Educational Inspiration

Today I watched Alan November's thoughts on education:

http://www.getideas.org/coge

Skills needed for the future:
1. deal with massive amounts of information well. Critical thinking with massive amounts of information and small pieces of technology.
2. Global Empathy - ability to understand the perspective of other people from other cultures. We need to learn how to work with people around the world - connect their students to authentic audiences around the world.
3. Self-directed - do not need a boss to tell you what to do. Not working alone, perhaps working collaboratively, but don't need the structure of telling you what to do hour by hour.

Create a culture that values new ideas, encourage principals to invest time into setting up such projects - teachers do not have time.

Step 1: Building community - through conferences, in-person meetings, online sharing of videos & resources
Step 2: Support 1 teacher first, build success, and go from there - we aren't going to do everything at once.

I'd like to watch Dave Egger's talk regarding education & schools - that'll have to wait until I get Flash player working, though!

It's been a while...

But here's an exciting announcement - might tie in well to some masters' work:

http://www.oneworldmanypeaces.com/peace_videos_of_the_week/2010/03/making-peace-education-compulsory-kenyas-bold-initiative.html

And an organisation that seems to be doing interesting work:

http://globaleducationfund.blogspot.com/

Anti-Bullying

This morning I attended an 'bullying prevention' workshop put on by RespectED, a part of the Red Cross. It was a fascinating workshop; I'm afraid that I and the group I was being trained with made the workshop delivery a bit difficult. My questions revolved around framing, bigger-picture prevention of oppression and abuse of power, and how to work proactively with the 'bullies' to make a difference.

Cited as part of the presentation were WHO statistics on bullying; Canada, it was said, ranks poorly compared to other developed countries.

http://www.prevnet.ca/Bullying/BullyingStatistics/tabid/122/Default.aspx

The study cites that among 13-year-olds, Canada is 26th/27th out of 35 countries. I cannot find the original study; I would be curious to explore further this statement:
"The drop in Canada’s relative ranking in spite of stable rates, suggests that other countries have been preventing bullying problems more effectively than Canada. Many of the countries that rank higher than Canada, such as Norway and England, have had national campaigns to address bullying problems."

Wider societal trends may have more to do with the changes in other countries. We need to be sure that the best way to address bullying is in fact to address 'bullying' - what if it is more beneficial to focus on multiculturalism, strength in diversity, open-mindedness, respect for others, conflict resolution, assertiveness - there are so many POSITIVE frames with which these issues could be addressed.

There's my thoughts for now... perhaps this will become part of the future masters'?