BRB Blogs

My mom has started a blog.

It's not every day that I get to say the person 50% responsible for me started a blog. This happens to be one of those days. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce brblearning, written by none other than Barbara Rubin Brier, also know as my mom.

She is an educational change consultant and I expect her blog will talk quite a bit about the intersection of education, change and technology. She's an incredibly smart lady and I highly recommend people pop over, give it a read and say hi (the site was designed by me as well).

For those loyal readers, you may have caught some of her writing on this site. If not, you can go back and read it.

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know and say congratulations mom, I know you'll do great.

And for a little Google help, her name is Barbara Brier or Barbara Rubin Brier.

Alrighty, I'm off to Dublin for the weekend. If you're in the neighborhood and fancy a pint, drop me a line. Until then, everybody have a great weekend.

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New Education Metaphors

It's time to stop thinking of education as a transfer of knowledge and start thinking of it as a gateway to learning.

[Editor's Note: This morning on my walk to work my mother and I discussed some of the ideas in yesterday's Education 2.0 post. As we were talking she was taking down some notes, which she sent to me after the conversation. I have then taken what she's written and added some of my own thoughts in italics.]

As you might have suspected, your post struck quite a chord with me. First, let me say how flattering it is to be considered in the same thought as George Siemens, who is my most recent educational hero. I do appreciate your bias on my behalf!

I love what Siemens had to say about visiting virtual museums as 'visiting content.' It always grates on me to hear educators talk about 'integrating technology in the curriculum,' which is on just about every school improvement plan I've ever seen. They definitely don't grasp that as far as the internet is concerned, it's the "curriculum" that must be integrated. They are indeed still " … fixated on the notion of learning content."

To quote you quoting McLuhan, in terms of the internet, only the early adopters have really even thought about what 'the medium is the message' really means. As we discussed this morning, in the traditional educational model, the teacher and textbook were the media – they were the locus of knowledge and authority. Keeping in mind that the word 'curriculum' stems from the Latin for 'current' (as in a river), the 'course' for students was teacher and content-driven. But when the internet is the medium, there is no central authority or locus of control; there is just the current -- the flow and movement of information. Which relates back to my idea of idiocentricity, which puts the user at the center of their information universe.

This analogy seems particularly appropriate to your objection to the phrase 'surfing the net.' As you've said, on a surfboard you're a passenger on a wave – re the net, on a wave of information. But on the internet, you can't be a passenger, you have to be a navigator or explorer. When we discussed it this morning, we concluded that before the internet, every medium had navigational control built into it. Television has a finite number of channels and books have pages. But the internet subsumes all of that, it is essentially infinite. We could visit an almost endless number of pages and, thanks to those behind intranets and the like, never reach the end. The only real navigational elements we have are built into the structure of the medium itself in the form of hyperlinks. For additional navigation we must turn to websites like search engines, furthering the idea that the medium is truly the message.

All of these factors act to put the user/learner in the position of having to learn how to control the content – how to use it for the end that suits his/her own purpose. To get back to education, basically, teachers will increasingly have to be learner-driven – they will have to prepare young people for the reality of a world in which information is both limitless and increasingly accessible – if you know what you're looking for and how to look. The marketing world is feeling the same heat, just look at the number of companies encouraging brand co-creation.

You used the word gateway to describe this new role, contrasting it with broadcast, which is a fascinating way to look at the change in the very concept of how teaching must change. Teachers should be a gateway to the world for their students – helping them explore learning from an access point of their own choice.

I've been thinking about this since your last post on Intention, Attention and Metadata vis a vis what motivates kids to learn, and for most kids, I think it's entering the learning stream from a place of personal interest or curiosity. It's like the whole video game thing and the intrinsic reward of getting to the next level. The trick is to build metacognitive awareness -- not just how to play the game, but understanding what it has taken to get there (a very McLuhanesque concept, actually.) I think that piques curiosity -- makes the player want to, say, read and write about game-playing, creating games, etc. When you follow that course, it very naturally integrates reading, writing, science, math, history … all the things we want kids to understand, and in a very interdisciplinary way. That takes you right back to Siemans connectivism theory -- and to the internet as a metaphor for how the brain works.

