson maintains that schools today thrash the creativity out of kids. I would argue that the final death knell takes place once they enter today’s corporate work world.

In another inspiring lecture, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO champions the importance of play in productivity of design and innovation.

Tim Brown Teaches Adults How to Play at a Lecture

How can we, as educators promote creativity and play in our classrooms, while teaching important knowledge and skills? I feel that developing curriculum driven by “student created content” is key to developing the creative minds that will build our future. I don’t know about you, but as an old doddering woman, I would rather live in a world built by the next designer of earth shaking technologies and innovative policies that help promote progress and not in a world populated by people who are fettered by rules that squelch creativity and productivity.

“It’s in the making of things that kids actually do their learning”

(Exerpt below is from an article I wrote for our company blog.)

Creating content in schools extends past the traditional class-report or diorama making. I found this wonderful example of the King Middle School in Portland, Maine. I believe that this school is really putting the approaches to 21st Literacy Education in a Action. The video provides examples of how the school integrates subjects like science, English, math with technology education.

Click the photo to view the video. Note the video will open and play automatically in another browser window.

The kids participate in truly constructivist activities, by developing videos, artwork, and collaborating on the development of music and music scores. All of these activities and projects require formal knowledge in writing, math, science, research and history that used to be taught to students via textbooks in an isolated context. Here are a few quotes from the short film that really captured my attention:

“We don’t use textbooks, per se… we do a lot of research in class.”

“The approach is to bring out the best in every student.”

“It’s in the making of things, that kids do their learning.”

The school also partners with businesses like a local printing press to develop products. The students work together as teams to develop items such as books for the press. These students also have the opportunity to work with professionals like the professional documentary maker who help them improve the quality of their videos. They get real-life experience and are encouraged to stretch and deliver quality projects. They are not coddled or isolated from doing ‘real work’ because they are not ready to do it on a ‘professional level.’

As I finished watching the video, I realized that many teachers might have issues with the fact that some students contributed 7 pages of work to a final project while some contributed only three paragraphs. I like the attitude that these teachers at King have that “Everyone does what they can.” Plus everyone should contribute to the project using the skills and talents that they have. Perhaps a student who needs help with math but has kinesthetic talents can choreograph a dance, and teach the other students how to perform the dance to be included in a final project. A student who lags in writing but has design skills might lead the team that develops the costumes or set. Both students are exercising their communication and leadership skills in helping other get their tasks done. Students who are better at writing can help coach these students when they have to do the written component for the project.

I think the comment that sums up the value and power of this approach to education was made by the kids of King Middle School themselves, “No one feels stupid here anymore.”

Why wasn’t I born twenty years later? I would have loved to go to school in a place like this. Seeing examples like this really makes me excited about the work we do here at PLS because I believe that in what we do we strive to make learning experiences effective and powerful.

Change is Good, Change is Natural… Stasis is an abomination to nature

Excuse me while… I chew on this thought for a bit… I may wax philosophical. Things change. The seasons change. The Earth changes.   Geological records have proven that the Earth’s surface has changed many times over it’s long life. People change. Throughout history, technology has changed the way humans live, produce and interact with each other.  Do you think the emerging democracies could have occurred after the Middle Ages and Renaissance without the printing press and proliferation of ideas through books?

But why then do we so cling to the desire to ‘keep things the same?’ I’ve been wrestling with this idea ever since I can remember.  Maybe this explains my love of History. Perhaps humans naturally crave stability because they’ve spent much of their unrecorded and recorded history dealing with the seemingly unpredictable nature of the elements, disease, and natural events.  Animals respond to change via natural selection or development of instincts, but we actively try to stop change from happening or build constructs that allow us to thrive despite change.

What would happen if we had a ‘long memory’ for change?  Who would build communities or cities on a flood plain or riverbank if they had memory or records of constant floods? How would we deal with social change? Would we nod things off as just a fad that would pass or would we actually try to develop laws or social institutions that were meant to adapt to change? I’ve noticed that politicians rely on people’s limited memory of history in order to push their agendas or to get elected or re-elected into office. Sometimes I lament that we live such mayfly lives. Still, having this memory might actually cause use to become more conservative in our actions. Since we could better predict cycles of events because of our personal memories.

