Ten Big Questions for Education

Crowds.Brian Kuhn has shared an opportunity with me that offers another means of our class – and others who might find this post – entering into the discourse on shaping the future of education. To echo Andrew B. Watt’s call for students to enter the EduBlogosphere and tell us how we’re doing, this project – which began yesterday – could find the TALONS engaging in a truly global endeavor!

A well known educator / traveling speaker Will Richardson has crowd sourced the 10 big questions for education.  If you’re not familiar with crowd sourcing, it’s a recent phenomenon made possible by social networking tools on the Internet like Twitter.  Will asked people in his professional network to post what they felt the most important questions are for education today.  Basically people in his network spread the message to their networks and the crowd grew as the message spread around the world, literally.  Then Will asked “the crowd” to vote on the questions so that he could come up with a top 10 list.  To facilitate a mass collaborative write for these questions, Will has created a wiki and offered people the opportunity to collaboratively write / share their thoughts and ideas for each question. The end goal I believe, is to produce a free online resource, perhaps a free published “e” book, from this work. This is a great opportunity for you to participate in a global shared writing project.  I have volunteered to moderate and promote question #1 “What is the purpose of school?”  Please click through to this question if you would like to contribute your ideas or to read others ideas. Here are the 10 questions; you can click on the link for a question you’re interested in to go to the separate page for editing.
1. What is the purpose of school? 2. What is the changing role of the teacher, and how do we support that new role? 3. How do we help students discover their passions? 4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students? 5. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using? 6. What does an educated person look like today? 7. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning? 8. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school? 9. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity? 10. How do we evaluate and validate the informal, self-directed learning that happens outside of school?

Welcome to the crowd!