Choithram International students traveling to ASB as part of international project

At Choithram International, students are learning that technology is flattening the world, and making it easier for people to work together.
Two Students Jai Venaik and Puneet Bhambani along with Me are participating in the Flat Classroom Project, a collaborative effort on a global scale designed to “flatten” or lower walls so that students are able to interact and work with other students around the country and the world.
Each year, the project holds a conference in a different world location. This year, it will be held in Mumbai, India, at the American School of Bombay, and four of the students will be there.
In addition to India, this round of the project includes classrooms from Maryland, Alaska, Kansas, California, Texas, Spain, Germany,Qatar and Canada.
Choithram International is the first Indian school to be accepted to participate in the project.
“It is an amazing opportunity,doing this project opens up doors for the students and gives them a chance to experience life outside of a small town.”
The result of the project will be a Web site created by the participants, complete with videos, a blog and other student-created content.
Making a difference
Organizers awarded scholarships to the four students to travel to India to work, face-to-face, with some of their global counterparts.
Students will take part in an intense four-day workshop during which they will be divided into teams with students from other schools participating both in-person and virtually.
The theme for this Flat Classroom workshop and conference will be “Opening Up Education,” and it will serve as an opportunity for teams of real and virtual participants to explore social, economic, political, cultural and other issues relevant to education on a global scale.
It is also a chance to discuss the best ways to use Web 2.0 technologies to join communities with a common goal to identify and solve problems in education. Ideas generated at this workshop will lead to potential solutions that join classrooms around the world in projects that will ultimately make a difference to the world, as we know it today.
Breaking barriers
The Flat Classroom Project, cofounded by Julie Lindsay, Beijing, China and Vicki Davis, Camilla, Ga., speaks to the very heart of Pennsylvania’s Classrooms for the Future initiative and 21st Century learning.
It utilizes technologies such as a Ning and Wikispaces that allow students to collaborate with other students around the world to peer edit and design a variety of multimedia, despite location and cultural barriers, much like how the real world is starting to work.
Each student works with an international partner to create a multimedia presentation based on one of the 10 “Global Economic Flatteners,” as described by Thomas L. Friedman in his book “The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.”
The students are anxious about the trip.
“It will be somewhat of a challenge because there will be different people and cultures that we will be working with from all over the world,” .
In a blog post, Michael Yuschock writes, “On the other hand, connecting with people from states, or even countries, gives us the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the future of the world. It shows us that anything is possible, as long as routes of communication are open.”
“We are excited It is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity that we all have. I am looking forward to meeting students from all over the world.”
For additional information on the Flat Classroom Project, visit www.flatclassroomproject.org/About.
For additional information about the conference, visit http://asbunplugged2010.flatclassroomproject.org/.

5 Social Media Secrets for 2010
Social media took a wild ride in 2009. The mainstream press fell in love with Twitter, Facebook grew aggressively and a new wave of companies starting taking social media seriously as a business tool. Below are 5 secrets to staying on top of it all in 2010
1. Pay Attention to the Metrics
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Chief Marketing Officers are going to pay more attention to metrics and tie in social media more directly to overall business goals, not just web-related goals. When starting up new project agree on what the metrics should be and what goals are appropriate.

2. Scale Good Habits
As you grow, make sure you match your structure, policy and guidelines to your organization size. What works with 2 people won’t work with 20 people. All in all your structure should encourage good habits. Your entire team should be motivated to respond quickly, post consistently and talk like a human. Speaking of policies and rules…

3. Have Rules, But Trust People
As your social media strategy matures, you’ll add in more rules and guidelines. However, you can’t have a rule for every situation. You need to trust your team. Lead by example, don’t manage with rulebook.

4. Creativity & Personality Trump Big Budget
Social media is definitely one of those areas in life where more money doesn’t always win. Two of the most powerful ingredients in social media are creativity and personality. They are the key to having a viral message and to being a trusted resource. They are also essential to discovering useful strategies and tactics. You can’t be afraid to try something new or go against the grain.

5. Listen Listen Listen
Don’t focus so much on you and your message. Put that farther down on your To Do List. Focus first on your customers. Hear what they are saying, see what they’re up to. Once you’ve been able to connect, and figure them out, then see how you can help.