Someone had the foresight to build this house on stilts - Image from the Morguefile.

Resources/more stuff:

Why people resist change (from the Slow Leadership Site)

I finally got a Second Life

Now how the hell do I get down… I’m stuck flying, suspended in the air. (okay… I figured it out… click the Fly/Stop Flying button).

My avatar, Bunny Kiwitz, suspended in the air at the “Pier of Culture.”
All I need is an umbrella and a carpet bag.

My avatar, in the Second Life Orientation Plaza with her new ‘outfit.’

Thanks to the TCC conference I was able to get my first taste of Second Life. I’m not fully hooked yet, but intrigued and I see the range of possibilities in here. I can now see what they meant by “steep learning curve” when it comes to learning how to be proficient in S.L. I unknowingly hit the “fly” button and couldn’t figure out how to get down. Also there are so many features and controls to work with that I found it a bit hard to get my bearings. Fortunately, the NMC tutorial ‘plaza’ allowed me to walk through a ‘museum of exhibits’ that showed me how to become familiar with the controls and features in Second Life. I was also able to learn a few things about how to integrate into “Second Life Culture,” such as how to use gestures and how to properly chat with people in a group.

During the conference I also attended a lecture/debate on the popularity and future of Second Life. One of the arguments in support of Second Life as a learning environment was that today’s students interact with and process information much differently than their predecessors. Second Life give them the opportunity to access it in a virtual space as well as interact with peers from all over the globe. These “Digital Natives” expect instant access to information and rely on social networking to get and build information. They have a ‘digital literacy’ because they’ve been raised with interactive technology that we “Digital Immigrants” need to be aware of.

Second Life allows participants to actively build both simulated and fantasy models and interact with these models. It stimulates creativity and promotes simulated learning of real-life scenarios. It provides students with the ability to engage in “situated learning” and as the one lecturer quoted, “work together to create a shared understanding that none have previously possessed.”

The half of this lecture that countered the support for SL, argued that the learning curve for Second Life is so steep that it’s just too frustrating for some learners. They also made the argument that subscriptions to the virtual world are dwindling and that people enter and experiment but they do not stay or continue to return. Second Life is merely another techie fad that will eventually become obscure and dated in the wake of progress.

Another point that this person brought up was that all the businesses that invested in real estate in Second Life are now pulling out. Personally, I think that the failure is due to the fact that they took a rather two dimensional approach to applying SL. They simply used it as only a virtual store. How boring! They could have developed an interactive storyline or even learning material around their products, and, oh yes, they could have given more free stuff. Free stuff always hooks people even if it’s free ‘virtual’ stuff.

I have this theory about these new virtual/simulated environments… that is when we (or most of us who are not digital protoges) become immersed in them our first instinct is not to create new and innovative things. We build what’s most familiar to us. In all fairness to the corporate businesses, they were in a hurry (as they always are) to get a piece of the Second Life action so they hastily constructed what they thought would work.

I believe that both sides of this debate brought up valid points. Though I’m becoming convinced that Second Life does provide participants with the opportunity to learn in a rich and interactive environment. Perhaps in the future it will become easier to learn and use.

I was going for the one piece tracksuit thing… maybe not my style but, oh well.

Does Everything Microsoft Touches Turn to Suck?

I can name a few things that come to mind….the “Ipod Killer,” attempts at Voice recognition software, their MSN web, Vista….

I know they have a few good things (at least from appearance) like the “Surface” project. Though I have never actually interacted the with device, so I can’t give a personal assessment of the tool.

This whole takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft worries and annoys me. Maybe it’s because MS is just again throwing their muscle around rather than focusing on creating new and innovative tools that people will like. Maybe I just don’t like the idea of large, looming bodies of companies that swallow up smaller businesses and then pass them through like refuse. Didn’t these Microsoft executives read the “NEW RULES” for running a corporation? I suppose you could just say that this is ‘normal’ behavior for a large predatory company and we should just write off these actions as expected. But as a consumer, I just want to make sure the products that I have available to me are “usable” from my perspective as a user, not a software engineer’s idea of ‘usable.’

