I was part of a great discussion last week, tossing around ideas concerning the variety of Web 2.0 tools that could be used by students to research and publish their work.
Being an evil central office type, occasionally I was obliged to point out that many of these applications would be frowned upon by people higher up the food chain and could go against regulations.
Of course, anyone who knows me will tell you that, when it comes to pushing enforcement of these rules, I’m a really lousy cop.
Aside from that, during the dialogue, one of our school-based trainers made an excellent point.
He noted that we’re in a marketplace. If we don’t provide the kids with what they want/need, they’ll go somewhere else.
Basically, he very accurately landed on the fact that we, as educators, have lost our monopoly on both information and the tools used to manage it.
Ok. Arriving at that conclusion was the easy part.
Now what do we do about it? And we better figure it out quickly.
That is a great point.
Now, how can we get you evil central office types to get the message?
Actually, I’d just like it if I could use wikispaces.
We need to revision our educational world and, instead of educating students to be problem solvers we need to make them solution and vision creators who can both solve a problem and create visions of what might be. Right now, we focus so much on getting them to solve problems that there is no time left over for them to be creative – and that is what these youth want – to be creative. Let them learn through the creation of new ideas, where they will need to solve problems, that will create new visions. They are looking forward, why can’t we?