Connected Learning

Might the information age have presented us with the opportunity for a fundamental reimagining of the way we educate our children? There's no longer a promise future for our kids. If people don't really learn how to learn and how to engage and how to be flexible and adaptive and find communities and have ideas about things they wanna do now, we're just really in trouble. We really think that part of what's wrong with the current educational system and why people talk about it is broken, it's 'cause it's fundamentally starting with the wrong questions. The educational system often now starts with the questions of outcomes. It starts with what we want kids to learn, what are the goals, and what's the content, what's the material that they need to cover. And then everything is defined by that. It doesn't almost matter who the kids is, so long as we are on pace throught the material and throught the content and reaching those educational standards and those outcomes, 'cause that's our starting point. Our core question is what's the experience we want our kids to have? So the core questions are around engagement, and the soon you start with: is the kid engaged? what's the learning experience we want the kid to have? and then, you have to pay attention to the kid. How do you create a need to know in a kid? That's an emotional question, that's an intellectual question, that's an identity question. And when you start designing learning experiences around that then getting to the content and getting kids to engage in core questions related to academic core, that's actually the easy part. In school we've drawn that out of kids, we're so decontextualised what the are learning, we take it out of context, we just teach them to describe facts, because we are so focus on his outcomes that we forgot the learner and we forgot that we actually have a passion for learning How might education to life if children were to possess a burning need to know? We are so used to know giving responsability for learning to professionals instead of looking at how it's part of the fabric of our interactions with everybody. Education is been framed for a long time as somebodyelse's job. It's the job of the school, it's the job of teachers, schools can't possible bear the burden of school educating young people. All of this spaces, the churches, the home spaces, families, the neighbourhood coffee shop, the person online across the world doing really interesting things, that's all people in groups can help own the learning of any particular young person. and really can contribute. part of this conversation is trying to open up the question of who contributes, and how is ultimately responsible for helping young people survive and thrive and grow up to be curious and engaged citizens. Might we each have a part to play? What we heard from kids over and over again, through all our research is that schools are not in their network of learning, so that they in fact are learning everywhere now, in part because of digital media, in part because they always have. The problem is effective match-making. How the kid find that mentor or that peer who is going to introduce them or support them in developing their interest, make their interest relevant, developing a sense of purpose, and it's not about actually finding the information anymore. How can we use the capacity of these network resources, this social connections to bring people together who want to learn together.. and not the model of how can we deliver content more effectively from a single source to many listeners. and that's fundamentally reconfiguring what we think of what's the problem and goal of education Might this digital age hold the possibility of bringing us closer together? We have a broad set of principals, and a broad set of ideas, that we think need to be at the core of learning for the XXI century. And those principles and desings need to start with the notion of connectiveness. I think our greatest aspirations is that this becomes the carnal of our set of ideas that enable a lot of people in a wide range of fears, feels that take get up and do something with it. Its about expertise that's widely distributed in our society and culture and the fact that anybody can help somebody else to get better at something. It's absolutely work in progress, I don't want to say this too strongly, but it's a work that it never should be finnished. It's a work that should always be in progress, and it's a work that it should neve be afraid to fail