Maybe it’s because I’ve worked in a very dysfunctional corporate environment similar to Microsoft’s, and I’m just assuming that most large corporations operate the same way (with very little imagination and too much politics). The are so fat and lard ridden that they have no choice but to throw their weight around like a corpulent bully, who must rely on manipulative and predatory tactics to maintain his position.

I also know that large companies use their patent attorneys to search out new and innovative processes developed by smaller companies. These patent attorneys work around the clock to develop broad patents so that once they find instances of small businesses and individuals actually developing something that works, they claim the right to the patent. Evil, huh?

I realize that History shows that Microsoft has given us products in the past that have pushed computing forward. Also, so many companies and people have become dependent on their software and tools. They’re big so they have better resources for offering technical support* Gee, I’m starting to sound like that bit in the film Life of Brian where the group of Judean Peoples front (or Peoples’s Front of Judea) asks…. “What have the Romans done for us?!” I just take issue with the way Microsoft does business, and before anyone points out that their behavior as a company is natural for their size and position, it seems that their way of doing business doesn’t meet everyone’s (the end users) needs. Therefore it’s in all of our interests to have other companies large and small who can fill these niches for us.

But when it comes to this recent takeover, I really can’t see them improving tools like the photo sharing tool Flickr. Also, having had a great deal of experience using Microsoft tools like MS Project and Sharepoint. I really don’t get the feeling that Microsoft really has a cultural appreciation of usability. Maybe Microsoft also suffers from the innovation drain, or their execution of new products just stinks. I could be wrong, but my intuition tells me that companies who are innovative and dynamic usually draw the right types of people who can think, create and implement dynamically. Maybe the combination of the doldrum suburban location and the restrictive politics and culture hurts some companies who can’t draw ideal teams of innovators and star project developers, I don’t know.

• Robert Scoble isn’t cool with Micrsoft
• Read Scoble’s post-I love his suggestion to to post Ballmer’s Stanford speech up in the Google halls to motivate every Google employee push the company forward
• When you type “Microsoft Sucks” into Google you get 1,940,000 results.

*Though one might argue with a well designed product you need less support.

What have the Romans done for us?

Pepino in Alicante

WordPress is really bull right now. I can’t seem to publish changes to my earlier posts, and I don’t have the time to worry. I wanted to scream this morning because I added a long write up of some of the shops, places and businesses we’ve frequented here… including a youtube video of Pepino… and it all disappeared after clicking the “Save” button.

I’ll try to post the vid again here. Note, the picture quality is bad but the sound’s the best quality of the videos I’ve found on youtube. Hopefully of the countless people taking video at the bar performance last night, one of them will post the vid of the performance.

More, video and sounds on digital music here:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/

Distance Learning Conference – My notes

I’m currently attending the Distance Learning Conference in Madison, WI (when I have time I will post the conference stats/details), and will post my notes and general reflections on the lectures that I attend.

Please note – these notes are not complete, I’ll fill out the details to some of these notes more as I go along.

Problem Based Learning for Online

Margaret Drew and Lori Mardis

Note: clicking on the image above will open up the full concept map.

 

Suggestion: Provide a collaborative lab project.

• Provide something that’s broken and get people to fix it.
• Multiple solutions to complex medical prob. (suggestion – use blog).
• Idea-make people take an active task oriented solution
• What…about using blogging to facilitate discussion/collaboration on the process.
• Creation of individual learning scaffolds… learning is meaning full
• Began with open-ended ill structured problem that initiated discussion.

Building Virtual Communities

Dr. Rena Pallof & Dr. Keith Pratt
Importance of online Community

Now, I’ve always suspected that it’s not okay to just dump and run when it comes to delivering online content, but now it seems that the novelty of this realization is becoming dated. This presentation highlighted the importance of instructors establishing a rapport and building a ‘community’ among the students. Big takeaway for me was the presenter’s suggestion not to openly communicate intent of building community because many learners will protest because they’re just in the class to get credit… and or NOT to make friends.

I believe that it’s important to demonstrate the value in learning from your peers by providing learning experiences that allow the students to do this. Those people who continue to want to be anti-social can do so, but not at the expense of the rest of the students. Also courses an the purveyors of a curriculum who employ this social approach to learning should continue to do studies and investigations to the efficacy of this method of learning and provide education on the importance of virtual communities.

——————-

Note: the “suggestions” are part of my notes to myself not the lecture.

