A New Model of Education: Designing Virtual Communities for Creativity and Learning

Check out the Edutopia article - A New Model of Education: Designing Virtual Communities for Creativity and Learning: The boundaries that define various school stakeholders are breaking down. by Ted Kahn

Me-Publishing

We need to keep K12 online students and teachers in mind as well when we read stories like the following. At RETA, we are experimenting with technologies that allow teachers collaborative, co-creation opportunities and the ability to me-publish. Current tools for experimentation: RETA Blog RETA Wiki Julz wiki - Let's Change the World NM eTeacher Blog - you're here NM eTeacher Wiki The following story is from Elliot Masie's Learning Trends. To subscribe go to http://www.masie.com/masie/default.cfm?page=techlearntrends "Me-Publishing" Imperatives: Your employees want an opportunity to"me-publish" their profiles and perspectives at work! Let me share an interesting story from a young employee that I met on an airplane: This young man had been recently hired by a Fortune 100 company to work in their procurement office. On his first day of work, he asked the HR person conducting orientation where he could publish his profile. This was a perplexing question to the facilitator who responded that his profile was already in their HR system. The new employee replied: "But, where do I post my profile so that everyone else in the company can see what I am about?" He kept his profile on Facebook and MySpaces up to date and used these social networking systems every day. So, he just assumed that a big corporation would have a similar system. He wanted to be able to see who had graduated from his college, who shared some of his same interests, even who already knew the massive system he was about to learn. His model of learning and "belonging" involved a degree of "me-publishing" and social networking. He was amazed that people could work for a 50,000 person company and not be able to self-publish their profiles and experiences. The HR orientation leader told him he should get used to the fact that big companies didn't foster that type of networking and it could be used to help recruit away some of their best talent. Actually, her response had the same effect. One week later, he resigned and went to a company that gave him the tools and permissions to keep a daily work blog and access to an internally secure social networking system. By the way, he took a 15% reduction in salary in order to be in a better topography of knowledge sharing. Don't do this just for your NextGen employees. The age of me-publishing and social networking is upon us and will be leveraged by every generation of our workforce. We can create models that protect the company's interests while deeply fostering the power of the network and the wisdom of crowds."