All learning depends on knowledge. It is odd therefore that people who write about e-learning rarely worry about the knowledge bases that must underlie any serious e-learning system. Schools have always had libraries and textbooks, not that they are used all that much. But the idea that there should be a knowledge base available to be consulted to help one better understand something is a key educational idea.

Yet, while e-learning systems might refer a learner to more reading, the very idea of e-learning is that it is self contained. Strange, since real knowing is never self contained. There is always someone somewhere who knows more.

Read "Reminding and E-Learning" by Roger Schank
at eLearn Magazine

Well, you wonder, isn’t that nice, but how could an e-mail program be that smart? It would have to know my business inside and out. Right. Why shouldn’t your e-mail program be smart enough to know which e-mails still need to be acted upon, and which present you with a potential legal liability issue simply because you have opened them, and which need to go on to a to do list of some type to be checked on regularly?

Download “Why we hate email” by Roger Schank

Every time I think that e-learning couldn’t get any sillier, someone figures out how to take a really bad idea and promote it into an ideology. At first I didn’t get what anyone could be talking about when they used the phrase “blended learning.” Those awful programmed learning workbook training manuals that everyone hated? Put them online with some cute graphics and presto: e-learning. Yippee!!

Download “Splendid Learning” by Roger Schank

People pretty much hate innovation (and the horse it rode in on.) Innovation is more than just having a good idea. And, it is more than getting your idea into production (which can be quite tricky if you need capital -- no one hates innovation more than venture capitalists.) Innovation requires an attitude. You need to think you are right and everyone else is an idiot.

Download “How to Innovate” by Roger Schank

These days there is a lot of talk about knowledge management, but curiously, you don’t hear much talk about human memory. Simply put, any business could use someone who knew all about every job, and every person doing that job and every experience the company had had in the past and what its goals and plans were at the moment and could use all that knowledge to know what to do with new information it has just received. Only this time he will be a computer equipped with a very new kind of KM system one that is not about document retrieval but about delivering just in time advice to those who need it.

Download “The Future of Knowledge Management” by Roger Schank

The school itself will evolve into a sort of student or community center, where kids are engaged in a variety of activities and projects. They will also become more connected to local businesses, as students have the opportunity to engage in real-world jobs with local employers. The school will become the center of the community in a much deeper way than it currently is.

Posted at The Journal – Transforming Education Through Technology

"There are two types of education... One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live."

-- John Adams

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff.  We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Read the full article at The Flat Rock

At the Institute for the Learning Sciences, at Northwestern, we designed a new computer program to teach biology, in which you get to design your own animal.

The National Science Foundation said that this program wouldn't fit into the curriculum, because biology isn't taught in the sixth grade, which is the level at which the program works. Furthermore, since each kid would have a different conversation with the computer, how could tests be given on what was learned?

Knowledge is an integrated phenomenon; every piece of knowledge depends on every other one. School has to be completely redesigned in order to be able to make this happen.

From The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution

Stop pushing your kid to do what he is told and allow him or her to be what they want to be and do it their own way. Say no to Harvard and yes to following one’s own path. I taught at Yale for many years. There are lots of kids there who know how to well on tests and whose primary question of a professor is whether what he just said will be on the test. Not so many geniuses there. Push your child to think, rather than to succeed and good things will follow.

Read the full article here.
Full article at The Big Idea Blog

The school experience they created in no way mirrors what student lives will be like after graduation,nor does it take into account any modern theory of how students learn best. The experience is passive, fragmented, unmotivated, and generally dull. And, not surprisingly, it usually does not work. Drop out rates in high school are astoundingly high.

In contrast to a passive, subject-oriented curriculum, a Story-Centered Curriculum (SCC) can be viewed as a carefully designed apprenticeship-style learning experience in which the student encounters a planned sequence of real-world situations constructed to motivate the development and application of knowledge and skills in an integrated fashion.

Full article at eLearn Magazine

Happily, there is a kind of Trojan horse that exists in education, and that is a computer, and when you put something on a computer, people have some sense that it's magic.Which is fine, because in addition, it turns out that the computer offers one-on-one instruction that potentially could be magic, and theycan see that the computer is interactive and will go in directions that kids want to go, and it helps eliminate the lockstep curriculum that requires that everybody has to be on the same page on the same day.

Full article at Educom Review