Construction of Online learning community in which instructor is on the same level as students as a contributor… research says.

Intentional work on the development of presence online as well as other means which community can emerge are important… on student learning satisfaction.

Give the instructors and opportunity to communicate with students as a human level.

Suggestion: Encourage Office Hours / Train Instructors on how to do this effective

• Need to be intentional and create the environment… you have to make the effort.
• Aspects of learning:
  • Teaching students howt o inquire/construct knowledge
  • Teaching students to become self-direct

Suggestion: I-Search Papers

Competencies of Online Instructors (Martha Davidson):

• Creating a Learning Community that is Intellectually Exciting and Challeging
• Pepper collaborative activity throughout the course
• Encourage learners to perform to the best of their abilities
• Demonstrate Effective Use of Group Dynamics and Dialogue – need to know when to intervene and when not to intervene
• Use a variety of methods other than lecture
• Stress the interrelatedness of the complete curriculum and the value
• Know workplace trends and perspectives
• Draw out creativity, innovativeness, and ideas in a collaborative manner
• Integrate curriculum designed to provide learners with experientially based learning environment
• Evaluate learning outcomes
• Continue personal development

Presence

1. You must be able to connect with the people in the course.
2. You need to establish a sense of rapport/ and portray yourself as a ‘real’ person in the online environment
   1. Non Example: professor who put his whole CV online
   2. QUESTION: Do you think there’s a level of infomality in creating this presence that some instructors might not be comfortable with? How do you get them comfortable with this?
3. When there is a high degree of interaction between these participants…

Social Presence Online Correlates with:

• Increased learner satisfaction
• Greater depth of learning
• sense of belonging to a learning community
• Increased perception of learning
• Begin the course by focusing on the development of social presence.
• BUT DON”T TELL THEM THIS…. (They say…I didn’t take this class to make friends… I just want to take the class to get a grade).

Techniques

• Give minimal guidelines (note to self – don’t make up fussy rules)
• Let students know -It’s NOT okay to do all your posts on the same day
• Agree on what’s a substantial post
• Allow them to disagree

Suggestion: offer modeled examples and many practice opportunities for instructors. For example show them samples of chat discussions (recordings, simulations), have them practice in various online activities

Working as a Team: Collaborative Online Course Development

Emily Hixon, Ph. D

This was the best lecture/activity I’ve attended at the conference so far.

She provided 4 case studies of working with Faculty and SME’s talked about the challenges of working with faculty to develop an online course. She outlined the challenges and provided suggestions for selecting Faculty participants. I’ll post more details later including some interview criteria she listed for selecting good Subject Matter Experts (or Faculty).

One of the biggest takeaways I got from this was… bottom line – you need to find SME’s who are collaborative and can work on a team of folks who also communicate their process and progress along the way. Moreover, you have to find a SME who really believes that teaching online is possible.

FRIDAY’s LECTURES:

Managing Flash Game Development

Jon Aleckson

Another great lecture and probably one of the best here at the conference, that I was able to attend… because the presenter basically confirmed my hunch that creating really great learning activity requires a well-balanced team with the right skills and doing this takes moolah. If you want to be stuck with word documents and handouts then discount the need for these types of people on your team or look to moving into the online publishing business.

Biggest Takaways

• Good Game Design Requires a Superlative Team including:
  • Instructional Designer/Writer
  • Artistic Illustrator
  • ActionScript Flash Programmer
  • Project Manager
• DONT SKIMP IN HIRING (Note: I will post my notes on each of these position descriptions later)
• Using CMMI (CapabilityMaturity Model) – importance of logging time for data collection purposes and learning for future teams and projects. It is important to communicate intent for data collection to employees (positively)
• Use a Wiki for Knowledge Management/Capture – Saves time builds knowledge
• Brainstorming tools:
  • Learning objectives and content outline
  • Activity List
  • Benchmarking
  • Include people with different roles!
• Game or Simulation Continuum (3 dimensions)
  • Roles
  • Goals
  • Interactivity

Using Webcasting technologies

Coco Kishi and Tomoko Traphagan

What students wanted out of player technology

• Wanted to see what the instructor was doing clearly
• Synchronized audo, video, slides (clearly see the blackboard or slides
• Content Searching
• Playback and Speek Control
• Flexible Viewing Controls
• Bookmarking
• Annotation

MySpace is not YourSpace

View the slides from the link here: http://flynnfoley.typepad.com/alan_foley/presentations/index.html

Christy actually took better notes than I did during this presentation. Check them out.