You said that metadata is what leads to metacognition. You need to understand the pieces -- the unbundled pieces -- that make the whole before you can understand the thinking behind your thinking. And that's where this needs to go … I think students have to want to understand the pieces, and the only way to do that is to help them find an access point of high interest and then help them become aware of the connections. Then it becomes a facilitated conversation in which both teacher and student are learning. How to get there, however, is a very tough question!

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Education 2.0

While we're all busy talking about reforming media, some of those same ideas could help the school system.

Education is a very big issue. While we're all busy talking about 2.0, America's children are being taught like the computer has yet to be invented. If we think making change in the media/tech world is hard, try your hand at education. Trust me, I have a mother whose job it is to find ways to help schools connect with students the system's disenfranchised.

Unfortunately there's not a lot of money in fixing schools, so smart people tend to use their brains for other causes. Luckily, there are a few brilliant people who do it anyway, like my mom and George Siemens.

In a recent entry about a roundtable discussion he had with museum professionals, Siemens discusses his response to the concerns of the group around their "desire to get people to use virtual museum resources." Siemens writes:

I think this is the wrong question. People don’t want to visit your content. They want to pull your content into their sites, programs, or applications. This is a profound change, largely not understood by educators. We are still fixated on the notion of learning content, and we think we are making great concessions when we give learners control over content (and start to see them as co-creators). That misses the essence of the change: learners want control of their space. They want to create the ecology in which they function and learn. Today, it’s about pulling content from numerous sites and allowing the individual to repurpose it in the format they prefer (allowing them to create/recognize patterns). Much like the music industry had to learn that people don’t want to pay for a whole album when all they want is one song, content providers (education, museums, and libraries) need to see the end user doesn’t want the entire experience – they want only the pieces they want. We need to stop thinking that learners will come to us for learning content – our learning content should come to them in their environment.

What does this actually look like? Well, it means that our education platforms should be designed to allow for learners to pull our content into their space. We need to make content open and available to be accessed so that exploration and dialogue can happen on the learner’s blogs, wikis, or personal eportfolios. It’s not about us, it’s about them. The dialogue and learning will happen on their time, in their space, on their device. We must create the ecology that allows for maximum innovation, so that the greatest number of recombinations are possible.

Sound familiar? Of course it does, this is unbundling at its finest. Those same ideas we've been talking about to reform media can be used to fix the educational system. After all, it's pretty much the same model. For years educators have broadcast their teachings to students who were expected to provide their full attention and unwavering belief. Then all of a sudden technology starts to fragment that attention when students start clicking around the internet and realize that following your own path is not a bad thing. Add in the fact that all of a sudden that institution at the center of every school, the library, is increasingly meaningless and you realize that schools are stuck in a world that's passed them by.

So what can we do to help? Well, I think we can start by including them in the conversation. After all, if you really want to change the world, there's no better way than starting when they're young.

My question to everyone is what other 2.0 models could be applied to the educational system? Think about it.

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It’s All About the Relationship

We all need someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages our personal and/or professional growth.

By Barbara Rubin Brier

In my last post, which I intended to be about mentoring, I got waylaid by a connection that took me by surprise. What I learned from that is that blogging can be a very self-indulgent enterprise. Self-indulgence is certainly nothing to be sneezed at – who better to indulge? But on reflection, I realized that there was something I really wanted to say about mentoring before my days as Noah’s guest blogger expired.

As I said, after close to a year of research on principal mentoring, it all really came down to this: having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable. Not to belabor the point, but … duh!!! It’s all about the relationship. What we seem to forget is that it’s always been all about the relationship, whether we’re students, teachers or principals.