As 2009 draws to a close, the Web’s attention turns to the year ahead. What can we expect of the online realm in 2010?
While Web innovation is unpredictable, some clear trends are becoming apparent. Expect the following 10 themes to define the Web next year:

Real-time ramps up
Sparked by Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed, the real-time trend has been to the latter part of 2009 what “Web 2.0″ was to 2007. The term represents the growing demand for immediacy in our interactions. Immediacy is compelling, engaging, highly addictive … it’s a sense of living in the now.
But real-time is more than just a horde of new Twitter-like services hitting the Web in 2010 (although that’s inevitable — cargo cultsabound). It’s a combination of factors, from the always-connected nature of modern smartphones to the instant gratification provided by a Google search.
Why wait until you get home to post a restaurant review, asks consumer trends tracker Trendwatching, when scores of iPhone apps let you post feedback as soon as you finish dessert? Why wonder about the name of that song, when humming into your phone handset will garner an instant answer from Midomi?
Look out, too, for real-time collaboration: Google Wave launched earlier this year, resulting in both excitement and confusion. A crossover between instant messaging, e-mail and a wiki, Wave is a platform for getting things done together. Web users, however, remain baffled. In 2010, Wave’s utility will become more apparent.

Location, location, location
Fueled by the ubiquity of GPS in modern smartphones, location-sharing services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Google Latitude are suddenly in vogue.
Foursquare and its ilkmay become the breakout services of the year … provided they’re not crushed by the addition of location-based features to Twitter and Facebook.
What’s clear is that location is not about any singular service; rather, it’s a new layer of the Web. Soon, our whereabouts may optionally be appended to every Tweet, blog comment, photo or video we post.

Augmented reality
It’s yet to become part of the consumer consciousness, but augmented reality has attracted early-adopter buzz in the latter part of 2009.
Enabled by GPS, mapping data from the likes of Google and the accelerometer technology in modern phones, AR involves overlaying data on your environment; imagine walking around a city and seeing it come to life with reviews of the restaurants you walk past and Wikipedia entries about the sights you see.
When using Layar, for instance, the picture from your phone’s video camera is overlaid with bubbles of information from Yelp, Wikipedia, Google Search and Twitter. The challenge for such services is to prove their utility: They have the “cool factor,” but can they be truly useful?

Content ‘curation’
The Web’s biggest challenge of recent years is that content creation is outpacing our ability to consume it: “Information overload” has become an increasingly common complaint.
In the attention economy, with its millions of daily status updates and billions of Web pages vying for our time, how do we best allocate that scarce resource? One solution has been algorithmic: Sites like Google News source the best stuff by technical means, but fall short when it comes to personalization.
In 2008, the answer revealed itself: Your friends are your filter. With the launch of its Facebook Connect program, Facebook allowed sites to offer content personalization based on the preferences of your network.
Meanwhile, Google’s Social Search experiment is investigating whether Web searching is improved by using information gleaned from your friends on Twitter, Facebook, Digg and the rest. Increasingly, your friends are becoming the curators of your consumption, from Web links to movies, books and TV shows.
Professional “curation” has its place, too: Who better to direct our scarce attention than experts in their fields? I explored this possibility in a CNN article last month titled “Twitter lists and real-time journalism” .

Cloud computing
Cloud computing was very much a buzzword of 2009, but there’s no doubt this transition will continue. The trend, in which data and applications cease to reside on our desktops and instead exist on servers elsewhere (”the cloud”), makes our data accessible from anywhere and enables collaboration with distributed teams.
The cloud movement will see a major leap forward in the first half of 2010 with the launch of “Office Web Apps,” free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote released in tandem with Microsoft Office 2010.
Next year will also see the launch of Google’s Chrome OS, a free, Web-centric operating system that forces us to ask: How many desktop applications do we really need?

Internet TV and movies
Is 2010 the year the majority of our television starts coming to us via the Internet? There’s certainly more activity here than at any other time: Among the early-adopter set, Hulu, Boxee, Apple TV and Netflix’s Roku box lead the field.
Hulu in particular has sustained remarkable growth this year, while the movie studios are getting on board with the launch of Epix, a Hulu for films.

