@Brad

You’re a rockstar, and this quote of yours prove it: “as much as I am growing to love education, I am always so frustrated by its forgotten limitless nature.”

Exactly, where is this idea of limitless nes you refer to, that is the key to the wonder of such a process. Without it, we might as well be breaking up rocks on the side of the road. In many ways, my work here has brought that idea of limitless possibilities closer to my soul than anything I have do up and until now, and it is a pretty intense fire.

As to the question of the term (or is it the idea) “educator” getting in the way somehow, I agree. And correct me if I’m wrong, but one of the things I have seen in Gardner’s classes is the ability to catalyze thought that is not tied to any one text, ideology, or way of reading. He seems to galvanize passion and multiplicity, which is a unique and powerful combination. When I saw th image of you in the hospital last Spring, I was kind taken back and blown away all at once. I oddly never expected ayone to be so bold, yet I knew when I saw it that that was what it is all about. You’ve been pushing the blogging boundaries for well over a year now, and whether you like it or not you have been an integral part of this conversation for me. And that is where the blurring of relationships, roles, and age needs to happen, and when it does I think the sense that we are doing something elsee, whatever we call it, become apparent.

@Andrea

I knew you were a home schooler because I follow the atypical life, and I saw your comments on Downes’ post about home schooling. y wife and I were fascinated by that discussion, and I think it is an entire element of this world that gets somewhat ignored (and I plead guilty to that). I cringe when I think about all my over-the-top exclamations about the institution, education, etc.,and all the while there are thousands that have decided to re-imagine ducation all together and truly do-it-themselves. I think we both know that with a tool like WPMu , you can create a rich community of students from all over the world, affording the distributed, social interaction that so many mourn with home schooling. There are some fascinating possibilities with the tools we all talk about. I have been thinking about the Downes post/video a bit, and I tend to agree that schooling depends on a community of difference that might challenge some deeply held cultural and religious assumptions so that we can begin to appreciate and struggle through identities. But I don’t think home schooling precludes this (despite the fact it is often used as a argument against it), particularly given the ubiquity of synchronous and asynchronous collaborative publishing possibilities all around us, not to mention video and audio and all kinds of other media.

I also love that you frame this group as educational anarchsts, it makes me that much fonder of all of you! Suffice to say, I have some more reading and talking to folks like you about homes chooling, and it is a topic my family is quite interested in. Thanks for all the goodness.

@Barbara

You were missed, and thanks for the kind comments. It means alot from Educations greatest renegade outlaw. During the whole EDUPUNk thing I found myself thinking a lot about you, particularly your decision to make your way outside of the instituions. For many said that EDUPUNK and education within the institutions as they are now is an oxymoron at best.

It’s funny, because being at UMW I don’t feel the heel of the “man” on my neck at all, particularly given my boss is a woman and she is a great innovator and thinker when it comes to so many of these tools, education, and navigating administrative gridlock. But beyond that, the question of where I stand in an institution is a strange one for me I am grappling with, I love UMW, and specifically DTLT, and having seen the inner workings of another insitution I got scared and knew immediately that what we have at UMW is unique, and if it should ever disappear I might have to be walking a similar road as you. Which is economic suicide for a poor bastard like me, but I cant help but think we need another Black Mountain College!

@IT happening

I apologize. Truth be told, I have been off my meds. I am going to see my shrink this coming Monday, and all should be back to normal shortly. I’m truly sorry for thinking out loud in this state, and will be sure to numb myself up good for the coming years.

In solidarity,

The ever-good and drugged-up Reverend

we regret to inform you that, due to your recent rash of long and overly thought provoking posts, you are in danger of being permanently removed from the central aggregator of the National Union of Instructional Technologists (or NUIT, pronounced Knew-It).

Not only are you making some of our older “digital immigrants” nervous, your recent rants are creating uncomfortable stirrings within our younger “net gens” who are starting to talk amongst themselves and fraternize outside of regular working hours. This cannot be tolerated as it directly contravenes section 802.11b of the NUIT bylaws that prohibit such networking.

We respectfully request that you return to ranting about WPmU and all things Netflix. We will all feel more comfortable that way.

Yours in perpetual anxiety,

I.T. Happens,
President,
National Union of Educational Technologists and Co-chair of the Society for Recovering LMS Administrators

The oldest had 2 years of public school in grades 6 & 7, and then he went to a 2 year college and is currently on a work term. He did fabulous.