Here’s my point: it is ironic -- and extremely unfortunate -- that schools can’t seem to retain that information. They’re always looking for a magic bullet here or there, when we all know that a good teacher and/or mentor (they’re often synonymous) can change a student’s life. The movie, In and Out, springs immediately to mind: a former student, receiving an academy award, thanks his high school English teacher. The movie may be about the accidental outing of the Kevin Kline character, but the situation – thanking a teacher in a time of personal accomplishment – is pretty ubiquitous. (It works in the reverse as well, witness Noah’s previous post.)

Sadly, being an educational change consultant, I see school improvement initiatives come and go all the time -- so often, in fact, that veteran teachers generally respond to new ideas with the attitude that ‘this too shall pass.’ (The upside of this attitude is that it’s enabled many educators to withstand the stress of No Child Left Behind – hopefully, it will pass soon!)

But skeptical as I may be, I applaud the growing interest in principal mentoring and sincerely hope schools and school districts heed the need for leadership support. (It wouldn’t hurt if the typical central office bureaucrats assumed some responsibility for this, either!)

Then, if we could develop more comprehensive teacher and student mentoring programs, and remember that having someone who genuinely listens, supports and encourages your personal and/or professional growth is invaluable, we might actually be able to make a consistent difference in young people’s lives.

As I’ve said before, in the long run, I think that the role of secondary school teachers will focus more on things like mentoring and facilitating higher order thinking. But until then, what we desperately need in our poorer communities and urban centers are teachers, administrators and people like you and me – people who care about kids and are willing to be there for them – to facilitate their learning based on their individual needs (which often have nothing to do with academics!)

So become a mentor! It offers as many rewards to the mentor as it does to the mentee. My sister just signed up with an organization called iMentor, which operates in the New York metropolitan area and is specifically geared to electronic interaction, but almost every major school system has some sort of student mentoring program. Just call your local school, district office or board of education to find out and sign up. That's it -- that's what I wanted to say about mentoring.

P.S. This is my final entry as Noah’s guest blogger, as I’m off to GWU for parents’ weekend and then to Providence for a conference. So I’d like to thank Noah for trusting me with this. It is all about the relationship -- and it means the world to me.

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Connecting with Connectivism

There's a new learning theory on the block and it really embraces the internet.

Last week I wrote about bringing on an education revolution. A few connections away from that post was an essay titled Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age by George Siemens, which I finally got around to reading this afternoon. In the essay Siemens clearly sets up why it's time for a new learning theory, explaining that "Over the last twenty years, technology has reorganized how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn. Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments." I would even take this a step further and say that it's not only reorganized all these things, but it's also changed how cognitive we are of this organization. It's allowed us to be aware of our awareness, metacognitive if you will. As I've mentioned in the past, this perfect picture of networking we call the internet gives us unparalleled peeks into how our networked brain operates.

With all that said, Siemens presents the principles of connectivism:

• Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.
• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.
• Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
• Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known
• Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.
• Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
• Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.
• Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision.

Before we continue, think for a minute about just how those principles are from the ones currently subscribed to in traditional education.

. . .

Time's up and if you said a lot different you were correct. These are all the ways the internet changes our world. One trend Siemens mentions earlier that has led to his theory is that " Know-how and know-what is being supplemented with know-where (the understanding of where to find knowledge needed)." That's a skill that was not all that important before the internet when there were so few knowledge bases, however, with the mass distribution we see online knowing where to find something can be just as important as actually knowing it. We're [especially young people] using computers as a bionic brain, why should we remember it if we know right where to find it online?

With that said, how could we really expect a school system that hasn't dealt with the invention of the calculator to deal with the internet in any timely fashion?

