Who's the Teacher? You're the Teacher.

Watch this TED talk from TED founder Chris Anderson. Go ahead, I'll wait.




I'm not going to say too much about this other than I'm just going to pull a few quotes from this to ponder.

Crowd accelerated innovation.
(Or, perhaps Crowd Accelerated Innovation, deserving of capital letters?)

It's the crowd, that shines the light, and fuels the desire . . .This is a model that pretty much any organization could use to nurture its own cycle of crowd accelerated innovation . . . Invite the crowd, let in the light, and dial up the desire.
(Schools? Education? Individuals? Learning?)

You have to show your stuff to the world . . . Radical openness.
(Radical. Openness. Is there anything more unlike what most schools/classrooms look like today? And do we think programs like Race to the Top are going to make things more open, more collaborative? Or less?)

We’re a social species. We spark off one another.
(Oy. Back to the drawing board for my Algebra class. I have to do better.)

We watch 80 million hours of YouTube every day . .. Cisco predicts that in 4 years, more than 90% of the web will be video.
(And more video has been uploaded to YouTube in the last two months than has been broadcast by ABC, NBC and CBS combined since ABC started broadcasting . . . in 1948.)

It’s in that non-verbal portion, there’s some serious magic.
(I like to think my writing is sometimes good, and I don't think anyone is saying that writing is going away, but he has a point.)

Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face to face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution . . . This is the connective tissue of the human super-organism in action.
(I have to think about the idea of "connective tissue" a little bit more, but shades of Clay Shirky here - both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus.)

Print scaled. The world’s ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide. . . But now, in the blink of the eye, the game has changed again. . . . what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can do for face to face communication . . . that primal medium which your brain is exquisitely wired for just went global. (Wow. Shades of both Shirky and Steven Johnson here.)

For the first time in human history talented students don’t have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. (I, of course, don't love that line, but I get the point. I would say it more like, "For the first time in human history talented learners don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy circumstances," but, yeah, okay. Also see Disrupting Class.)

Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. ('Nuff said.)

Thought for the Day 1-4-08

This quote was read at my School Accountability Committee meeting at my daughter's school. It's from the book The Backdoor to Enlightenment: Eight Steps to Living Your Dreams and Changing Your World and was apparently featured in Oprah's magazine.

For every nine people who denounce innovation, only one will encourage it. For every nine people who do things the way they have always been done, only one will ever wonder if there is a better way. For every nine people who stand in line in front of a locked building, only one will ever come around and check the back door. Our progress as a species rests squarely on the shoulders of that tenth person. The nine are satisfied with things they are told are valuable. Person 10 determines for himself what has value.

Makes me think of Will. I think he's peering in my back door right now . . .