We have to make a choice: divert more & more energy to avoid & repair leak after leak or come to terms with an open world. # This is the big ethical and practical choice we need to confront. Every time we choose to keep even the smallest secrets we sow seeds that’ll grow into [...]
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This month’s Utne Reader has an article featuring yours truly; the subtitle includes a term that I used, somewhat spontaneously during an interview: “radical self-educators challenge the ‘tyranny of credentials.’” I’ll explain what I meant by “tyranny of credentials.” (Regular readers may remember the original article which appeared in full at Rabble.ca and TheTyee.ca, written [...]
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Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED talk is up titled, “Bring on the learning revolution!“ (via @hjarche) Of course it is full of moving sentiments and wonderful ideas, presented with great wit, and I’ll recommend it to everyone (not that I have to, as it recommends itself)… but I think it falls short on substance: Criticizing schools is [...]
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Steven Johnson has an excellent column in the New York Times, on the iPhone and the mixed merits of open and closed platforms. He begins with a reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s work on “generativity,” (familiar to readers of this blog) i.e. “the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate [...]
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Read The Craftsman by Richard Sennett — one of my favourite thinkers. This book gets right to the heart of things. From the publisher’s description: Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship [...]
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Becoming a subject and future panelist for the UWO Online Journalism class’s EduPunk team has thankfully put my ass into gear. Education strayed off my radar for a bit; but looking back, a lot of what I’ve written is even more consistent with EduPunk than I knew. Sometimes these cut-and-paste sessions make everything more coherent… Creative Learning [...]
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Props to TechAlliance and BIOTECanada for booking Adam Bly to speak at the launch of National Biotechnology Week. I’m very grateful to have attended; I came away rejuvenated with energy and ideas… Bly made the case we need to reorient “our collective ideology, our collective imagination,” towards science — towards “Big Science.” Some of his remarks [...]
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Jeff Jarvis has been “thinking a lot about this lately: the need to risk and fail and not hold perfection as the standard of success.” That’s a ‘perfect’ jump-off to introduce an important concept I’m trying to promote: generativity: instead of evaluating things on how well they accord with preconceived models and assumptions, let’s evaluate [...]
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Don Tapscott gets things rolling at Edge.org: The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It’s a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who [...]
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I’m guessing this must seem pretty weird to a lot of people: I just love making up mottos, lists of “core values,” etc. I’ve done it since I was a kid. I can’t friggin help it. I used to do logos a lot too but as I got older I’ve tended to grow more at home in [...]
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I’ve been trying to figure out who from my group of friends and “real life” acquaintances might want to start using Twitter. I got on it recently and I love it. (Actually, I tried it over a year ago and didn’t quite “get it” — not until after I’d been immersed more in the social [...]
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