Explosion of Learning Going On at #Fuse13, Atlanta

Today may have been my most productive learning experience ever between 6-8 AM, with the probable exception of that morning on the north side of the Annapurna range in eastern Nepal…

Mount Vernon Presbyterian School in Atlanta is holding their second annual Fuse conference (Twitter #fuse13) today and tomorrow.  It is a design thinking experience for educators.  I won’t even try to credit all the great folks on the attendee and presenters list. There are 100 educators at #fuse13, and some more following virtually, which means there are a million not there, which is a real shame for our kids. I am following from my window seat at home, so this is as much about the lack of excuses to learn as it is the ideas coming out of the group.

All I am going to do is summarize bullet ideas that flew out of the Twitter stream in THE FIRST TWO HOURS today and strongly suggest you follow along later today, tomorrow, or go back and mine the Twitter feed.

• Build your team.
• Playtime is not wasted time.
• Understand the mutual dependence of task and maintenance.  Usually we spend too much time on tasks and not enough on maintaining the health of our teams.
• Success is rooted in personal relationships.
• Should we not fear mediocrity more than failure?
• Design challenge worthy of any school group: How might we improve the first week of school?
• How wide is the gap between expectation and experience? What do you place in that gap?  Assume the best?  The worst?
• What are we excited about?
• What are our fears?
• We all tend to champion our own ideas; growth is found in building on ideas of others.

If teachers can see what this learning looks like, and build just a fraction of it into the student learning experience, we will have gone a LONG way to driving a stake into the heart of industrial age, assembly line education.