Read this from the WSJ…

Online Education: My Teacher Is an App – WSJ.com: “I don’t think learning has to happen at school, in a classroom with 30 other kids and a teacher…corralling all children into learning the same thing at the same pace,” she says. “We should rethink the environment we set up for education.”

Then this from Will Richardson…

Will Richardson: “My Teacher is an App”: “And it’s time to raise our game, write comments and op-ed pieces and journal articles and books, have conversations with parents (or at least give them some reading to do), speak up at conferences and board meetings and elsewhere, not about the wonders of technology but about the changed landscape of literacies and skills and dispositions that the current system, online or off, is not able to provide to our kids in its current iteration. That schools can be places of wonder and exploration and inquiry and creation, not just force fed curriculum 75% of which our kids will forget within months of consuming it. That learning and reform as they are currently being defined are both nothing of the sort.”

Will is right, as is the WSJ article in many ways.

My key takeaway is that localization matters down to the granular point of not just a classroom learning environment but a lead-learner-and-student relationship.

The real trick to this mess is to stop thinking of ourselves as teachers with something to protect (knowledge, our union pensions (ha! I’m in the Carolinas… what’s a union??), our ability to have “classroom management”) and start calling ourselves learners alongside the other learners in the classroom, out of the classroom and in the universe around us (what better classroom is there than a clear night sky?).

Teachers should be budget-cutted and minimized and learners should be elevated.