Reboot Learning!

Last week I was high up in the mountains of Vail, Colorado, at a brainstorming retreat organized by the Charter School Growth Fund. I was very flattered to be asked to join and found myself surrounded by some big thinkers/heavy hitters in the education space. The idea, in a nutshell, was that public education is failing students — or at least large numbers of students — who don't even complete high school. We all agreed that because of the internet and other technology, students are now outpacing their teachers and administrators in terms of the "informal learning" they are doing online outside the classroom. Everything is changing except K-12 public schools…

When I was first invited to join, I thought I would share my own experiences on the road promoting Totally Wired — experiences of teachers and parents who were largely resistant to social media and its potential. Of course I did overhear a couple conversations at the retreat where adults were worrying about what kids are posting on Facebook, will it impact their chances of getting a job, etc. But instead we really focused on trying to dream up a new vision of learning or at least imagine something radically different than what exists today without any restrictions (like fear of social media, standards, testing, physical school buildings).

In the visions that emerged, a few themes became clear:

- The educational experience should be more individualized and customized for the student. Whether it's where they learn from (home, community center, traditional school) or how they learn (games, virtual worlds, books) - the consensus seemed to be that groups of students sitting in a room drilling for the same test isn't helping anyone.

- Still there has to be some structured goals/desired outcomes. Maybe it's a workplan, maybe it's completing certain types of projects. Measurement has to change to factor in new types of skills and take a more holistic approach. It's not just filling in bubbles and generating a score — it could be an online portfolio full of student artifacts or a video game type badge showing bars depicting the different areas students are completing work in.

- The role of teachers will and must change. As knowledge becomes more broadly available through technology, teachers are no longer the all-knowing beings they once were — they instead become more like "guides" or "facilitators" of learning. Some teachers would continue to add to the knowledge base as content creators, but the idea is that knowledge is more distributed, and more people, including students, can add to our collective knowledge base.

- It's about preparing them to be adaptive vs. having one job or career for the rest of their lives. We talked about the new skills needed for the 21st century like filtering/information literacy, project management, personal branding, thinking globally and the ability to adapt to rapid change. It has to be about more than just mastering subject matter or even learning one specific vocation.

There were many more ideas and concepts, these are just a few big ones to give you a sense of what folks were talking about.

We came up with "day in the life" scenarios of future students in our ideal learning settings — they were making documentaries, connecting with and learning about students in Pakistan, building ski resorts, using a mobile device to collect field notes on different types of trees and plants, role playing in virtual worlds, meeting with mentors, working on a new business or doing community service. Some of this stuff is happening already in some charter schools, private schools and even public schools with renegade teachers/administrators — the question and the challenge was how to radically transform the entire system, especially one that is so entrenched in government bureaucracy. I don't think we completely answered that one, though there was some talk of being able to "flip a state" or get one state to become a model for others to follow.

We were also asked to come up with a catchy slogan that embodies what needs to happen (alas Reboot Learning was what our table came up with — tagline TBD).

I left this experience feeling like education is everyone's responsibility — not just people who run schools or teach in them. By creating a sort of educational ghetto where only underpaid people in the field are thinking about what's working and what's not, and where the red tape is so thick that no one outside the system feels like they can have any real impact, we're missing an opportunity to create real change.

Many Ypulse readers are marketers and content creators in industries spending billions on understanding how to captivate and engage young people — whether through video games, movies or ads. My feedback to the Charter School Growth Fund was to get YOU in the room next time, as well as more young people. If you can create measurable ROI for brands or for your own media properties, you can dream up how to make learning more engaging to young people. We need educational games that are as fun to play as Grand Theft Auto and learning the classics to come alive like We Tell Stories is doing over at Penguin. I believe that marketers and media professionals have the collective knowledge and experience to help "reboot learning" — don't you?

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