I really liked the fact that these presenters encouraged us to think about the consequences of technology and also really question whether or not some learning media were truly appropriate for all learning.

Flat world, tolerant world and the heart of a Samurai

Sometimes serendipity rules, and I mean rules as in reigns not rocks.

Yesterday, Ronnie Ann of the Work Coach responded to a comment I made on her blog about job seekers need to develop a “Ronin” attitude and approach to looking for employment in a post on her blog. It occurred to me sometime ago that because we cannot compete with our lower waged counterparts in the “East,” that the only way one can remain employable in the Western world is to emphasize and flaunt the less ‘technical’ attributes as an employee, namely one’s creativity and people-oriented skills. Hopefully, you’d find an employer who shared the same view as you instead of someone who was just looking at how many years experience you had writing xml or tinkering with Visual Basic (ugh!). Still, one must abandon the idea that most employers are no longer looking at you as a long-term investment or an employee that will give a good chunk of their lives to a company and embrace the notion that you drive your own employment and literally ’serve no master.’ Therefore, you must approach any engagement of work like Ronin or masterless samurai.

Serendipity struck because yesterday I also finally watched the MIT video of Thomas Friedman speaking about his book “The World is Flat.” Because the world is flat, we need to worry about our employability in the West. The whole idea that we need to train or educate folks to ‘think on their feet’ ran through my head the rest of the evening.

Everyone now has the same tools?

What are you going to do with those tools?

It’s our imagination that sets us apart.

How are you going to use your creativity?

Unfortunately, our education system is still haunted by the educational needs of the factory age (video link). This was an age where the common commands in school were…sit in your seat… learn by rote, shut up and behave and fit in! As the business man quoted in Friedman’s book pointed out:

The global economic playing field is being leveled and you Americans are not ready.

Friedman insists that our greatest asset in this new and flat world is our imagination. He also points out that technology allows us to collaborate with others on a global scale. More importantly, economies will be driven by packs of individuals working together. Sort of like bands of wandering samurai? The possibilities that result from global collaboration of imaginative minds are endless. For example, musicians and writers from different countries can develop works together, thus, allowing various cultural perspectives to contribute to the development of artistic works. Global collaboration between programmers and application developers has resulted in phenomenal products such as Mozilla Firefox, and Linux OS.

Today, we are interacting with people from other cultures both within and outside of our borders at an increasing rate, therefore we Americans should rely on what we’ve learned or ‘did not learn’ from our cultural history as a nation of diverse groups in working with people all over the world.

Music from the Yoshida Brothers, clips from the anime Samurai Champloo

Reggio Emilia – The environment is the ‘third’ teacher

Reggio Emilia educational approach and philosophy insists that children learn readily from their environment, and there for the environment is the ‘third’ teacher. I’m assuming that the teachers/parents and the child themselves are the first and second teachers.

So much has been written about this educational approach that I posted links to information below. You might wonder what an instructional designer is doing by focusing on pedagogy rather than adult learning theory. Perhaps it’s a result of my own efforts to deconstruct myself as a learner to better understand the subject of how to teach not just children but everyone regardless of their age. Next, I need to understand learning from the perspectives of others.

Also, I have this hunch that really building people who are ‘creative-workers’ takes more than just giving them internet access and the opportunities to collaborate. We need to think about how to raise these workers from the ground up. True businesses do fund a lot of educational events, but does it ever occur to them that helping people grow in understanding alternative ways of thinking starts from lessons you learn at a very young age?

I don’t believe that Reggio Emilia is the one and only approach to education. It’s an example of a model that is ideal. However, I believe that one of the cornerstones of a good education must be to provide learners with examples of learning that promote them to ask questions of their learning? To ask questions about what they observe and to learn from their environment. Yes, yes, yes… they still have to memorize times tables and Latin and Greek roots. Because naturally these are tools for learning. The focus should be on making connections with the rote learning and tools and application in the real world. Not just with storybook math problems about people taking trains and making connections. Children should be provided with opportunities to create their own story problems from their own experiences. True, the teacher still has to be an active guide helping these children achieve their questions and their answers (when possible). Teachers should take the role of post-modern mini-Socrates.