Convergence conundrum
The outlook for devices in 2010 appears somewhat contradictory: While the convergence trend continues apace and many of our gadgets are folded into the smartphones we carry around every day, we’re seeing a converse trend in which task-specific devices gain popularity.
GPS device maker TomTom recently introduced a $100 iPhone appthat removes the need to buy a TomTom hardware device. Google then one-upped the company by releasing free turn-by-turn directions on devices running its Android operating system. Garmin and TomTom beware: Standalone GPS devices may meet their demise in 2010.
Also on the endangered gadgets list: Flip video cameras, which PC World declared dead upon the launch of the iPhone 3G S. Meanwhile, Apple executives say the iPhone is cannibalizing the iPod: Why carry two devices when you only need one?
Paradoxically, the e-book reader is seeing traction as a single-use device. With hard-to-read, power-hungry laptop screens proving impractical for reading, and smartphone screens proving too small, the Kindle and its competitors are gaining buzz.
However, I’d argue that the e-book reader is a fad: Carrying an extra device is never desirable, and the major factor preventing convergence is the lack of superior screen technology. Flexible, expanding low-power screens on cell phones might tip the balance.
The real power of Amazon’s Kindle is its ease of use: a virtual bookstore so simple that it does for books what Apple’s iTunes did for music. The devices will converge, but the “app store” model for books will persist across all devices. The technology won’t be with us in 2010, however.

Social gaming
There’s little risk of social gaming proving a bad bet in 2010 — Zynga’s FarmVille game on Facebook now counts more active users than Twitter, claims a Facebook executive. Meanwhile, rival Playfish was recently acquired by Electronic Arts in a deal valued at up to $400 million.
Of growing interest in 2010, however, will be the virtual currencies these games have spawned: In the allegedly unmonetizable world of social media, virtual buying and selling may be the route to riches for some social media sites.

Mobile payments
I’d wager that 2010 will be the breakthrough year of the much-anticipated mobile payments market. While much of Asia has embraced the technology, the U.S., in particular, has lagged. There’s reason for optimism in 2010, however: From PayPalX to Amazon’s mobile payments platform for developers, the big players are seizing the mobile payments opportunity.
Meanwhile, newcomer Square, founded by the creator of Twitter, began its rollout this week to much early-adopter excitement: The company enables merchants to accept payments via Apple’s iPhone.

Fame abundance, privacy scarcity
Warhol was right: Fame is now abundant. Social media has birthed a galaxy of stars in thousands of niches: We’re all reality stars now, on Facebook, Twitter and all the myriad online outlets where we hone our personal brands.
We’re seeing the ongoing voluntary erosion of privacy through public sharing on Facebook and Twitter, the rise of location-based services and the inclusion of video cameras in a growing array of devices.
The incredible efficiency of Web-based communication and our Google-fueled appetite to know everything about everything (or everyone) right now are combining to a larger extent. Expect personal privacy — or rather its continued erosion — to be a hot media topic of 2010.
To conclude let me wish everyone a very happy and prosperous NEW YEAR 2010. A year of possibilities.