It's all kind of sad when you think about it that way, but theories like Siemens begin to give us some hope that at least there are some minds thinking about the problem. This is really about a paradigm shift, as my mom wrote in the comments to last week's entry, "So what we are really talking about here is the redefinition of the teacher/student relationship. Undoing that truly ancient paradigm is huge; the revolution may need to be nuclear." She's right, and so is George Siemens, this is about changing the very theory of what learning is, and in turn gaining a clearer understanding of how we interact with our 21st century world. Siemens writes:

The starting point of connectivism is the individual. Personal knowledge is comprised of a network, which feeds into organizations and institutions, which in turn feed back into the network, and then continue to provide learning to individual. This cycle of knowledge development (personal to network to organization) allows learners to remain current in their field through the connections they have formed.

The shift to individuals at the center of their media/learning universe is something I've dubbed idiocentricity, in a post from last year, I explain:

[Idiocentricity] is what makes the internet such a powerful medium, and what makes blogs and other social software such a great addition to the web's landscape. We have now begun to shift away from messages being broadcast to us by traditional media, instead opting for the route of the internet. This allows us to sit at the center of our media universe and pick and choose what we receive. We are no longer held hostage by the television schedule, rather, we can just tune into an aggregator and receive all the news or entertainment that we've decided we want.

But with that freedom comes great responsibility (and this is where a lot of the skill/learning starts to come in):

When we want to know something, we no longer look it up in the encyclopedia, instead we Google it, which gives us any number of answers ranked in order of how many other people thought those answers were good enough to link to. From there, we have to choose what information is reliable and what information is not and make a final decision on the answer to our original question. Answers hardly ever come from one source anymore. Now, thanks to search engines, we put together our own answers and explanations, we own the final product, it is an amalgamation of any number of sources. Rather than the traditional top-down mediation of old media, broadcasters decide what is and is not news, we are able to make the final decisions and create our own stories. Thanks to blogs, not only is more information being reported on than ever before, but also now everyone has a chance to add the debate by publishing their own opinions. It is a truly democratic medium.

In an entry titled "It's not what it is, it's what it enables" on Siemens' Connectivism blog he explains connectivism like this:

"The concept centers on a person’s ability to create his or her own personal learning network. Rather than learning only through courses, we learn by creating and forming connections to information and people. The sources we select are dynamic. When they change, our whole network gets smarter."

This is huge. This is different. I don't exactly have answers on how to implement it, but it seems like we need to start somewhere. Young educators being taught in colleges should understand this stuff. It's important. It's different. Who's in?

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Bring on the Education Revolution!

Now that we know thinking is all about connections, isn't it time we started teaching it?

I've always said that the most important thing I learned in college was how to think better. I attended a fairly free program that allowed me to follow my own interests throughout my four years, not tied down by any majors or requirements. What that did was allow me to evolve and connect my own thoughts. In fact, I can basically chart back, semester-by-semester, how I arrived where I am today. (For those interested it goes something like this: urban studies to educational reform, educational reform to Black studies, Black studies to hip-hop culture, hip-hop culture to postmodernism, postmodernism to digital culture.) When I finally arrived at digital culture everything made sense. It was the thing that finally connected everything together. That webbed network that we all play with was the perfect way to illustrate how the world connected together.

The problem is that most people don't have this experience. Most people aren't given the freedom to follow their own path. Especially in pre-college education, so much of school is about teaching subject matter than learning often becomes the forgotten stepchild, left to watch from the corner. In the past, the reason for this was that there was simply no other way for students to learn the things the need to know. Things about math, government, etc. But that's changing. That 10th grade history book is tiny when compared with the vast universe of knowledge on the web that's available to students around the world. This should cause a major shift in the way both students learn and teachers teach. Educator Will Richardson explains:

I mean, at some point, we're going to have to let go of the idea that we are the most knowledgable content experts available to our students. We used to be, when really all our students had access to was the textbook and the teacher's brain. But today, we're not. Not by a long stretch. And we don't need to be. What we need to be is connectors who can teach our kids how to connect to information and to sources, how to use that information effectively, and how to manage and build upon the learning that comes with it.

