Great Throughts Treasury

"Americans are so often thrown by Japan. It looks familiar but, an inch below the surface, it isn't anything like the West at all."

"Information, the ways we exchange and interact with information, how information informs and shapes us. But our schools-how we teach, where we teach, who we teach, who teaches, who administers."

"It is often noted that, of all existing institutions in the West, higher education is one of most enduring. Oxford University, the longest continuously running university in the English-speaking world, was founded in the twelfth century."

"We do not claim to have solutions for these massively complex social issues, nor do we claim to understand fully the relationships between and among the various developments we have listed. However, we do believe the opportunity"

"Binet himself worried about the potential misuse of the tests he designed. He insisted they were not a measurement, properly speaking. He argued that intelligence comes in many different forms, only some of them testable by his or by any test. His understanding of different skills, aptitudes, or forms of intelligence was probably closer to that of educator Howard Gardner?s concept of multiple intelligences than to anything like a rigid, measurable standard reducible to a single numerical score. His words of caution fell on deaf ears. Less than a year after Binet?s death in 1911, the German psychologist William Stern argued that one could take the scores on Binet?s standardized tests, calculate them against the age of the child tested, and come up with one number that defined a person?s intelligence quotient (IQ). Adapted in 1916 by Lewis Terman of Stanford University and renamed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, this method, along with Binet?s test, became the gold standard for measuring not aptitude or progress but innate mental capacity, IQ. This was what Binet had feared. Yet his test and that metric continue to be used today, not descriptively as a relative gauge of academic potential, but as a purportedly scientific grading of innate intelligence."

"To type in a response, and then allowed subsequent readers to add additional comments. Literally hundreds of viewers read the draft and dozens offered insights and also engaged in discussions with us or with other commentators."

"By one estimate, 65 percent of children entering grade school this year will end up working in careers that haven't even been invented yet." You argue that our education system is structured to produce workers for an economy that will not exist when today's students enter the workforce."

"Businesses, even traditional ones like IBM, use crowdsourcing more and more as a way to get a read on their employees? opinions, to frame a challenge, or to solve a problem. Sometimes they create a competition and award the winner a prize while the company receives the rights to the winning idea."

"Commercial economy depends on mobile access of one form or another. To fail to acknowledge the cost of human labor and the amount of support necessary to sustain virtual institutions."

"Contributing to Wikipedia, to adults exchanging information about travel, restaurants, or housing via collaborative sites, learning is happening online, all the time, and in numbers far outstripping actual registrants in actual schools. What's more, they challenge our traditional institutions on almost every level: hierarchy of teacher and student, credentialing, ranking, disciplinary divides, segregation of high versus low culture, restriction of admission to those considered worthy of admission, and so forth. We would by no means argue that access to these Internet sites is equal and open worldwide (given the necessity of bandwidth and other infrastructure far from universally available as well as issues of censorship in specific countries)."

"Current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The Reports result from research projects funded by the MacArthur Foundation as part of its $50 million grant."

"Certification of what constitutes merit and quality. Nevertheless, and even granting the digital divide, there is a generational shift in the kinds of learning happening by those both living above the poverty line."

"Epistemological appreciation of the profundity of what the Internet offers humanity as a model of a learning institution."

"I have sympathy with the in-the-trenches teacher who is constantly being asked to change without a good reason for change, especially when a school district gets a windfall like "free iPads" without any sound curricular motivation. I am against simply dumping technology into a school system. The point is that technology alone, without a clear redesign of the learning it enhances, is not enough. The exception to this is perhaps in a really terrible classroom where there isn't much of anything else going on. A gadget such as an iPad, in that situation, can offer a smart kid a real opening on to a new, wide world."

"I began to wonder if writers don?t choose to love long-distance, a sure way of blending passion and prose. The love letter seems perfectly suited to the contradiction of a writer?s life... the love letter may be the emblem of a vocation that demands solitude but desires communication."