Learning to do
This question is closely associated with the issue of occupational training: how do we adapt education so that it can equip people to do the types of work needed in the future? Here we should draw a distinction between industrial economies, where most people are wage-earners, and other economies where self-employment or casual work are still the norm.
In societies where most people are in paid employment, which have developed throughout the Twentieth century based on the industrial model, automation is making this model increasingly “intangible”. It emphasizes the knowledge component of tasks, even in industry, as well as the importance of services in the economy. The future of these economies hinges on their ability to turn advances in knowledge into innovations that will generate new businesses and new jobs. “Learning to do” can no longer mean what it did when people were trained to perform a very specific physical task in a manufacturing process. Skill training therefore has to evolve and become more than just a means of imparting the knowledge needed to do a more or less routine job.
From certified skills to personal competence
The major part played by knowledge and information in manufacturing industry renders obsolete the notion of specialist skills on the part of the workforce. The key concept now is one of “personal competence”. Technological progress inevitably changes the job skills required by the new production processes. Purely physical tasks are being replaced by tasks with a greater intellectual or cerebral content such as the operation, maintenance and monitoring of machines and design and organizational tasks, as the machines themselves become more intelligent.
There are several reasons for this increase in skill requirements at all levels. Instead of being organized to perform specified tasks in juxtaposition in accordance with Taylor’s principles of scientific labour organization, manufacturing workers are often divided into work teams or project groups on the Japanese model. This approach represents a departure from the idea of dividing labour into similar physical tasks which are essentially learned by repetition. Furthermore, the idea of personalized tasks is taking over from that of employee interchangeability. There is a growing trend among employers to evaluate potential employees in terms of their personal competence rather than certified skills which they see as merely demonstrating the ability to perform specific physical tasks. This personal competence is assessed by looking at a mix of skills and talents, combining certified skills acquired through technical and vocational training, social behaviour, personal initiative and a willingness to take risks.
If we add a demand for personal commitment on the part of employees in their role as change agents, it is clear that this kind of personal competence involves highly subjective innate or acquired qualities, often referred to as “people skills” or “interpersonal skills” by employers, combined with knowledge and other job skills. Of these qualities, communication, team and problem-solving skills are assuming greater importance. The growth of the service industries has resulted in an increase in this trend.
The shift away from physical work - the service industries
In advanced economies there is a shift away from physical work. The implications of this trend for education are even clearer if we look at the development of the service industries in both quantitative and qualitative terms. Most of the active population (60 - 80 per cent) of the industrialized countries is employed in the service sector. The main defining characteristic of this extremely broad category is that it covers activities which are neither industrial nor agricultural and which, despite their diversity, do not involve any tangible product.
Many services are defined primarily in terms of the interpersonal relationship involved. Examples of this are found both in the rapidly expanding private service sector which is benefiting from the growing complexity of economies (every kind of expertise imaginable, security services or high-tech consultancy services, financial, accounting and management services) and in the more traditional public sector (social services, health and education services, etc.). In both these cases, information and communication play a vital role. The key aspect here is the personalized acquisition and processing of specific data for a clearly defined project. In this type of service, both the provider and the user influence the quality of the relationship between them. Clearly, people can no longer be trained for this sort of work in the same way as they learned how to plough the land or make a sheet of steel. These new jobs are about interpersonal relationships; workers’ relationships with the materials and processes they are using are secondary. The growing service sector needs people with good social and communication skills - skills that are not necessarily taught at school or university.
Lastly, in the ultra high-tech organizations of the future, where relational inadequacies might cause serious dysfunctions, new types of skills will be required, with an interpersonal rather than intellectual basis. This may provide an opportunity for people with few or no formal educational qualifications. Intuition, common sense, judgement and leadership skills are not confined to highly qualified people. How and where are these more or less innate skills to be taught? The problem is akin to that raised by the idea of vocational training in developing countries. Educational content simply cannot be inferred from a statement of the skills or abilities required for specific tasks.
Work in the informal economy
The nature of work is very different in the economies of developing countries where most people are not wage-earners. In many sub-Saharan African countries and some Latin American and Asian countries, only a small proportion of the population is in paid employment. The vast majority works in the traditional subsistence economy, where specific job qualifications are not required and where know-how is the fruit of tacit knowledge. For this reason, education cannot simply be modelled on the types of education that seem to fit the bill in post-industrial societies. Besides, the function of learning is not confined to work; it should meet the wider aim of achieving formal or informal participation in development. This often involves social skills as much as occupational skills.
In other developing countries, a thriving unofficial modern economy based on trade and finance may exist alongside a small official economic sector and agriculture. This parallel economy indicates the existence of business communities capable of meeting local requirements.
In both these cases, there is no point in providing the population with high-cost training (since the teachers and the educational resources have to come from abroad) either in conventional industrial skills or in advanced technology. On the contrary, education should be brought into endogenous development by strengthening local potential and the spirit of empowerment.
We then have to address a question that applies to both developed and developing countries: how do people learn to act appropriately in an uncertain situation, how do they become involved in shaping the future?
How can people be prepared to innovate?
This question is being asked in developing and developed countries. It basically comes down to knowing how to develop personal initiative. Paradoxically, the richest countries are sometimes restrained in this respect by the excessively coded and formal way they are organized, particularly as regards their educational systems, and by a certain fear of risk-taking which may be engendered by the rationalization of their economic model. Undoubtedly, sport, club membership and artistic and cultural activities are more successful than the traditional school systems at providing this kind of training. The discovery of other societies through study and travel may encourage such behaviour. From this point of view in particular, a great deal may be learned by observing the economies of developing countries.
In all countries, lastly, the growing importance of small groups, networking and partnerships highlights the likelihood that excellent interpersonal skills will be an essential job requirement from now on. What is more, the new working patterns, whether in industry or in the service sector, will call for the intensive application of information, knowledge and creativity. All things considered, the new forms of personal competence are based on a body of theoretical and practical knowledge combined with personal dynamism and good problem-solving, decision-making, innovative and team skills.

