Ignoring intertwingularity was education’s shark jump

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Posted on 7th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability | Schools we now have

Jumping the shark, as we see Fonzie doing, is the point at which something absurd is done, followed by ongoing efforts to revive an enterprise. Ignoring the intertwingularity is the shark jump for established education. Schooling is on a path of increasingly under serving youngsters and education as it was known in the 20th century is petering out.

Meanwhile there is great news: the connection handschooling can make for a student to the intertwingularity is now real and quickly getting more effective and spreading.

The reason handschooling is so hopeful is that it can put an individual student in touch with the intertwingularity. That connection can be made regardless of the “schooling” situation and status of that individual student, who could: be in a school where students score high on standards, be in a failing school that does poorly by schooling standards, schooled at home, not have a school to go to.

The fact of the matter is that handschooling — when it tips with enough of the world’s youngsters connected to the intertwingularity — will force the reconfiguring of established education. That reconfiguring is sketched whimsically in stories taking place in the future in my book Intertwingle, if you are interested. The point of this website is to bring handschooling into focus now.

So what is the intertwingularity?

The word was coined in 1974 by Ted Nelson, as Wikipedia states, “to express the complexity of interrelations in human knowledge.” The beautiful, spontaneous, serendipitous gift to learning that has emerged in the internet is a network that does indeed interface the complexities of interrelation of human knowledge. That network is what I call in handschooling.com the intertwingularity. At the end of this post, I have included, from my book 109 IDEAS FOR VIRTUAL LEARNING, some paragraphs describing the first time I realized the intertwingularity was out there. (Then ten years ago, I did not yet know of Ted Stevens’ word, but I saw exactly what he described — and it was, as I write below, mysterious.)

A brief history of the intertwingularity so far:

  • What is known by humankind has poured into the open internet and there, following network laws, emerged as the intertwingularity.
  • Established education has held the internet at arms length, attempting at best to organize and judge some of the online knowledge, but not deigning to recognizes or engage the intertwingularity of knowledge formed naturally in the network.
  • Education practice has continued to divide and disconnect human knowledge into standards and grades, continuing the increasingly dark art of shoehorning knowledge relations into standards and curricula (instead of letting them intertwingle).
  • Opposite to education’s standards and curricula, the interwingulatity is emergent from the knowledge placed online by experts and authorities in knowledge fields, and is naturally vetted by network laws (think how Google puts the best stuff at the top).
  • By being individually owned and operated, the mobile internet browser has became able to connect its owner to the complexities of interrelation of human knowledge — the intertwingularity.
  • The intertwingularity has created a global knowledge commons where everyone who connects to it literally learns from the same virtual page — with very big time implications for world understanding.
  • The future of learning has become not about what we do in schooling: it is now about how soon we engage our learning generation with the intertwingularity.
  • We can connect individual kids to the intertwingularity right now through handschooling. Let’s do it! (more…)

School big thinker ignores the internet

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Posted on 6th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Schools we now have

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This education “big-thinker” never mentions the internet in this nine-minute talk on “Becoming Internationally Competitive.” If you want to spend the time to watch this video, ask yourself as you do whether it is about the 1980s or 1950s or even earlier. The are almost no clues that the internet exists. The students and teachers use pencils, pads, and printed workbooks to write by hand. A botany class uses printed images of leaves — when they could, for example, be learning something new each day from the Botany Photo of the Day.

The students we see in the video are from excelling schools in countries where students average far better on tests than do students from USA public schools. Kids are shown from Finland, whose education ranks highest by the video’s standards. Finland is tech-drenched; it is the home of Nokia. In Finland 79% of the population use the internet and each of the 5.5 million people has a legal right to a one-megabit broadband connection. It is almost certain that every Finnish student in the video owns a smartphone that browses the internet and would beautifully display the Botany Photo of the Day. Yet in the video we only briefly see a student using a handheld calculator and one quick look at a classroom with 1990s era desktop computers on tables.

The big-thinker narrator laments, after showing scenes from schools in other countries, that USA schools are inferior. She says at one point that in our “low income schools science is barely taught.” She concludes the video with a discussion of common course standards — and saying that the federal government is organizing itself to fund new assessments that will be tied to the common course standards. She says that the federal role will be to design an approach that is more internationally comparable.

OKAY, this is oversimplified, but: Why not provide kids in whatever are our “low income schools” with smartphones so they can learn about nature from Botany Photo of the Day and the comprehensive natural sciences openly available online – like these samples for botany?

And what possible clue is there in the video to how the “low income schools” in the USA — and all the kids around the world NOT in the superior countries — could ever have deep knowledge experience like the narrator touts. A great start is handschooling where deep knowledge awaits online.

How we can keep Obama from creating underclass youth by taking over American education

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Posted on 5th February 2010 by Judy Breck in Obamaschool | Politics | Schools we now have

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Reading the post today that I have written about in the comments that follow has changed my approach. The need to stop the further socialization of learning has become critical, with what Obama is pushing. In the face of that threat, Handschooling is a major way to get local nurture and individual teaching to the children of America and across the world.

This is this what I read today: an explanation of what Obama and Arne Duncan are up to in taking over education, by Susan Durand:

Indoctrination Disguised as Education Reform: How Arne Duncan’s well-funded Race to the Top program will inject (even more) propaganda into your child’s head.

As Durand points out, Texas Governor Rick Perry has said “no” — as have some local districts in various states. Still, I am horrified for what this means for the current generation now in schools.

But can these Obama/Duncan moves really be a ploy to make community organizers out of the already under-served class created by failing public schools? After some further investigation, I think the answer is: yeah, that’s right. As the article points out, by authorizing charter schools the folks who run those can teach 1) what they want to, and 2) what the fed tells them to. Scary.

When I read the parts in the article about indoctrinating kids, I thought: What is this woman saying? She must be a conspiracy theorist. I have had, for example, only the most positive thoughts about Wendy Kopp and Teach for America. Controlled by AmeriCorps? Who are they? So I did some digging.

This is AmeriCorps — our .gov taxpayer paid bureaucracy which is, self-proclaimed: “A program of the Corporation for National Community Service”

It took some real digging in the Teach for America website, but sure enough, as it says buried down in this page, “Teach For America is currently a member of AmeriCorps, the national service network.”

And there I found an example from the Teach for America website how AmeriCorps sets the rules for the their members who teach under TFA and AmeriCorps grants:

My guess is that learning itself is going through a phoenix-like collapse and rebirth. I have thought for a long time that the delivery of knowledge by the internet will inevitably liberate individual students from captive classrooms. It think it will also liberate teachers to become independent professionals. How funny it would be to see the system they are sending out tentacles to control withering in the paws of Arne and The One.

A major part of the ongoing mission of handschooling.com is to shed light on this crucial struggle between educational control and individual learning.

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