It's all about the connections, but before the web showed us just what connections looked like this was hard to understand. The web has fundamentally shifted the way we understand how we think and, in turn, should shift the way and what we learn. Konrad Glogowski at the blog of proximal development, in response to Will Richardson, explains this change quite well:

Learning is no longer an internal, solitary activity happening inside an individual learner - it is also a process of creating knowledge. This connection would not exist without the nodes created by Will Richardson and George Siemens. It would not exist without a personal network of nodes that I created with my Bloglines subscriptions. It cannot exist unless it is reified in this very entry where it becomes another node in an ever-growing network. My learning is therefore dependent on my ability to perceive some sort of connection or pattern in the available chaos. “The value of ‘pattern recognition,’� to quote George Siemens again, “and connecting our own ’small worlds of knowledge’ are apparent in the exponential impact provided to our personal learning.�

When I read the line, "My learning is therefore dependent on my ability to perceive some sort of connection or pattern in the available chaos," it rung especially true. That is what learning and thinking is all about to me. Those aha moments in life come from realizing a connection between two seemingly disparate entities. It's how problems are solved. It's how scientific breakthroughs happen. Yet instead of encouraging students to think about the connections between the information, we just teach them the information. We force feed history dates and the periodic table, but we don't encourage them to try to find the connections.

That's what always drove me nuts about tests. A multiple choice test is looking for very little other than basic learning. People who can memorize well do great on tests for that reason. It's not asking people to think. Ask a student to write an essay and all of a sudden they've got to develop thoughts and communicate ideas. It encourages more interaction with the information and opens up the chance for connections to happen. But even that's not enough.

Today's teachers must begin to encourage students to make connections. To think about connections. To realize the importance of connections. Whereas teachers of yesterday were DJs, serving up one piece of information after another, today's need to be producers, giving students all the tools and assistance they need to create their own remixes. Guide them through the process. Encourage interaction.

The question becomes is the average teacher/administrator even cognizant of this shift? It gives me hope to read someone like Will Richardson, but I can't help but worry. It's time for a revolution.

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Life at NYU?

A very enjoyable New York Post article by an anonymous NYU freshman.

[Editor's Note: A friend of mine sent me the full text to this article about what life is really like for a freshman at New York University from the New York Post. It was a little too funny not to post in it's entirety. Hope you all enjoy -- especially those of you who are also NYU alum.]

LET ME MAKE IT QUITE CLEAR THAT I DID NOT WRITE THIS. IT IS THE FULL TEXT OF AN ARTICLE FROM THE NEW YORK POST.

Confessions of an NYU Freshman - The Sex, Drugs and Poker that Tempt One City College Kid

By Anonymous

COLLEGE is exactly like it is in the movies. Well, movies like "Animal House" and "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle." Less like "Mona Lisa Smile."

I realized this after watching a red-faced New York University senior stuffing a keg in a computer box in hopes of smuggling it past dorm security.

That was last week, my first as a freshman in the Stern School of Business at NYU. It's been a time of excitement, stress - pure joy and pure fear. I'm overwhelmed by how many distractions there are here, going to college with 39,000 other students in the middle of Manhattan. I'm amazed, but not necessarily surprised, by the alcohol, sex and drugs on campus.

Yet I'm also thrilled to be here, a university that was my first choice growing up in Rockland County. This was the place I had always wanted to go to. It's a chance to party, date and, yes, study in a village made up of my peers. And I've already learned the most important lesson:

I really need a fake ID.

HOOKING UP

I live in Hayden Hall, a building right on Washington Square Park, with a well-founded reputation as a party dorm.

I have friends who live in University Hall uptown, and it's pretty boring. Everyone has their doors shut, and no one really socializes. I also have friends who live in Weinstein, the other freshman dorm, and they kind of hate it, too. It's more like a prison block than a dorm.

In Hayden we all keep our doors open all the time, and people room-hop all day and pretty much all night. My three roommates and I have met a ton of people this past week. I think everyone is much more social because we've all been drinking our faces off.