"Given this history, it is certainly hard to fathom something as dispersed, decentralized, and virtual as the Internet being a learning institution in any way comparable to, say, Oxford. We know, given these long histories, what a learning institution is-or we think we do. But what happens when, rivaling formal educational systems, there are also many"

"Games are integral in human society, from ancient times to the present. Games are based on strategy and on challenge. If you do well at a game, your reward isn't "recess" or a "time out"; it's a greater challenge. When you beat a tough opponent, you seek out a tougher one. That is learning. Being able to harness the energy of games is one of our best learning tools, as any good parent knows, from patty-cake to Simon Says to musical chairs to chess or go. You can advance physical, mental, linguistic, and intellectual progress through games where the testing isn't after the fact but is intrinsic to and embedded in the very structure of play."

"Games are unquestionably the single most important cultural form of the digital age."

"I am not against testing -- I am against using such a crude form of testing, one that is such a disincentive to deep interactive learning, as our national standard. That's demoralizing to teachers, parents, school administrators, and, mostly, to kids. In so many ways, our educational system is an assembly line churning out kids like Model Ts. That's not what our kids need to address the constant changes and complexities of the 21st century."

"I think one area of resistance by educators comes when we simply critique teachers for not adapting without offering them support and time for retraining and upgrading. In the business world, IBM happens to spend the equivalent of $1,700 per year per employee on retraining to help workers adjust to a rapidly changing environment. How can we expect teachers to change without similar investment in their future and in the future of our kids?"

"If we are going to imagine new learning institutions that are not based on the contiguity of time and place-virtual institutions-we have to ask, what are those institutions and what work do they perform? What does a virtual learning institution look like, who supports it, what does it do?"

"In our private lives in the last decade, we've gone through enormous change that has affected everything, from the way we do business to how we view intelligence and attention. We have to rethink it all in a more interactive, networked, and collaborative way."

"In the years ahead, we will need knowledgeable activists to fight to protect our labor laws in a new economy and to protect our personal and civil rights at a time when, from Egypt to San Francisco, authorities have been willing to turn off the cell-phone towers to quell protests. We will need new kinds of financial analysis to understand and regulate erratic market behaviors that the new computational systems already allow. And we will need new artists, writers, dancers, and musicians who can make beauty from our digital, interactive participation on the Web and beyond it."

"It is just hypocritical to think educators can make such a paradigm shift without changing all the systems of assessment that judge the success of our teachers and students? All the methods of assessment we use for "quality" are actually metrics for standardization analogous to the punch clock, not about interactive, synthetic, and analytical thinking and problem solving. You cannot reform the content or the method of teaching without radically changing the terms of assessment. That means ending the end-of-grade tests required by No Child Left Behind. It means going beyond so many of the quite simplistic quantitative measures that ostensibly test learning but really test the ability to take tests."

"In the 1980s and 1990s virtually all the research on early video games was positive, about the benefits to everything from attention to memory. Games are still used to train pilots, the military, architects, surgeons (robotic and traditional), musicians, engineers, and are also used for rehab and to help or enhance elderly cognitive functions. But three factors shifted the focus of the research on games away from learning to the negative effects games could have on kids. (1) Cute, abstract games like PacMan gave way to graphic, violent narrative games such as Grand Theft Auto. (2) Kids really took to video games; a recent Pew survey indicates 97% of kids play games. And (3) blame for the terrible 1999 Columbine tragedy, where kids systematically sought out and executed their classmates, was pinned by the public and the press on rock music and video games. The actual commission that studied Columbine did not reach this conclusion but parents and educators understandably were alarmed. After 1999 research dollars that once went to thinking about games and learning were rerouted to moralistic studies about how video games lead to violence, asocial behavior, and so forth. We lost a decade."

"Like the Catholic Church, universities today bear a striking structural resemblance to what they were."

"Leaving can sometimes be the best way to never go away."

"Learning happens, constantly and in many new ways, because of the collaborative opportunities offered by social networking sites, wikis, blogs, and many other interactive digital sources."

"Lacking confidence in your ability to change, it?s much easier to blame the changed situation?typically, new technologies?and then dig in your heels, raising a bulwark against the new."

