From my eTwinning conference liveblog we see that Heppell’s hypercarding again, and hitting the nerve where it matters.

School buildings, timetables where one subject is studied for a month at a time, libraries made from honeycomb, air-filled balloons to give privacy to learners, people taking risks because they realise that the riskiest thing they can do is do what we did last century.

• 1997: We built BIG things to DO things for OTHERS
  We had national curriculums, central control. We deliver curriculum, we deliver stuff.
• 2007: We build THINGS to help PEOPLE to HELP EACH OTHER
  The Creative Archive, eBay, YouTube. We communicate, we mentor, we twin up, we help, we don’t want content, we want to interact.

Some phenomena - do they matter?

• 
  YouTube: A 12 year old can be world champion cup stacker. Everyone’s excited in the video, except for the mum Kids are still keen to be the best, they are proud of their excellence and want to share it, they can share it, and schools’ attempts to limit this power are, at best, futile.
• YouTube: CMTV is YouTubed podcast video from a school. It’s simple, it’s effective, the whole school watch it, a third of parents watch it. It’s better than assembly, so much so that they don’t do assemblies any more. It’s produced by kids for kids.
• TeachersTV: A content producer, creating programmes to help teachers to do their jobs better. One of the biggest growth sectors in its audience? Kids. They watch it, they want to learn what it could be like to be taught in a particular way.
• Mobiles: China in 2002 had 200,000 phones. In 2007 China adds 200,000 more phones daily.
• Homemade video: 60-second videos are celebrated at international cinema events, like Bafta.
• Knowledge and content don’t matter: Why do PC World sell Encyclopedia Brittania for 99pence? Who knows? Knowledge is free on the web so knowledge can’t and shouldn’t be sold. It’s what is done with knowledge that’s worth money. [Ewan - Do we teach our kids to ‘do stuff’ with their knowledge?]
• Buy Essays Online vs Free Essays Online - which one wins a GoogleFight?
  Could we not start asking our students to critique others’ essays and give their reasons for grading them themselves as students?

School buildings

• Toilets in back of every classroom: kids need to drink water to concentrate, kids need the toilet, kids need a toilet near the place of learning. Performance of kids who drink more water rises 15-20%
• Classrooms designed by students, architected by students and with no ‘front’, just a wide length-long door open to the grass outside.

Education 2.0 - Education 1.0
We can’t expect schools do meet the kind of targets being set by copying the tactics of those reaching them already. Every school is different. Teachers need to be empowered to go and research what will work for their culture. That means they will discover new things.

After all, we wouldn’t go to the dentists and wish it was “like it was when I was a wean”.

Why should we not measure the happiness of children as they leave school? Has the process contributed to their happiness, their enrichment, beyond academic results? We need a learnometer.

Education 2.0 is really something that should feel very comfortable for most people, like Learning 1.0. It’s maybe just that some have forgotten the excitement you can feel when you’re learning rather than being taught.

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