Too long for twitter, too short for my blog

A reply to the NB dept of Education re: 21 century skills

This is my email reply to the dept of ed's request that i blog about their new initiative. Great that New Brunswick is looking ahead... I'm a little concerned about what they are looking ahead to.

Hello,

First, thank you for including me in your mailout. I had not seen the video, and while i had heard of your initiative, I'm now much better acquainted. I note from a quick look at your email, however, that you have not included any personal information about me or my blog, I'm left wondering if you've read it. My blog is not a public instrument, nor is it something that is payed for in anything but my time. I am very interested in public education and have worked extensively with educators from around the world and here on PEI (assuming you know I'm on PEI and was actually born in New Brunswick) and I am more than willing to engage in a discussion Mr. Kierstead, but this is a press release, not an invitation to discussion. If you are interested in being on my blog or any of the other ways in which i communicate about education ( I manage edtechtalk.com, do a monthly seminar series for AACE, and am currently starting an open course on the future of education http://edfutures.com among other community memberships) please engage with me in a way that does not make me feel like a news organization. I don't mean to be picky about that... it's just that you seem to be requesting the kind of response you would get from a news organization... which isn't really the way that I blog. I might be wrong... I'd be interested to hear what you expected.

If you would like my personal viewpoint on the subject, I would agree that there are 21st century competencies that we need to change our education system to support, but think that they are less 'technological' and more about understanding the new ways in which people communicate. The same way that 'driving a car' is a 20th century literacy we've needed to do little to support in a technical sense (people learn to press the gas because it makes the car move and they want to move) but we have to constantly enforce the 'most socially supportive' way to drive - to not hit other cars, not speed, not drink and drive, stay calm, drive defensively, new phone laws. 

Your video is very cool and someone clearly put alot of work into it. I addresses a number of future issues that are very important to the education of students. (i'm not only an educational researcher, but have two young kids about to hit the school system) It is, however, going to be inaccessible to a number of people (i started getting dizzy after 4 min and had to stop the video (i'm 35 y/o and live online) and people with any number of disorders will find it difficult to watch, and listen to) I may have missed the parts about being safe, being responsible citizens, understanding the new audience,  etc that may have been at the end, but the social side of the 21st century was not foregrounded. Our kids are still just going to be kids, they will just be communicating on what will what they have always know. It will not be 'new'. That platform, like a downtown street, is complex and requires a number of skills; seeing through advertising, understanding dangerous locations, dealing with bullies, expressing yourself, understanding your identity etc... It is not a street that they need to learn to 'walk' in. 

Which brings me back to spam. Do you consider your email spam? It is possible, I suppose, that you sent out a single email to a single blogger and did not include a single reference to that person's work or their blog. That distinction... between spam and an invitation to participate in a dialogue is very important to me and to my vision of professional communications in the 21st century. It is critical that students understand this (among many other social skills that happen to be leveraged by technology) coming out of school.. 

Perhaps most interestingly, you've sent me an email full of content that your own confidentiality clause claims i can't post anywhere. I'm assuming that you never thought about it... but it is just this kind of institutional thinking that can be difficult when, as you say, you make changes from within. I'm not convinced of the legality of your confidentiality clause, but my own ethical standards are to abide by the requests of the sender (i could add your email to this post if you like). As your youtube link is public, I will take the risk of including it here.

This reply has been posted to my discussion blog at http://davecormier.net 

dave.

An introduction to our thinkings about the future

I stand corrected! The due date should be March 29th.

cheers all

dave.

On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 11:25 PM, dave cormier <coarsesalt@gmail.com> wrote:
Hello everyone,

I will be your instructor over the next two weeks virtually and for four days onsite at your polytechnic in Singapore. We'll probably get to know each other fairly well over the next three weeks, so I'll leave the 'who am i' conversation to those of you interested enough to do a google search for my name (use dave cormier not david cormier).