Connecting learners in a global world: why is this important?

The 21st century will be a very different life experience for the current generation of children and young adults. Those born since 1980 will face global competition on a scale unimagined by previous generations.

In the decades ahead, the approximately 30 million people in India who have at least 20 years of their career ahead of them will have to compete with over a billion more people than their parents.

While not all of those people will be educated to the level of British citizens, there is a Red Army saying: ‘Quantity has a quality all its own’. China and India already have over 200 million primary and secondary school children, each, and they are investing to educate more.
Indian children will witness extraordinarily fast innovations in energy, clean-tech, green products, information technology, medicine, nano-tech, robotics and a host of new technologies not yet imagined. In 2009, more science is being conducted in more places around the world than ever before; those innovations may come from anywhere.

Today’s students will also experience incredibly rapid shifts in global economics as countries that make the right investments in education, entrepreneurship and advanced research create new products that spawn new companies that dominate global industries and that destroy old industries and old business models. Newspapers are dead; Western auto companies are on life support; China has become manufacturer to the world; India has created an IT centre of higher wage jobs.

Students in the 21st century must become more connected learners or they risk being uncompetitive adults in the work world, for two reasons: 1) knowledge is generated globally and unless students recognize that and are adept at accessing that knowledge they will fall behind; and 2) more countries will become potential customers, suppliers or competitors and students without a grasp of global history, culture, religion, languages and behavioral norms will be losers in the global economy.

Since the 1950s, Western countries led by the United States have dominated knowledge creation. The great universities of Europe and America along with the major industrial companies of the European Union and US produced the lion’s share of the world’s new knowledge and resulting new industries.

That hegemony has been broken in the past few decades as universities and companies in China, India, Korea, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia have been expanding their research and begun respecting intellectual property rights. Arguably some of the best scientific research being done today is conducted in universities and in laboratories in Asia or India.

This generation of children and young adults must be more global in their thinking and more aware of and comfortable with other cultures. Using the Internet – video, voice and text – to bring the world into OUR classrooms is imperative for children to become globally aware.

Connecting school children early in life with children in China, India, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brazil and Russia will aid them in their understanding of the world, sharpen their language skills and serve them well as they enter the intense global competition for high-value, high-wage careers.

This is a big challenge which we are facing , as the professions of the future are unknown we need to develop these skills of collaboration among the students thus they learn more about different cultures and are ready to face the world wherever they may be doing business or in any profession. 

Continued from the previous Blog………… 

The Synthesizing Mind:

I began to think about the Synthesizing Mind when the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann made an off handed remark.  He opined that in the twenty-first century, the most important mind will be the synthesizing mind. A great example of a synthesizer is Charles Darwin. He travelled for five years aboard the Beagle, and collected a huge amount of information about the flora and fauna of the world. He did his own experiments and observations of the world, corresponded with everybody who was a naturalist, and then twenty years later put forth one of the great intellectual syntheses “On the Origin of the Species.”

The Synthesizing Mind realizes that nowadays, we are all inundated with information. If you looked up the word “evolution” on your search engine, you could spend the rest of your life just reading secondary sources. Many of them are of questionable value and you need criteria for deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Additionally, to synthesize for yourself, you have to put information together in ways which cohere, which make sense for you. And if you are involved in communication, as every teacher, parent, and professional is, the synthesis has to be transmittable to other people.

