Time for professional reflection

Today was PSAT day. I thought it would be a good opportunity to catch up on some major blog reading and look at current conferences as I await the K12Online Conference. I did enjoy the keynote video from Stephen Heppell on Oct. 13. I already introduced the concept to our faculty of his title “It Simply Isn’t the 20th Century Any More Is It?: So Why Would We Teach as Though It Was?”

Looking for more info bring to my faculty, I came across Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's broadcast video at the Learning 2.0 Conference in Shanghai in September. She begins with a good question that I want our faculty, "What am I doing right now in my classroom to prepare kids to live out their lives and be successful in the 21st century?" Good question, and to be honest, I really don't know. I think as a history teacher I am preparing students to live in a new global age and learn different perspectives and cultures. I want them to use tools of technology to be more effective consumers of knowledge but also learn to present, share, and create.


Other points in her video:
"Helping students to learn to be . . . is just as important as learning about . . ." Our school has spent some a lot of deliberate time reflecting on what do we want our students to be. I don't think that these "to be's" have become more important than our "to know's."

"We do a wonderful job help our students engage in conent so that by college students are ready to be engaged with content. But the problem with that model is that the rate at which content is expanding."

"By 2020, knowledge will be doubling every 72 hours." If this is true, we cannot have content be the focus.

I use this concept of the growth and speed of knowledge in my history classes, and I do agree with the concept, but I am still trying to understand how this is measured. Here are some similar statements.

"In the ninteteenth century, it took about fifty years to double the world's knowledge. Today, the base of knowledge doubles in less than a year." http://www.emory.edu/TEACHING/Report/AppendixD.html

"We're all striving to keep up with the quantum leaps being made in all areas of knowledge. It's estimated that medical knowledge, for example, doubles every seven years, and scientific knowledge doubles every twenty years. The total written knowledge in the world is said to have doubled between 1450 and 1750, and then to have doubled again between 1750 and 1900. Between 1900 and 1950, human knowledge doubled once more, and then again from 1950 to 1975. Now, it is believed to double every 900 days. By the year 2020, global knowledge is predicted to double every 72 days!" http://web.uncg.edu/dcl/web/about/about_dean.asp