Education 3.0 Blog Starts Up on Wired

The first post for a blog on Education 3.0 went up on Wired today.

It's loaded with good insights.

How do we help our people, who will work more in teams than as individuals, who will work on more projects at a single time than ever before, and who will interface with technology at a rate as of yet unseen? How do we encourage learning for these skills when our schools are still filled with individual projects and grades trumping all else, with instruction and assessment doing everything possible to hone concentrated focus as was required in industrial-aged work vs. multi-tasking required today, and when the majority of classrooms (K-20) still require students to put away their devices and stop using the web so that they can “learn?”

The post speaks to many of the concerns that prompted my move to e-portfolios, collaborative pre-writing exercises, a classroom that welcomes the use of phones, and open-web exams.

The author is seeking to widen the audience of an important discussion, and I applaud that effort.

I couldn't help but notice that the author Jeff Borden works for Pearson, a for-profit education publishing and assessment company. They make some good products and publish some great books, but I wonder how Jeff and his company feel about my believe that classrooms should use as much open source software and/or freeware as possible.

Don't get me wrong, private companies like Pearson should play a role in the advancement of Education 3.0. I am not one who thinks education is at odds with the private sector. I'm not against profit. In fact, I like profit. I just don't want to see the pursuit of profit trump the public mandate of education.