 I thought that psychology would have something to say about synthesizing because it is so important, but my research revealed that in fact psychology doesn’t have much to say. Some of you are thinking: “well, isn’t synthesizing what teachers have always done?” But let me introduce Monsieur Jourdain from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière.  M. Jourdain got very excited in middle age because he found out that he was speaking prose all his life without realizing it. I think we have been in the business of synthesizing, but we haven’t been aware of how important it is and how we might help other people to become better synthesizers.

 How one might be more reflective about synthesizing? The answer is: looking for the current best synthesis, deciding what our ultimate synthesis should look like, picking a method, deciding what are we going to look at, listen to and why, examining what are we going to ignore and why, and importantly, how are we going to record information, using equations, mind maps, stories, formulas, taxonomies, or whatever.Again, the kind of things that most of us do already, but we aren’t really reflective about it, we don’t spend much time explicitly transmitting that lore to people who are less experienced in synthesizing. Life is short, syntheses are due, term papers are due, lectures are due, but you want to finish the proto-synthesis some time beforehand, so that you can get informed reactions. Not only from people who know a lot but also from people who don’t know so much.

The Creative Mind:

 The Creative Mind is embodied by Einstein in the Sciences and by Virginia Woolf in the Arts. People who are creative are those who come up with new things which eventually get accepted. If an idea or product is too easily accepted, it is not creative; if it is never accepted, it is just a false example. And acceptance can happen quickly or it can take a long time.

I believe that you cannot be creative unless you have mastered at least one discipline, art or craft. And cognitive science teaches us that on the average, it takes about ten years to master a craft. So, Mozart was writing great music when he was fifteen and sixteen, but that is because he started when he was four or five. Same story, with the prodigious Picasso. Creativity is always called “thinking outside the box.”  But I order my quintet of minds in the way that I do because you can’t think outside of the box unless you have a box.

  I thought that creativity was mostly an issue of how good your mental computers were. But  studies  of others have convinced me of two other things. First, personality and temperament are at least as important as cognitive powers. People who are judged creative take chances, take risks, are not afraid to fall down, and pick themselves up, they say “what can I learn from this?” and they go on.

The other day I was giving a talk and the first question asked was “How do we make people creative”? And I answered that “It’s much easier to prevent it than to make it”. You prevent it by saying that there is only one right answer and by punishing the student if she offers the wrong answer. That never fosters creativity.

Second: People think of creativity as a property of the individual and therefore they say “I am creative”, but that doesn’t work. The only way that creativity can be judged is, if over the long run, the creators works change how other people think and behave. That is the only criterion for creativity. Therefore, the bad news is that you could die without knowing that you are creative, but the good news is that you will never know for sure that you are not creative. Because maybe after you die, people will make a big fuss about you and then, post-mortem, you will be creative. That’s what happened to Emily Dickinson and Vincent van Gogh.  We call that the judgment of the field.

To be continued………….

Continuation of the previous blog..

The Five Minds: 

In this blog I am discussing about the first type of MIND

1.  The Disciplined Mind:

I was asked in the year 2000, “what was the greatest invention of the last two thousand years?”  My answer was classical music. The real reason I gave that answer is because I wanted to be quoted, and I knew if I said something such as ‘the wheel, the pill, or nuclear energy”, many other people would have said the same thing and I might have been quoted.  But, if I say classical music, I would have the prospect of being cited in a magazine. 

A better answer, and an answer which I think we can all feel at home with, are the scholarly disciplines. I would include: Classical Music, Science, History, Economics, etc. Those of us in academia take these disciplines so much for granted, that we forget they are all human inventions. It took hundreds of years to invent Experimental Science, Classical Music, linear Perspective, and Calculus. And they might well never have been invented. Often, when tyrants come to power, they try to eliminate the disciplines and the disciplinarians because they/we get in tyrant’s way. Therefore, I believe that one needs to begin with disciplinary thinking.

When I use the term disciplinary thinking I am playing on three connotations of the English word discipline. Firstly, what our grand-parents knew — you should work regularly and steadily on things and eventually you will get better. Indeed, any practice will build up disciplinary muscle.