2nd oldest just “graduated” and is again job-hunting to save for college.

And yes, they get plenty of socialization. Our house is loaded with books, librarians know us by name and they are always asking question (which we answer).

So that’s the point of view I’m coming from.

What you, and Brad, and Andrea write about here touches upon much of what always bothered me about teaching within a formal institution of education (I thought for a time that I could quietly subvert the same-old same-old by refusing the mantle of expert and the regimentation of learning, and that it was essential to do that from within the industry itself). Now that I see real potential for a radically different approach from sequestering 5-to-22-years olds from the world for hours a day/week/month/year/decades/childhood to “learn” according to authority-produced and scripted curricula, I’m jumping out of school and into something far messier: overlapping, intersecting learning communities with as many approaches, styles, ideas, questions, and answers as we can get. No educational theory will be touted, no tools pushed. No one-size fits all approach. And no isolation either.

What you say about communities, and your final question about formal learning communities in particular: “How do we move our communities out of the often limiting logic of educational theory and the latest tools in order to span the range of ideas that will demonstrate and exemplify the power of the distributed space for learning on a wide range of axes” is right on target. Looking forward to seeing how you explore possible answers.

And I love what you say about the difference between reporting and imagining–sharing our wildest ideas, daring to imagine and to think beyond what we thought we could, playing, questioning, being okay with making a mess of things from time to time. Thanks for such a lovely, thought-provoking read in post after post.

Brad’s onto something, but I don’t think it’s naive at all. I know it works.

For example: think of a child who has grown up in an environment where they are encouraged to follow their natural inclination to amass as much knowledge as they can. A baby starts out this way, so does a toddler. only when they become school-age we start putting up walls around them, insisting it be done this way or that or let’s try the latest new thing in teaching.

how ’bout we answer their questions? We let them explore? We act as a mentor and facilitator, not treating them as an empty vessel that needs to be filled with our pompous idea of “we’re smarter because we’re bigger”.

And I think you and I both still have this sense of learning all the time, taking things apart to see how they work, let’s remove or tweak this bit of code to see what happens. *That’s* what I’m talking about and that’s the kind of thing that gets snuffed out in a lot of kids – too dependent on someone else telling them what they should think, how they should learn. Fill in this box, circle these letters, pass this test now you can forgot what was so important last week.

Your edu-punk-ness is starting to mesh up with the educational anarchy and the unschooling slant of some homeschoolers.

And I just wanted to add with my youngest, I recently realized I did accomplish something important – she has no idea that there are “school” books and regular books. To her, you learn from all kinds of books. She thinks workbooks are hysterically funny, answering all those silly questions. (She’s 7.5)

Oh Lawdy, Jim, yes!! This is the exact kind of point I have been trying to make across so many different examinations of media; as much as I am growing to love education, I am always so frustrated by its forgotten limitless nature. There was a point last spring where my lung suddenly & without warning just shrunk in on itself, & because of the way I had grown up, the only way I knew how to deal with it was to write about it. But if you are a writer, you need an audience (an idea I am toying with & arguing vocally with myself about recently), & luckily I was in Dr. Campbell’s Film/Text/Culture class. My blog became my outlet, despite its initial foundation as a classroom assignment. It was something new, some space of my own that I hadn’t thought of before. I continued along with it, sometimes writing about class discussion, sometimes just describing as vividly as I could whatever dreams I had experienced the night before. The way I have been coming at education ever since my second semester of college has been like this:
1. Live Life.
2. Learn.
3. Connect The Life Lived With the Information Learned.
If there is a way to make a child learn without realizing they are in class, that they are just learning because it is giving them experience & maturity & stories (Oh God, this is all about gathering moments to share to your kids! I have had lengthy discussions about how I only want to live my life in a way that I can learn as much as possible so that I can pass every moment I live down to my children. & then they will pass it to their children, & so on. The beauty of education is not that we are learning, but that we are growing up through our moments of educational exchange! If I can influence someone’s life while at the same time having them influence my own – this is the life well lived!) – if there is a way to do this, I will discover it & kids, we twentysomethings, we will grow to know better & we will not make mistakes!
(But ha! Do you see how impossibly naive this is? & that is why education is so necessary, why it is so beautiful! You don’t live to learn; you learn to live. I am so adamant about this issue!) Thank you for this post!