Interesting post by Robert Cringely on the challenges facing educators. (One of many) money quote:

…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.I came to this conclusion recently while attending Brainstorm 2008, a delightful conference for computer people in K-12 schools throughout Wisconsin. They didn’t hold breakout sessions on technology battles or tactics, but the idea was in the air. These people were under siege.

Via the always-useful blog by Nik Peachey, here’s a link to a site with an extensive collection of teacher training videos, many about using web 2.0 tools.

Guy Kawasaki’s latest project, the blog portal Alltop, just added an education section. You can get the headlines / post titles and mousing over the title gives you the first several paragraphs, so you can decide if it’s worth a read. Not sure how or why this is better than a feed reader, but I do seem to go to Alltop every morning….

And, as a teaching tool, Alltop would be a good resource helping students find content they are interested in.

From Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed News, an all-too-familiar description of an education conference. Money quote:

First, am I a snob? Out to lunch? I mean it. I feel like it sometimes when I go to an education conference with 6,000 attendees and virtually no Internet access where almost no one who is presenting is modeling anything close to great pedagogy with technology. (That doesn’t mean, btw, that they are not great teachers or thinkers.) Where just about the only technologies represented on the vendor floor deal with assessment or classroom displays. I mean, I know I’m a one-trick pony in terms of what my frame of reference is (so no need to remind me again), but shouldn’t I be at least getting some sense that the people who are making the decisions understand on some level what we here are jammering about every day, the transformation that’s occurring, the amazing potentials of this? I feel like I have to be missing something here, that it must be me.

It’s not just you Will: we’ve all had that sensation, and it’s scary.
What we’re starting to see now is a new type of “wealth gap”, but where wealth is defined as “ability to adapt to change”. Today* it’s technology that’s driving this change, and as a whole the teaching community is woefully behind.

And the folks we’re behind are the ones we are supposed to be teaching. We’re about to slip into perceived irrelevance.

And since the rate of change is accelerating, a small gap now will only get bigger unless something dramatic happens. William Gibson points out that “The future is already here - it is just unevenly distributed”…so how do we teach young people who are in that future, when we’re living in the past?

I don’t have much hope for teachers enmeshed in the government-run, bureaucratic, union-led morass that passes for public education these days. I feel woefully behind and I’m an independent free market freelancer guy designing web-based learning software, so how can teachers shackled within the public system manage? They are trying to keep their head above water with a big lead ball chained to their ankle.

(Yeah, I know, this sounds a little apocalyptic…to balance things out, later this week I’ll post some possible solutions.)

* or…as always?

German author Stefan Klien, in the New York Times:

Believing time is money to lose, we perceive our shortage of time as stressful. Thus, our fight-or-flight instinct is engaged, and the regions of the brain we use to calmly and sensibly plan our time get switched off. We become fidgety, erratic and rash.

Tasks take longer. We make mistakes — which take still more time to iron out. Who among us has not been locked out of an apartment or lost a wallet when in a great hurry? The perceived lack of time becomes real: We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

From the TED blog:

Ben Kaufman, founder of Kluster, goes on stage to tell what he and his team have been doing — with the help of TED attendees and 1200 people around the world — since the beginning of the conference. Kluster is an online collaboration and decision-making platform. They set out Wednesday morning to develop a product, with some basic guidelines but “we didn’t know what it would be”. They set up a studio in the conference’s venue, and got 208 ideas submitted in 24 hours. Collaboratively, it was decided that it would be an education board game; the content for it was developed; a name chosen (”OverThere” — the logo was submitted by a participant online); the rules set; a tagline developed; a full prototype developed (photo). 72 hours, 1200 participants, a board game “of social awareness” collectively invented, developed and prototyped: a pretty awesome piece of work.

Check out the Kluster site.

Interesting discussion at Ken Carrol’s blog. Money quote in the comments:

So what does it take to learn language? Among other things: learner buy-in and commitment; daily, meaningful written and spoken target-language communication in real-life situations; access to target language media for authentic consumption. Can technology help us improve the way we do any of these things?

Free from Harvard comes this excellent video series on public speaking skills, by Professor Patrick Winston. It has a different focus than many similar resources: instead of the corporate PowerPoint-driven presentation, he discusses the lecture format of universities. But the core principles of how to “give a talk” are  of course the  same. The video is nicely broken up into convenient 2-4 minute chapters.

Hat tip to soulsoup.

Here’s a nice survey post by Curt Bonk of a variety of online language learning solutions out there, with short explanations and reviews. There’s a bit of buzz right now prompted by the NY Times article that came out Sunday (reg required).

A little different take, with a refreshingly informal register. Great advice on what is all too often overlooked: hardcore practice.