Not that this is the only example of this, but building a website offers children the opportunity to learn and apply knowledge and skills. Can you see where the language-arts, math, art, teambuilding skills are applied through these questions? The list below is just a start.

• Who is going to do the work?
• How will we divide the work?
• How will we work together and follow needed schedules to accomplish our work?
• What is our subject matter? Why is it important to us?
• How will we produce the written content?
• What standards will we hold for the written content?
• What sizes (in inches/pixels) do we want for our webpages?
• How do we reduce images that we find so they fit here proportionally?
• What colors should we use?

What is Reggio Emilia?

Read More…

Side note and commentary – One of the things that frustrates me about education in general in our country is we (unintentionally) beat the desire to learn and explore out of students with the fundamental structuralist nature of or education approaches/systems. There’s so much emphasis on promoting creativity and the free flow of learning with younger children, but then how do we keep this going as children get older. Or do we hope that children have life-shaping experiences that cement the love of learning for them?

Links and Resources (some to start):

Reggio Emilia overview and links to books on the subject

Unpacking Observation and Documentation: Experiences from Italy, Sweden, and Australia *(Collected Works) – a collection of articles which includes observations by Gunila Danberg on an attempt to adopt Reggio Emilia practices in Swedish Schools. Some of the observations on being adaptive and making sure that a school/culture approaches R.E. to fit and involve “the whole organization” is important. Also, this paper treats some key questions in applying Reggio Emilia (and any other approach) in shaping a child’s learning and success at learning, do we refer to the ‘ideal’ pedagogical model of the child? How does this restrict us in educating the child?

Aesthetic Codes in Early Childhood Classrooms: What Art Educators Can Learn from Reggio Emilia* (Article)

Discovering Regio Emilia, Building Connections Between Learning and Art *(Paper)

*Available thru ERIC

Media-rich can = learning bonanza (so can teaching from the child’s environment)

I tend to learn better and have things sink in deeper when I see real-live examples of things. Call that a failing of my generational learning style.

Now, I happened to wander over to Allanah K’s podomatic site, and I was able to see some examples of students learning using web media such as podcasting and blogging that were inspirational. It’s really nice to see children being stimulated to learn or even apply what they learn. They are being encouraged to engage in web media-rich environment and even reach out to people all over the globe, and therefore learn from them. I believe in America we are so bent on teaching to tests (due to political influences and the obsessive desire to quantify learning via numbers and stats) that it’s difficult for teachers to have the freedom or ability to use new media to teach.

I recently debated with a boomer member of our family over the need for students to learn the old-way… the rote way at our “4th of July” gathering. He insisted that the reason why they pushed the testing is because of the experimental failures in education during the 70’s and 80’s. So we need to make sure that student’s learn the basics. I replied “…and then what…?” I said, failure aside, the testing is doing more harm than good because you don’t have rich curriculum which creates a learner who can successfully think or think creatively.

Being creative isn’t just about being spontaneous and helter-skelter. It’s not just about being free-form and spirited and unconventional. Being truly creative requires discipline. But we can’t even begin to marry the connection between discipline and creativity when we are teaching to tests. I love to learn, and sometimes I have to push myself a little harder in the motivation area than say a seven year old, but I realize that if I don’t put my 2-3 hours a week of learning Flash Action-scripting, I’m never going to be able to make the things I covet on other people’s websites. (Though I may never make them perfectly, at least I’ll understand what went into making them). If I learn from others and try to apply what they learned, I may make something good or I might help myself and others make connections into what they wouldn’t have seen on their own.

If the US wishes to truly take advantage of the creative economy we are really going to have to get our butt into gear and make sure our children are learning to be creative, and think creatively. More we have to wash ourselves of this notion that creativity is for ‘free-spirited’ social anomalies. My greatest fear that this drive to test will continue to hinder us. Testing was there when I was in school and I fear it will always be there, but I suspect that over the decades schools and districts have learned to “duke their stats” in order to survive. That’s human nature – play the game (and cheat at it if you must) in order to win/survive.