C4T #3 - Will Richardson

My third C4T is on the blog of Will Richardson.He is an educator, an author, and a speaker. He says in his bio that he is trying to answer the question, "What happens to schools and classrooms and learning in a 2.0 world?" The first post that I read is titled We Need Discoverers. In this post, Mr. Richardson takes an excerpt from David Edwards' American Schools are Training Kids for a World That Doesn't Exist. This is a fascinating article about how the world around us is changing, and we need to discover new ways to survive in it. Edwards says that there is a disconnect between learning and doing in our culture. You go to school and learn how to be a doctor, lawyer, chef, engineer, etc. and then once you graduate, you get to do it. This disconnect is simply not functional within our society. So how do we teach our students to become discoverers? I believe that one of the best ways to do this is through PBL. In PBL, students are given a problem and challenged to discover the solution. These are the types of professionals that we need. We cannot move forward in the areas of technology, medicine, agriculture, etc without people who are willing to discover new and better solutions. The article written by David Edwards would make an excellent prompt for future blog posts in EDM 310.

Mr. Richardson's next blog post was another excerpt, this time from Gary Stager. Stager predicts that the amount of time students spend in school will decrease, potentially to nothing. I'm not sure if I agree with Stager, but there certainly has to be some sort of shift. The comment section of this post is where the conversation really gets started. One reader suggested that as long as parents need glorified babysitting while they're at work, schools will continue to monopolize our children's time. Another pointed out that government assisted families will continue to send their children to school for free food and access to technology. That comment seems a bit far fetched. I pointed out that the incidence of children who are home schooled has steadily increased over the past decade. I believe a shift like this is most likely to pull students out of the traditional school setting. However, I tend to agree most with Mr. Richardson's comment that schools will still exist, but what the children are doing in the schools will change.