How do the most creative, big-thinking, successful people you know learn? Obviously not by sitting at a desk in a room listening to someone talk at them for seven hours a day. Where do the best, most innovative educators in your school community go to grow, learn, and create? Not to the faculty lounge.
What if “school” looked more like the Twitter “highway”? That is where our most innovative, forward-leaning educators hang out. So why not our students? What if this thing and place we call “school” was designed primarily as an on-ramp to a similar highway? And what if once on the highway there were lots and lots of “pull-outs”, places where travelers who find common interest could have a nice rest stop while they learn together..and then back on the highway, maybe back to “school” or on to another pull-out in the knowledge-space/time continuum? What if “on-ramps” and “highway”s were not slang for high speed technologies, bur for learning modalities that just happened to use evolving technology as better tools?
Sound like I have been mainlining Arthur C. Clarke science fiction? Maybe. But it is going to happen, and sooner rather than later if I get a vote. Why should “school” not be a place of optimal learning, when that is exactly what it is meant to be?
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