I didn't know my roommates, and that made me kind of nervous. Four guys in two adjoining rooms is a lot of testosterone. But, thank God, I was pleasantly surprised. We get along really well, and it's been fun so far. The mess? That's a whole other issue.

A lot of people have fake IDs, so they get the liquor and then we all share. Vodka, Captain Morgan's and beer are the dorm favorites. When I first got here, I really feared meeting new people and hoped that getting comfortable with my chaotic surrounding wouldn't be too difficult. It turns out it was much easier than I thought.

One of the first things I did when I moved in was sign up for Facebook (facebook.com), an online student directory. It's the greatest thing ever - Cliffs Notes for your classmates - where you post your name, hobbies and picture; a virtual extension of yourself. You can also post your schedule, which is helpful when you want to know the name of the hot redhead who was sitting next to you in Bio 101.

Most of the upperclassmen use Facebook, also known as the "hook-up book" the "hooker booker" and the "get face book" to get a look at the hot freshman girls. It works both ways. If the hot redhead from bio is much more into the upperclassmen, my chances are slimmer.

As if we need more distractions, every room is linked to a high-speed computer network. I haven't quite figured out how it all works but, despite anti-piracy efforts, it's an endless supply of free and very illegal music and movie sharing. There's also plenty of porn, supposedly even one made here in the dorms and a video going around of some poor shmuck professing his love for some girl.

A TOUCH OF CLASS

Yes. We go to class. For now, pretty much everyone is making it to the lectures and discussions. I have a feeling that all this is going to change soon. There's a lot going on around here, and class could end up becoming a side act for some people.

It's not so much the bars and drinking that is as distracting as the idea of just lounging around all day hanging out with friends. You can play chess in the park, head over to Broadway and do some shopping or just sit at home and watch hours of television. Plus, most classes don't have mandatory attendance, so no one would really miss you.

At first, I was really intimidated by the library; I mean so many people killed themselves there last year. But now I think it's a good place to go and study and get away from the insanity of the dorms. I love dorm life, but it's really not the most productive place to pore over lecture notes and do finance homework.

EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

Drugs are not hard to get in the dorms. They're readily available, and although I don't know anyone personally who deals, I've heard plenty of stories.

I have a friend who's a sophomore, a photography major, who lives in the Palladium. Palladium is mostly apartment-style housing for upperclassmen and an awesome place to live. There's a guy who runs a poker room, and there are parties three or four nights a week. People do lines in the bathrooms, some kid makes like 700 bucks a week dealing and you can pretty much get any drug you want without ever leaving the dorms.

Ritalin is no longer the drug of choice for studying. It's Adderall, and it's really easy to buy. It's only like $5 a pill, and people love it. People buy Vicodin and Perks, too, from kids who have had muscle strains and stuff. They're not dealers, they're just NYU entrepreneurs.

What blows my mind is that I heard someone paid $50 for two Vicodin pills. Some of these people just have so much money. I mean, people probably spend an average of $250 to $300 a week in restaurants and buying alcohol. It's difficult being a student who doesn't have a lot of disposable income or a trust fund.

WORDS OF WISDOM

My cousin is a senior at NYU, and he's told me some wild stories about what he did his freshman year at Hayden.

You know that Red Hot Chili Peppers poster, the one with just a sock? They did the same thing, a strategically placed sock, some towels and they ran around flashing people. They didn't even get caught.

There are tales of drinking gone awry, of tasteless pranks played on unsuspecting New Yorkers, of failed tests and all-night crash study sessions.

I don't tell these stories to my parents. I'm pretty confident that I'm going to be fine. This place is like Las Vegas and Sodom rolled into one, and the best advice I've heard is to not get sucked into a 24-hour party lifestyle.

I'm sure it will work out. But for now I'm kind of scared s---less.

Update (9/19/05): NYU's Washington Square News responds.

Update (5/18/06): Due to a site improperly crediting me as the article's author I added the extra warning at the top.

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Schools vs. The Web

What role will the web play in the future of education?

