Hitting a moving target is all about aim, velocity, and trajectory. When NASA fires off a satellite to intersect with an asteroid, they need to accurately calculate where that little rock will be a few years from now. If they are wrong in those calculations, and if the satellite has booster rockets, they can make [...]
Tesla took orders totaling more than $14 billion for their new car model...in one week. There are a number of other electric and hybrid cars on the market and coming soon, and some with arguably better range and price point. The analogy to Apple computers should be lost on no one. What Elon Musk did [...]
What will "school" be 20 years from now? I am not ready to roll out my entire argument, but one result that I think is inevitable is that all schools, public and private, will increasingly fall into one of three categories (and probably some mixtures of the three): Struggling to stay open. Insulated from market [...]
I met Jordan Greenhall last night; he has a remarkable background in technology companies and I was immediately impressed with his thinking about connected learning and social systems. This short video outlines some of his thinking about "why we have jobs" and what social and economic benefits they provide in a post-industrial economy. This is [...]
I have been recording a series of short (10 minutes or so) conversations with Garth Nichols and Justin Medved, two educators in Toronto, as they and their interscholastic group of colleagues, and the Canadian Association of Independent Schools, use #EdJourney as one guide in their conversations around changing schools. If you are looking for a [...]
When we benchmark against other schools, are we focusing on the river or on the banks? Assessing how well an organization is meeting its mission is a difficult job. Most organizations compare themselves against other similar organizations with similar missions following the logic that measuring against an "average" or a "best in class", tells us how [...]
What if teachers learned to teach and learners learned to learn like explorers, scientists, empaths, inventors, poets, artists, and entrepreneurs? What if we started over in our construct of education, dialed it back to pre-1850 and extracted the pedagogy of apprenticeship, experience, observation, synthesis, and practice that underlay the wondrous mind explosions of the Renaissance, [...]
I was honored to guest host the very popular #SatChatWC this morning (Saturday mornings, 7:30 am Pacific Time; hosted by Shelley Burgess and Dave Burgess of Teach Like a Pirate fame). It is a "west coast" chat, but always seems to have great representation from educators from pretty much every US and Canadian time zone. My [...]
Does your school have the courage to invest in the extraordinary? That was the thesis question posed by independent thought and practice leader, Tim Fish of McDonogh School last week at the NAIS conference. I have known Tim for more than ten years, but had never seen him present. It was so succinct, so precise, and [...]
In my ongoing conversation with Canadian schools on how they can best change to meet the needs of the future, here is my second weekly vodcast with Garth Nichols and Justin Medved. We talked about how schools view "time", and how they can re-imagine use of time to better meet their learning goals. Follow along [...]