The second—is the heart of what happens in middle and secondary school—is mastering the major ways of thinking. Before university, they are Science, History, Mathematics, and one or more art forms.  I make a very sharp distinction between discipline (a powerful but typically non-intuitive way of thinking) and subject matter (facts, information).

The third connotation, which is so important if we want our children to be gainfully employed and have a full life is becoming an expert in at least one thing. Because if you are not an expert, you will not be able to work in the world of the future, or you will work for somebody else who is an expert. And that is so different from two hundred years ago during agricultural times and a hundred years ago during industrial times. Now, we are really in a knowledge era, and expertise is the only thing which will take forward real value.

Now, I just introduced a distinction between discipline and subject matter. In most schools, in most parts of the world, though probably not in your schools, we “do” subject matter. Subject matter means information and facts. Things like, “Which king followed which queen? What was the year that something happened? What’s the atomic weight of lead? How many planets are there in the Solar System?” But that has nothing to do with disciplinary thinking. Disciplinary thinking is the deeply different ways in which scientists or historians or artists approach their daily work.

To illustrate this point, I’ll compare Science and History. Scientists create models of the world; they try to explain the physical, biological, psychological worlds. They develop theories, they carry out experiments, or they do observations—and when those empirical works are carried out, the theories are revised in light of the outcome.

Historians on the other hand, try to figure out what happened in the past. They primarily use written documents, more recently graphic documents, and in some ways human beings are no different from how they were three thousand years ago. Historians have to understand the missions, fears, and purposes of human agency. But in other respects, over time and across cultures, people are very different. Historians always have to play with that antinomy.

 Finally, every generation has to rewrite history. If you are an American, when you write the history of the Roman Empire today, it is totally different than it was fifty years ago. Not because we know so much more about Rome, but because the United States today is the Roman Empire, for good and for ill; not to think about that state of affairs is to be in outer space.

Those are the things which you can’t just pass on to people.  In contrast if I want to pass on a list of American presidents, I can carry that around in my hand and pass it on. And so disciplined thinking is very different from subject matter thinking. It is our responsibility to our middle and secondary schools to engender the disciplinary habits of mind of the major disciplines. Because otherwise, we won’t be able to make sense of what is happening in our world in terms of current events and new discoveries—whether good or ill. This is what history has needed, and we won’t be able to make decisions about health and about policy unless we have cultivated those ways of thinking. The more international comparisons focus on subject matter rather than on disciplinary thinking, the more anachronistic they will be.

No cigar. When I was a young boy we used to go to Carnivals and they would have Kewpie-dolls on a ledge. You would be given a ball and your job was to throw the ball and knock down a doll. If you got the doll you could keep it, but if you missed the barker would say “close, but no cigar”. So, in each case of each of the minds I am going to talk about false or faux examples.

One example of the poorly disciplined mind is when people see everything through one discipline: economists who see the whole world through rational choice; psychologists who see the whole world through evolutionary psychology; the lawyer who sits down with his children who are two and three years old and writes down a constitution which gives the children their rights and their responsibilities. That is hyper disciplinarity.

The second example comes from the life of Arthur Rubinstein. He was a world famous pianist.  From the age of twenty, he gave concerts which had an enormous reception, but then he became lazy and he relied on pyro-techniques rather than careful practice. But, he came to realize that if he didn’t practice for a day he knew it; if he didn’t practice for a week the orchestra knew it; and if he didn’t practice for a month, the audience knew it. Therefore, he stopped his wild and carousing ways and began to practice each day and essentially recovered his discipline. The lesson here is that you can think disciplinarily for a while but ultimately you have to keep up the disciplinary muscle if you want to be taken seriously  by those ‘in the know’.

To be continued……………

Five minds for the future

Note:  This paper was given as an oral presentation at the Ecolint Meeting in Geneva, January 13, 2008.  It has been edited only in the interest of clarity.

Introduction:

I am an admirer of the International Baccalaureate.  I consider IBO the source of strength in education, because I believe the International Baccalaureate is more forward looking, more globally oriented, and less faddish than other educational enterprises.

