Mindworkers

Charlet T. Kerchner / MindWorkers

The Elements of Learning 2.0: Students as the real workers in education

Most education reforms start with the premise that adults need to work harder so students will learn more.  But ultimately, maybe quickly, that premise is self-defeating.  Regardless of the pedagogy used, who governs the school, or how long teachers toil, students are the real workers in the system.  Building around that reality is one of […]

Insanity or Courage?

Last evening, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at a reunion of Education Pioneers, an organization that looks for and trains out-of-classroom talent for education reform.  The conversational stars of the evening were Maria Casillas, who flunked retirement to rejoin the Los Angeles Unified School District to head its efforts at connecting […]

The Elements of Learning 2.0: A Remix of Knowledge Acquisition and Practice

The words “remix” and “mashup” entered the vocabulary as descriptors of life in the digital age.  They are also key to what I am calling Learning 2.0, the next full-scale version of public education. At the simplest level, these new terms are represented by three teenagers using Apple Garage Band to combine bits and pieces […]

“A New Culture Of Learning”: Dewey Redux

Two of the gurus of the Internet age have written a charming, compelling, and ultimately romantic book about what learning could be. In the opening pages of A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown lay out the dimensions of “arc of life” […]

Understanding the Kahn Academy

In Learning 2.0, I reference the Kahn Academy, the wildly successful and growing open-source video tutoring program.  Here Salman Kahn talks about how his video lectures have penetrated regular classrooms.  By removing the one-size fits all classroom, the teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.  His TED speech here.  Listen to his notions about […]

The Elephant on the Mountain:

or how to talk about public education without mentioning the financial crisis hardly at all I had a good time at Tuesday’s self-styled Education Summit.  United Way, which put on the meeting, did a fine job of organizing and packed a lot of content and good will into a half-day.  I’ve written a cover story […]

Learning 2.0

“Why, one might ask, should California, the headwaters of the digital revolution, be stuck in the eddies of an early 20th Century school design?” Starting this week, I will be posting a series of pieces about the what I believe to be the essentials of 21st Century learning and the changes in educational politics that […]

A Real Cheesehead: Public Sector Collective Bargaining Under Attack in Wisconsin

The extent of the attack on public sector collective bargaining has taken me by surprise.  I had expected that Republican victories in November would lead to a hardening of attitudes, but the extent and spread has been breathtaking.  There are reports of an initiative to repeal collective bargaining in California, but that may well amount […]

A Cautionary Story About Merit Pay

In a just published piece on the PACE blog, I talk about the unintended consequences of paying teachers based on student results.  In the long run, actually much more quickly than one might think, Talent will organize to insure its economic success.  The blog piece retells the story of how baseball players became superstars with […]

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About

Charles Taylor Kerchner is an Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Claremont Graduate University. My daily musings appear in the blog. The archives of my EdWeek blog are available via link under the 'On California' head. Some of my photography can be seen by clicking on 'Gallery.' And numerous links to academic work and other research and commentary can be found by clicking on 'Projects.'

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