I must say that I'm tremendously excited by the opportunity presented by this course. It is material that I am very interested in and I consider it a privilege to be working through it with you. We have a very short period of time in order to get a fair amount of work done, hence my desire to get started as soon as possible. I've written a couple of blog posts mulling over my intentions regarding the course but I very much hope that this will change over the next too weeks of getting to know each other... changing as I get a better sense of your context and your interests. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/03/09/the-future-of-education-a-course-in-futures-thinking/

Our first assignment is very much intended to help start that conversation. I need to know what your technical competencies are, what your interests are, what your context looks like and what futures may look like to you at the moment. In the interests of this, I'd like you to take a look at this blog post that I wrote last week after an interview with Stephen Downes. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/03/19/the-pad-trends-drivers-and-a-scenario-from-1998/

Pay specific attention to the audio link available at the end of the post. In it, stephen describes his context at the college he worked at in 1998, why he felt the need to look to the future, what kinds of changes he saw coming and how that might affect the life of the educational worker. I'd like you to read through some of the piece (The Pad section in particular) and I'd like you to create a DIGITAL story of your own context, what one thing you think may be coming ten years in the future and how that might change your life as an educational worker.

It's a big first job... but by the time it is done, we'll all know alot more about each other. You can use youtube or slideshare or any other tool you would like. I'm thinking that your story should be somewhere in the 3-7 minute range.

1. create a digital story
2. due date - monday March 22nd.

Feel free to contact me with any questions. Private submissions will be accepted accompanied by valid reason.

 

An introduction to our thinkings about the future

Hello everyone,

I will be your instructor over the next two weeks virtually and for four days onsite at your polytechnic in Singapore. We'll probably get to know each other fairly well over the next three weeks, so I'll leave the 'who am i' conversation to those of you interested enough to do a google search for my name (use dave cormier not david cormier).

I must say that I'm tremendously excited by the opportunity presented by this course. It is material that I am very interested in and I consider it a privilege to be working through it with you. We have a very short period of time in order to get a fair amount of work done, hence my desire to get started as soon as possible. I've written a couple of blog posts mulling over my intentions regarding the course but I very much hope that this will change over the next too weeks of getting to know each other... changing as I get a better sense of your context and your interests. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/03/09/the-future-of-education-a-course-in-futures-thinking/

Our first assignment is very much intended to help start that conversation. I need to know what your technical competencies are, what your interests are, what your context looks like and what futures may look like to you at the moment. In the interests of this, I'd like you to take a look at this blog post that I wrote last week after an interview with Stephen Downes. http://davecormier.com/edblog/2010/03/19/the-pad-trends-drivers-and-a-scenario-from-1998/

Pay specific attention to the audio link available at the end of the post. In it, stephen describes his context at the college he worked at in 1998, why he felt the need to look to the future, what kinds of changes he saw coming and how that might affect the life of the educational worker. I'd like you to read through some of the piece (The Pad section in particular) and I'd like you to create a DIGITAL story of your own context, what one thing you think may be coming ten years in the future and how that might change your life as an educational worker.

It's a big first job... but by the time it is done, we'll all know alot more about each other. You can use youtube or slideshare or any other tool you would like. I'm thinking that your story should be somewhere in the 3-7 minute range.

1. create a digital story
2. due date - monday March 22nd.

Feel free to contact me with any questions. Private submissions will be accepted accompanied by valid reason.

 

suggestions for my creative commons consent form for data on my research project?

I understand that all data collected over the course of my interview(s), in the filling out of forms on rhizomatic.net and in my participation on the Cloudworks discussion platform will be licenced Creative Commons Non-Commercial Share Alike. This means that while no one will be able to make money from the proceeding of the data, and I will receive attribution, the content will be freely available to the public and available for research by anyone in the public and for remixing and reuse under the Creative Commons stipulations.  

submission to #nv10. had this idea last night...

This story/talk will look at how thinking, being social and making stuff has changed and might change in the future. It looks at the creative process of Machiavelli and Montaigne, locked in their libraries, and compares it to working in the social spaces of today. They drew on a discussion with history, sifted through the stories, and found a path forward for living. We are having live conversations with each other, communicating in almost real time, in a state of constant re-iteration. Or, at least, we could be. 

Frost saw two roads diverging in the wood... I see a rhizome, rooting out in all directions... 

How can we choose between an indefinite set of paths that haven't even been formed yet?

Well... we can do it together.