"Linked to SMARTBoards in every classroom and networked so that assignments and notes can be accessed even from home. The building itself is also unique in its holistic approach. Rainwater is caught and repurposed for use in toilets, the roof is covered with vegetation to shield it from ultraviolet rays, panels embedded within the windows capture."

"Money revamping its technology offerings, creating great wired spaces where all forms of media can be accessed from the classroom. But how many have actually rethought the modes of organization, the structures of knowledge, and the relationships between and among groups of students, faculty, and others across campus or around the world?"

"Most university education, certainly, is founded on ideas of individual training, discrete disciplines, and isolated achievement and accomplishment. What we want to ask is how much this very paradigm of individual achievement supports the effective learning styles of today's youth and prepares them for increasingly connected forms of civic participation."

"Organizational charts and well-defined legal structures. What is the relationship between the quite traditional nonprofit corporation headquartered in San Francisco and the free, open, multilingual, online, global community of volunteers? Is the institution the sustaining organization, the others met (if at all) only virtually, whose institutional status."

"Pedagogy is tough. To relearn one's own teaching methods requires some time out of the classroom and dedicated to experimenting and practicing new methods, with serious feedback from teacher-mentors to help. If we are serious about reform, we have to be serious about teacher professionalism and aid that process, not simply hurl critiques at "bad teachers.""

"Schools-how we teach, where we teach, who we teach, who teaches, who administers, and who services-have changed mostly around the edges."

"Our argument here is that our institutions of learning have changed far more slowly than the modes of inventive, collaborative, participatory learning offered by the Internet and an array of contemporary mobile technologies."

"The creative use and development of new technologies for learning and research; second, critical understanding of the role of new media in life, learning,"

"Since the current generation of college student has no memory of the historical moment before the advent of the Internet, we are suggesting that participatory learning as a practice is no longer exotic or new but a commonplace way of socializing and learning. For many, it seems entirely unremarkable.' Global business more and more relies on collaborative practices where content is accretive, distributed, and participatory. In other areas too-from the arts to the natural and computational sciences and engineering-more and more research is being enacted."

"Reports on Digital Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, present findings from current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life."

"Shifts is participatory learning. Participatory learning includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment on one another's projects, and plan, design, implement, advance, or simply discuss their practices, goals, and ideas together."

"The Japanese school year begins in spring ... so mothers can send off their children as cherry blossoms fall from the branches."

"The process of unlearning in order to relearn demands a new concept of knowledge not as thing but as a process, not as a noun but as a verb."

"The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, published by the MIT Press, present findings from current research on how young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The Reports result from research."

"The School of the Future incorporates many innovations but also has high-tech interactivity that borders on extreme surveillance."

"This method of learning has been promoted both by HASTAC and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Participatory learning begins from the premise that new technologies are changing how people of all ages learn, play, socialize, exercise judgment, and engage in civic life. Learning environments-peers, family, and social institutions (such as schools, community centers, libraries, museums, even the playground, and so on)-are changing as well. The concept of participatory learning"

"To create learning institutions on new participatory models and offers a bibliography of models and examples of pioneering institutions that already are making the first steps at creating new learning networks. In the online version of our book, URLs will point one directly to sites where one can find out more about a number of innovative participatory learning experiments and institutions."

"This has been a collective project from the beginning, and so our first acknowledgment goes to all those who supported and contributed. Funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as part of its initiative on Digital Media and Learning, we thank Constance"

"There is certainly a greater degree of fluidity and access to participation than at traditional educational institutions.' So we re-ask our question: Are these Internet sites learning institutions? And, if so, what do these institutions?"

"To initiate and exemplify this rethinking of virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions, we used this project to examine potential new models of digital learning. This project, in short, is an experiment. We engaged multiple forms of participatory learning to test the power of virtual institutions and to model other ways that virtual, digital institutions can be used for learning. The process itself informed every step of our thinking about new forms of alliances, intellectual networks,"

"This puts education and educators in the position of bringing up the rearguard, of holding desperately to the fragments of an educational system which, in its form, content, and assessments, is deeply rooted in an antiquated mode."