By Barbara Rubin Brier

Trying to follow your thinking on web-related developments, I was pleased to see Richard MacManus ask some good/hard questions about down-to-earth explanations and projections of the future vis-à-vis interfaces. Out of curiosity, I clicked over to his site and found a number of references to web 2.0 and education and to differences in first year and fourth year student use and perception of the web. I was particularly curious about Gardner Campbell's quote concerning younger students living "…on, and in, the Web", and spent a moment or two on his site before I realized that I just didn't have time to follow that tangent right now… I have a report to write … about the increasing challenges and complexities of being a school principal.

There is a connection here, so hang on. The reason I was visiting NoahBrier.com earlier this AM is that I was feeling a bit overwhelmed by my report; the challenges of the principalship have become pretty overwhelming, especially considering that principals are being held accountable for improved test scores in an environment where they have no means of rewarding teachers for employing effective new instructional strategies, nor any way to impose consequences on those who refuse to step up altogether. Given the prevalent structure and organization of schools, the principal's challenge seems pretty intractable – which is pretty discouraging.

When I'm feeling like that, my mind wanders, and I seek distraction – ergo, my visit to your site. But what I read on Richard MacManus' Read/Write Web and briefly, on Gardner Campbell's blog, made me feel even more uncertain about when and how we can transition to this new world you're seeing. In a nutshell, it's hard to imagine RSS being an educator's best friend when librarians are still discounting web resources, and teachers continue to put a quota on the number of web references allowed on research papers (in spite of the fact that a blog exchange can probably be considered a primary source) … you get my drift.

I've recently been expounding the belief that 25 to 30 years from now, the people in our classrooms will not be teachers of content knowledge, but facilitators of learning that will be entirely web-based. We will still need schools and classrooms, as parents will still need to work, so children will still need to be attended to during work hours. But I don't think teaching, as it is currently practiced, can really continue. I still see 'professional' adults in the classroom, but I think they'll be more focused on 1)helping students learn to analyze, synthesize and connect content they access online, and 2) helping students to listen to one another, cooperate, collaborate, etc. ("Listen, Learn and Cooperate" as Carroll Lewis [ED: She ways my kindergarten teacher] always said!)

Anyway, I would love to hear what others have to say about this. I'd really like to look down the road, with others, and envision how these adjustments might occur. What do you think?

Barbara Rubin Brier is an educational change consultant who's incredibly passionate about the state of schooling.

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Educational Change

Editor's Note: My mother was inspired to write something and asked me to post it on my site. I am doing this for her for two reasons: first, because she's my mother and second, because I think it's very interesting. Hope everyone enjoys the guest entry and if you've got something you'd like printed up here shoot me an email at writing@noahbrier.com.

Having spent an increasing amount of time, of late, reading this blog (my son's) and following the links he posts – many about the internet, blogs, and the way the world is changing – I've been inspired to post my thought on how and why education has to change as well.

This is not a new subject for me. When this same son reached middle school, I discovered that the progressive Bank Street magnet school he'd attended from Kindergarten through 5th grade was not the norm, but a rare alternative to the same old lousy public school education I'd received. I went back to school. Having spent the 80's in a retail buying office dealing with the thorny theme of industry consolidation, I wanted to know this: Why am I not seeing anything I've learned about organizational change in my kids' schools? In fact, my 214-page master's thesis is entitled, "Applying Organizational Change Theory to School Reform." But I digress. My point here is that I went back to school, got my masters in Educational Change, and now work as consultant in the field. So I think about this stuff a lot.

But every once in a while, a personal situation arises that crystallizes my irritation at the system. This week, there were two. Here's the first one (and in this case, it's not even a public school, but a private college.) My daughter, a freshman at George Washington University, just got a 67 on an astronomy test. Before you jump to conclusions, this is not about the grade. I could care less about grades (although she was beside herself.) This is about GWU's School of Arts & Sciences requiring students to take 3 lab science courses in order to graduate.

