I feel as you do, that we need to reinforce the natural creativity, curiosity, and playfulness associated with thinking at the earliest ages and continue to do so throughout the school and college experience. But this pedagogical flip would require a different sort of teacher, one who understands that thinking is a lot more important than memorizing the correct answers — even when, or especially when, the student’s self-discovered answers are “wrong.” In other words, it’s OK to be wrong when it broadens the scope of our explorations. In my mind, wrong is relative, and it’s a critical part of learning. In the sciences, we’re learning over and over again that what we thought was right is actually wrong. But the wrong was necessary to discover the right.

Part of the experimental and scientific process is to systematically explore and test options and eliminate those that don’t pan out. Thus, the failures are just as important as the successes. It’s this exploration that’s lost when teachers insist on only one right answer (theirs), and what’s also lost is the magic of discovery or the eureka moment that lights the fire for a lifetime of what John refers to as “self-initiated learning.”

The old idea of CAI, or computer assisted instruction, takes on a whole new life in the web learning environments that are being touted as MOOCs. Open course services such as edX and Coursera aren’t really MOOCs, but some of them do include impressive drill and practice programs for mastery. A lot of the drudgery associated with learning certain basic skills and information can be relegated to self-paced interactive online programed learning. When done right, they could be fun, challenging, and very effective.

Our children must be challenged to think at the earliest possible age. I did it with my children and now am doing it with my grandchildren. If their schools fall down, then I am there poking sticks at the conventional knowledge in the hope of making holes for my offspring to look through and think about.

It’s a cliché that children constantly ask “Why?” I think that it’s fun to ask them why and that helps them stretch their minds.

Well, that’s what we always should have been. Surely, you must “learn” to read and write, to add and multiply. But, even those mundane memorization exercises, learning the alphabet, learning to spell, learning to construct sentences, learning multiplication tables, and so on can have an element of knowledge construction in them, can challenge students to think.

For me, it’s all about just that — challenging students, not just with higher walls to climb, but with thinking challenges where this metaphorical wall doesn’t get higher but becomes more complex.

I hope that online delivery of learning really will allow for “learning to mastery” to become reality not just for the few, and will allow all students to define the level of mastery for themselves. Then, the sentence quoted above will become reality, and our most valuable resource, the minds of our populace, will reach higher levels and will propel our citizenry to greater achievement than ever before.

Can’t happen soon enough for me.

This function is not just one of geography but also of cost. Too many people cannot afford education now. I could also say that too few communities allow themselves to afford it as well. As this near-depression continues, education is one way, albeit slow, to get out of it. Wide access to employable skill learning, e.g. the multimedia journalism example in the article, will make a difference.

Those who teach must adapt. For many who have painstakingly developed their course structure and materials over time, it will be wrenching. I think that these people should view it as a great opportunity to exercise their minds and bring joy to their work. But, I’m not one of them and so should not attempt to put my ideas into their heads. I was a professor in the old days and had the problem of never teaching the same course in two successive years.

Some continue to assert that online education misses some critical factor of being physically together. This elusive factor has suddenly become all-important. I immediately think of Columbine when this sentiment is expressed. Can’t help myself. I did not have great experience with schools. It was all fine until I skipped third grade. After that, I become more reclusive in school. I was in the position of being too smart and too young. I watched others being tormented because of some difference and many striving to be a part of the best group.

The fact is that online education the future, and we all must accept that. In early years it will be blended with not too much online, although much may be technology-based. The online component of blending will increase until the age at which students no longer are required to stay in a friendly version of a concentration camp daily.

Interestingly, alternative education has been apart from that system for a very long time. Online resources, including entire courses, should help alt ed greatly, but I don’t see it yet — although I don’t look often.

Learning should be fun. Online learning has the capacity to make it so, also to make it better, make it faster, and make it affordable for all.

Yesterday, I was listening to US Dept of Education’s Office of Educational Technology Director Karen Cator on the radio, describing how Denmark allows its K-12 students to use the Internet/Web as a resource during exams. This is the direction in which we should be heading: enabling students to learn how to access and select information, as well as deciding what information is worth memorizing. Most of us have managed to scrape by OK without even knowing what the Nemst equation is, let alone memorizing it ;-) — but that info was useful for Harry, so it made perfect sense for him to memorize it.

Calls to improve learners’ ability to think critically and to create ideas rather than just regurgitating them have been around for many decades — for example, one of my favorite books from the 70s was “The B.S. Factor”, essentially a “crap detector” manual. My book describes the importance of “growing self-initiating learners” in this context. In fact, one of the main reasons I wrote Seven Futures was to help reframe conversations about educational reform in terms of more useful questions (e.g., how to we use technology to improve education? how do we grow self-initiating learners? et al.) instead of the relatively useless ones which currently predominate (e.g., how to get more students to memorize more facts or get higher scores on standardized tests). I hope that the book also helps people ask, and find some answers to, the question of why such relatively useless questions currently predominate in the first place…

When we ask students to think, are we really asking them to think just like us or to show us that we’re not as smart as we think we are? For our children’s sake, I hope it’s the latter. -Jim S