What do conferences of people who wear stuffed animal costume for sporting events and people who make balloon animals have in common? They know what they do for a living. What do TED watching folks do for a living? Try to make change. Of some kind. Of ideas. Old ones to new ones.

Smash some old ideas. In entertainment, marketing, business, design and even teaching!

“I want to argue that we are living through and are right now at the key moment of a change in the way that ideas are created and spread and implemented.”

What does this have to do with teaching? I’m not sure because for the most part many schools are too over their heads with this what not and that what not to even think about entertaining old ideas let alone new ones. Regardless, we hope.

According to Godin, we started with the factory idea. Basically build a good factory line and churn, churn, churn. I think most school systems still follow this model. The Henry Ford model of Education. What better way to ensure cheap labor than by following the factory/industry model of education.

That idea was followed by the TV one. Blanket the airwaves with ads and you rule. Acceptable spamming. Hypnotize.

Godin believes that the new idea of making meaningful change is not by using power or money but by leading tribes. The idea of tribes. Strikingly reminds me of Clay Shirky’s talk…

“There is an awareness that the internet is not a decoration on contemporary society but a challenge to it…” -Clay Shirky

“We’re living through, in our historical generation, the largest increase in human expressive capability in history.” -Clay Shirky

Interesting questions on how different/similar is this media revolution that we’re all currently a living, acting part of compared to the previous media revolutions of the printing press, the telephone/telegraph, recorded media of all types and finally broadcast.

Godin speaks of ideas (factory, TV, tribes) and Shirky speaks of media revolutions. In the end, same good message. The digital revolution is not about hardware and software, it’s about social ideas and media revolutions and understanding their implication in time to affect meaningful change.

Double-Taker (Snout), Interactive Robot from Golan Levin on Vimeo.

It’s been a while since I’ve listened to this talk by Sir Kenneth Robinson. Splendid. It seems appropriate for this time of transition for me.

I’m looking forward to getting back to teaching soon and doing what I love. And then, hopefully, soon recover my passion for being an advocate of multi-media literacies.

For now, I’ll be glad to just get back into the classroom.

As I enter 2009, I found the preceding interview of Gladwell on Charlie Rose very important for me at this particular time. I haven’t read his new book and to be honest, I don’t plan to at this time. I’m planning on going back to finish Blink and think about the relationship between rapid cognition, meaningful work and curiosity (important culminating point at the end of the interview) and how that affects not only my work as an educator but my day to day living as well.

I first discovered Malcolm Gladwell via his talk on TED on What we can learn from spaghetti sauce.

It’s hard not to love anything on TED but this talk was particularly poignant for me at the time. I am not an artist and have never claimed to be but this talk re-affirmed for me my interest in the importance of intentionally teaching creativity (or curiosity) in schools.

It also helped support my feeling that the fact that art and visual literacy is something that is merely taught at the fringe or in an extra-curricular setting significantly hurts our students. In an attempt to help students in the area of science, math and technology, we fail to see the importance of art, creativity and visual literacy in this age. Despite our efforts and investment in science, math and technology in this country, why are our students still so significantly behind? And, more importantly, why does so much creative work seem to come from those same students from those same countries that are so significantly ahead of our students in the area of science, math and technology? It seems like these students have no problem being strong in disciplines that are both right and left brain.

Dan Pink has something to say about that.

After that talk on TED, I began reading Blink and reflected on the importance of “rapid cognition” and how it was immensely related to his talk on spaghetti sauce and how that relation was significantly relevant to teaching in a web2.0 classrooms(whatever that means since, for the most part, they really don’t exist…sticking hardware in a classroom doesn’t count…and, it may, in fact, hurt more than help).

So, again as I enter 2009 I plan to go back to finish Blink and enjoy thinking about the relationship between rapid cognition, meaningful work and curiosity and how that affects not only my work as an educator but my day to day living as well.

This is definitely one of the best science&technology museums I have ever visited. A powerful combination of beautiful design, technology and history.

Thanks to Jesus being born supposedly at or around this time of the year, I get a nice break from work for two weeks.

After seven years of making a feeble effort at being a good educator, this past semester has been a bit difficult. It’s been a while since my first experience as an educator, teaching sistemas at the INSA in Cali, Colombia while living with the Basilian Fathers.

Since that time I’ve taught in inner-city Houston, south McAllen in south Texas and at a University in Mexico for six months.

Although I’ve been interested in the role computers, technology and media play in the classroom and learning environments since I began teaching, I’ve stepped back a bit to from it this year to reflect on how and why I came into this profession, or as the Basilian Fathers prefer to refer to it, this vocation.

This break will be a good time to reflect. On the birth of Christ, of course, and in my profession, vocation, work as an educator. One writer that immediately came to mind was Parker Palmer.

I hope to re-visit some of his thoughts and writings during this break. When I began teaching my interest in spirituality was just as strong as my interest in technology. In fact, I was deeply interested in the intersecting roles of both of these in the classroom. Not spirituality in dogmatic, “prayer back in schools” type of religion. But definitely some kind of spirituality that gives birth to good, healthy imaginations.

These last years I think I’ve lost some of my interest in the importance of some kind of spirituality in the lives of educators and in the classroom environment. A spirituality of creativity that goes beyond curriculum and inspires “real” instruction in some way. The kind of instruction that is human, humble and grounded.

“As we renew our schools and highways, we’ll also renew our information superhighway. It is unacceptable that the United States ranks 15th in the world in broadband adoption. Here, in the country that invented the Internet, every child should have the chance to get online, and they’ll get that chance when I’m President because that’s how we’ll strengthen America’s competitiveness in the world.”

Read the article here.

Henry Jenkins has a great little article on fair use at his blog.