My daughter does not want to be an astronomy major. She doesn't even want to be a science major. She reluctantly took A.P. Physics and A.P. Calculus in high school because she knew she needed them to get into a decent school. But her strengths are in liberal arts, music and the social sciences. She knows that, I know it, and it works for us. It just doesn't work for GWU.

I'd been promising her for years that school would be better when she got to college. It was definitely better for me. In fact, I've often said that I didn't know education had anything to do with thinking until I got to college. I thought it was all a matter of memorization and regurgitation. Of course, in my day, NYU had very few course requirements and you could take one course per semester pass/fail. I made it through geology and some prehistoric computer course where I learned a program that created a Snoopy outline on a punch card. So much for my science and math background.

Noah, host of this blog, also went to NYU. Against his mother's advice, he applied to the School of Arts & Sciences. (I vividly remember a conversation about 'needing more structure' – but I got my master's at Goddard -- yet another story.) Anyway, it took Noah one semester to transfer to Gallatin, NYU's school of individualized study, where he had no requirements, hungrily pursued his interests in media and culture, and left school with a passion for learning that inspires me.

I WANT THAT FOR HIS SISTER! I don't want Leah to feel bogged down by requirements. Believe me, I understand and applaud the philosophy behind a broad-based liberal arts education. I think of anything else – business, pre-law, even pre-med – as trade school. But don't bog kids down in lab sciences just because it's the only way to pay the science professors. It does an immense disservice to students who should be finding themselves intellectually, not cramming for endless tests and quizzes on the physical principles of the universe. (I looked it up.)

Require one lab science, if you must, but offer it pass-fail to non-majors. And tweak the curriculum! I've never taken astronomy, but I'm quite certain that a creative teacher could find any number of connections between the science and art, literature, history, poetry, drama, religion. That is what makes a liberal arts education worthwhile – recognizing that no field exists in a vacuum. You have to make those connections, create that web of knowledge, realize the extraordinary dimensionality of what it means to understand something. Only then do you want to know more. That's the secret to that 'lifelong learning' catchphrase to which so many school mission statements give lip service.

I learned a lot of what I understand about education on the internet. I learned it because I enjoy what I call tangential thinking (and others sometimes see as always changing the subject.) I just like to start a search and see where it takes me. Sometimes it lasts for weeks. At one point, I actually got into the habit of copying every search phrase I entered, and every address I visited, into my notes, so I wouldn't lose my trail and not be able to return. (Bless del.icio.us for making that so much easier.) But there I go again. My point: this is what I think education is for.

Which brings me to my second source of education irritation. Just this week, my doctor mentioned that her son is not enjoying a very competitive, suburban high school here in Fairfield County. I asked if he was interested in anything. "Sports," she said. "Just sports." I asked if he spent any time researching sports on the internet and she said yes, that he spent a lot of time participating in fantasy football, fantasy baseball, looking at player stats, and so forth. My advice to her was simple: Encourage him to write about it. If he's reading and writing, and thinking about statistics, he's got literacy and math skills. Gently nudge him into following the Barry Bonds steroid scandal, and you can add science to the mix. Left to his own interests, with a little encouragement to question what he sees and reflect on what he's learned, he'll be as prepared for college as any of his peers -- maybe even more so.

Wouldn't it be something if high schools and colleges actually encouraged this sort of thing. Imagine your high schooler seriously pursuing personal interests. What a concept. There's a lot to learn, but once you get beyond the foundational math and literacy skills, you can't force feed it. Fortunately, young kids' brains are designed to accept tons of input, so you can really crank it up in those magical and concrete developmental learning stages. But once a kid's achieved abstraction, you're into that whole 'leading a horse to water' thing.

I know you won't be hearing this here first, but please, to GWU and all those promoting unnecessary and/or pedestrian required curriculum: you can't even imagine how fast you're falling behind, now that kids have gone digital. No more sympathetic niceties: FIX IT!

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