Transformation

People aren’t afraid of change, they’re afraid of loss

Instead of encouraging change for its own sake and the sake of the institutions served by change, we need to focus on the trade-offs. If change is actually about loss, we need to address loss and how to make loss more acceptable.

Can a 20-Minute Test Tell Employers What a College Degree Cannot?

When it comes to hiring, many employers still lean toward graduates from name-brand institutions. Yet … too many graduates “don’t get a shot at the high-value jobs they should be getting,” says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education. “That’s a big deal in a liberal democracy.”… Companies and others spend $1…

Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers

Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…

The Minecraft Generation

Mastering [Minecraft] requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong. One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked…

Seven Things Higher Education Innovators Want You to Know

Excerpt from Campus Technology — March 2016 “If you think the great colleges and universities of the past will be the only great colleges and universities in the future, then you’ve forgotten everything you knew about evolution and you need to up your game,” asserted Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. “Our society…

Video: Let Kids Rule the School

I recently followed a group of eight public high school students, aged 15 to 17, in western Massachusetts as they designed and ran their own school within a school. They represented the usual range: two were close to dropping out before they started the project, while others were honors students. They named their school the…

The genius of this school is not in a program, it’s not in the laptops, it’s in the learning. It’s in teachers designing learning that they know will work for kids … and they have the space and the time and the autonomy to do it.

From TED Talks Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize…

Real Value Creation Happens at the Edge

From Harold Jarche I think the edge will be where almost all high value work gets done in organizations. Core activities will be increasingly automated or outsourced. Most of the people in an organization will be on the edge. The core will be managed by very few internal staff. This is a sea change, in…

The engagement pyramid – connecting people and social change

Civic engagement can mean a lot of different things – from the casual forwarding of a friend’s email to deep involvement on a board of directors. Some engagement is lightweight and some is deep, and that’s OK – we can’t expect everyone to have the same degree of interest in our mission. In fact, having…

Disruptive innovation in higher education

From Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Caldera, and Louis Soares: Disruptive innovation is the process by which a sector that has previously served only a limited few, because its products and services were complicated, expensive, and inaccessible, is transformed into one whose products and services are simple, affordable, and convenient and serves many…

The film ‘Schooling the World’ is profound, disturbing

From Kima via Cooperative Catalyst: “Today, I watched a profoundly disturbing film. It completely shattered my view of education as a progressive force in the world. Even if the system in place is seriously outdated, I never really questioned the intrinsic value of education as a way out of poverty, as a way to move…

Beautifully inspirational viral video for Li Ning/China. Analysis from Rand Han of Little Red Book: I’ve been seeing this trend recently, first introduced in Olympics advertising, then obvious in Vancl’s latest campaign, and now in Li Ning: protagonists that focus not on conformity, but on discovery; a beautifully refreshing attitude of going against the grain of…

Krishnamurti’s 1974 talks on education are still inspiring

“Education is not only learning from books, memorizing some facts, but also learning how to look, how to listen to what the books are saying, whether they are saying something true or false. All that is part of education. “Education is not just to pass examinations, take a degree and a job, get married and…

Video: The Banker – Robin Hood Tax

Excerpts from YouTube Campaign video by Richard Curtis and Bill Nighy, about the Robin Hood Tax, a tiny tax on bank transactions that could raise hundreds of billions for public services and to tackle poverty and climate change at home and around the world. Add your own voice to the campaign

China’s Taoism Revival

“As China’s only indigenous religion, Taoism’s influence is found in everything from calligraphy and politics to medicine and poetry. In the sixth century, for example, Abbess Yin’s temple was home to Tao Hongjing, one of the founders of traditional Chinese medicine. “For much of the past two millenniums, Taoism’s opposite has been Confucianism, the ideology…

Lyrics: The Dreamer by Tom Rush

The moon she rides the tattered storm on a ragged gypsy journey The snow lies on the mountain like a cloak upon a king My dreams go tumbling with the dust out across the valley Low above the river low above the sea Life’s a sparrow lost at sea in dark of night with far…

Adora Svitak: What adults can learn from kids #ted #tedxdirigo

Child prodigy Adora Svitak says the world needs ‘childish’ thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach. http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf “‘Now, our inherent wisdom doesn’t have to be insiders’ knowledge. Kids already do a lot of…

Creative Destruction

Just as the cassette tape replaced the 8-track, only to be replaced in turn by the compact disc, itself being undercut by MP3 players, … online free newspaper sites such as The Huffington Post and the National Review Online are leading to creative destruction of the traditional paper newspaper…. In fact, successful innovation is normally…