We’ve been looking at changing our professional development programme for next academic year to try and test this out. The Google apps rollout went absolutely fine with no training at all a few months ago. Seems to suggest that if the tools are good enough we can focus on the why rather than the how… Got to be a good thing.

The discrepancy I see in your example is that you say teachers do not (or cannot, or should not) create new knowledge about the Vietnam War. However, we expect _students_ to “construct knowledge” or something to that effect. Why should we expect anything less from teachers? Wouldn’t a teacher have to be proficient in constructing knowledge in order to teach students how to do the same?

Perhaps this apparent contradiction can be explained away as a semantic difference between “creating” and “constructing.” But I don’t think so. Either way, we are expecting something original. When you curate people, and the people linked to those people (etc., etc.) you do so because at the end, they are leading you to something of value, something original, something Google can’t give you.

Consider this- if you follow somebody because they follow all the folks with interesting ideas, but generate none themselves, won’t you eventually “cut out the middle-man,” by directly following the people with the interesting ideas? Therefore, to be of value, you need to do more than just point to other people. Sure, there is value in being connected. (In Malcolm Gladwell’s _Tipping Point_, the “connectors” are the catalysts of movements, even though they are not the ones with the specialized knowledge, nor are they the early adopters.) But the connectors are few, as Gladwell illustrates.

Which leads me back to the conclusion that we connect to people because they provide us a “value-added” product, either in idea or work.

Perhaps product of the teacher in your illustration is the transferable skill of curating people. But is that enough?

http://www.hound-dog.com/weed_hound.htm

I also prefer in this order: text, email, voicemail, phone when dealing with issues at work.

In the “school world” it is so difficult to reach people by phone anyway–asynchronous communication methods make so much more sense!

Trust me, don’t buy the premixed poison, buy the concentrate and the pro version of the 1 gallon spray jug. AND be sure to mix the poison with water from your kitchen sink, the odor produced helps to prevent dandelions in your carpet. Serious, I’ve yet to have one weed in the house, and we have a deep and lush berber carpet.

Kids should NOT be CONTENT PRODUCERS! They should be mathematicians and musicians and engineers and programmers and software designers and historians and artists and authors (of more than blogs)

Content is the sort of word used by Rupert Murdoch. It’s a term that does not discriminate between quality or motive. It’s just random bits to be sold.

If you need proof that the iPad IS NOT disruptive to the publishing industry like iTunes, you just have to look at 3 pieces of evidence:

1) Steve Jobs is contemptuous of print – http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/the-passion-of-steve-jobs/

2) Doing anything to preserve the viability of the American textbook industry does great violence to education. The winners will be McGraw-Hill and the like – companies responsible for 99% of what is wrong in schooling.

3) With iTunes, Jobs protected the consumer by holding the line on music and video costs. He did this by strong-arming the media publishers. The first thing he did with the iPad was allow book publishers to RAISE their prices in a way Amazon had not tolerated.

The iPad only begins to get interesting when 3G is on-board. How many schools can or will pay for 24/7 net access for children’s iPads? Clearly schools maintaining their own wireless networks is on the wrong side of history.