Education is fundamentally about values, but we have a great deal of difficulty talking about values. In the United States now, we rarely teach Philosophy of Education or History of Education, because people would disagree too much. There is a local joke in the United States called the “Jesse Test”: You could never, in the United States, come up with a curriculum that would please: Jesse Helms, a conservative Southern senator; Jesse Jackson, a fiery, African American leader; and Jesse Ventura the wrestler-turned governor of Minnesota. And therefore, we simply don’t talk about values.

 The economist J.M. Keynes said that you can put down economists as much as you like, but whether we know it or not, we are all acting according to the theory of some long dead economist. I believe the same about education. People who have never heard of Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant, or Dewey, are living their educational philosophies, erroneously thinking it is their own philosophy. 

I welcome the platform of this conference. My presentation is somewhere in between must and should. Must in the sense that the Five Minds are competencies which young people and the society need in the twenty first century going forward.  My talk is also about should in the sense of my own values. If I were the Tsar of education worldwide, this is what I would prescribe. However, I remember what happened to the Tsar, and so I am more cautious.

I will begin with a disclaimer, then show some images of the future, and move to the heart of the talk which will be about the Five Minds that I am interested in. Finally I will mention the two most frequently asked questions/challenges to this conception.  I hope there will be time for questions.

People who know my work in education think of me as the man who proposed seven, eight, or nine different intelligences. When I write about intelligence, I am trying to be a scientist. If we really understood human evolution in detail, we would see that the mind and the brain are composed of a number of relatively autonomous computing systems. For example, one system is for language, one for music, one for spatial cognition, etc. In talking about Five Minds I am of course interested in psychology, but I am really speaking from the perspective of policy. And in that sense, there are many other minds that I could have talked about.  As the policy maker/Tsar, these are the minds that I would try to promote today and tomorrow.

Here are some images of the future: The genetic revolution: within all of our lifetimes, young people will go to school with gene chips which contain their entire genome and they’ll say to teachers and administrators “these are the genes that are inactive, these are the ones that are working- teach me effectively!” and we will not be able to ignore that plea. More images of the future include: Mega cities, images and fashions that circulate around the world; trillions of dollars traded 24/7 each day; machines which do thinking, carry out tasks which used to be done by human beings; virtual realities like “Second Life”.

 A hundred years ago, most people didn’t go to school, and those who did left school at twenty years old, confident that they would never have to be further educated. But nowadays as one biologist told me, if one doesn’t keep up for three months one will never be able to catch up again. All of you know the speed with which knowledge accumulates in almost every sphere.  Much of our education has to be self-education.

Here are some descriptions of changes which will impact educational thinking. Many people work on problems which cut across disciplines. They converge on a geographical area, work together in teams, build on one another’s knowledge, then separate and maybe connect electronically, but maybe never work together again. Linear thinking doesn’t end, but non-linear kinds of thinking, systemic thinking, and dynamic models are in the ascendancy. So much of “thinking within the box” can be done by automata, and so the capacity to be one step beyond computers takes on additional importance. Most of our students are already way ahead of us digitally whether we are teachers or parents, and that raises interesting questions about what it is that they have to give to us and what it is that we have to give to them in terms of the educational dynamic.

The plan for the rest of the talk will be to describe the five minds. I will be concentrating more on the Synthesizing Mind and the Ethical Mind because I think that they are less familiar, and frankly, I find them more enigmatic and thus more energizing to explore.

 To be continued …………………..

As teachers, we often work with students who are uncooperative or disrupt other students. If you do not address this type of behavior quickly, it can lead to many problems. Here are some quick tips when confronted with disruptive students.

1. Know Your Students- Events outside of the classroom are the cause of most problems.

2. Use a Team Approach- Talk to other staff members that work with the student. See what works for them.

3. Don’t Embarrass Students- This will only lead to more problems.

4. Model Behavior- Model the behavior you expect from your students.

5. Speak with Students Privately- It’s best to approach students outside of the places they are seeking attention or being disruptive.

6. Let Administrators Know- See if they have any helpful experience with the student.

7. Start a Learning Contract- Help student understanding accountability.

8. Catch Them Being Good- When students are doing well, let them know it.

9. Make them involved in Co-Curricular activities.

10. Use Life Skills for improving them.

11. Ask them more questions while teaching, give them more creative questions.