I was engaged by this wiki by the story on globalization. In fact, I would have thrown out everything prior to the first paragraph appearing below. What other stories are out there about how globalization has changed your life? And, what do you intend to do about that?

As an educator, I see only one possible response in the face of everything–innovate, create. It is the only sane response but it can’t be done alone, although alone is where you feel before you start innovating, before you give yourself permission to create.

Consider this quote….

If courage you lack, I hereby give you creative license to speak your own truth; to tell your story, as my fourth grade teacher used to say, “in your own words.” I give you permission to create indiscriminately, just as you wish — wildly, freely, and without asking permission from anyone. Tell your tale, paint your masterpiece; sing your song. Tango with the Muses. I send you inspiration, strength, creative energy, and my wildest hopes and dreams.
Source: Permission to be creative

Are you ready?

• Technology Night – EDL 628: Educational Law and Ethics
  • The day I understood Globalization was a fall day in 2002. I was just starting law school and my wife and I had bought a new home. That night I had planned on buying $500 worth of lumber to build a patio in our backyard when my wife called on the phone, crying; she had lost her accounting job in Saint Louis. She had lost it to an accountant in … India. The accounting firms in the U.S. have become so good at outsourcing that now they are advising others how to do the same. Needless to say, the patio was never built. Something that would have been unthinkable to my parent’s generation just happened to me and my family. Globalization is not something distant or foreign … its personal, its real.
  • the pace of innovation in non-tangible hardware areas is perhaps even more dramatic. The following video is a great explanation of how innovation operates in today’s world. We invent something, and then we exponentially improve it.
  • Our pace of human innovation is an exponential curve. With some certainty we know that we will create more, faster in the future, just as we have created more, faster than in the past.
  • We have fundamentally changed the way information works to the point that has become what we are known for … we are living in the “Information Age,” pushed by “Information Technology” since the “Information Revolution.”
  • Do you know any schools these days that don’t use e-mail? When is the last time you wrote out a paper long-hand? You literally cannot get a diploma or high school degree in this country anymore without understanding and heavily utilizing digital information. We are less than 30 years into the information revolution and already it has fundamentally altered society … and there is no going back.
  • once everyone started participating in the conversation and helping to do the work of organizing, finding, sharing, etc … we started to work together, a lot. Instead of just one person writing, sharing, organizing … we started to work in groups to do all that stuff. Its more fun, it gets more done, and it starts to create a sort of community and communities allow for reputations and respect and other things people naturally want. And, people were willing to work together to get these things. No one is paid to edit wikipedia, but a community exists nonetheless that regulates it. It is just not regulated with dollars. It is regulated with responsibility.
  • We have seen massive changes to our society in the recent past. We have not seen the same kinds of changes at schools.
  • we are facing more systemic challenges than just encouraging teachers to blog. If we are having to redesign information … don’t you think we might have to redesign schools? Information is our stock and trade, is it not? And if information is fundamentally different, maybe we need to be fundamentally different too.

    But here, I don’t have the answers. There is no instructional video for remolding the education system. Everyone is so busy catching up that no one is thinking ahead … yet, anyway.

    Your challenge as school leaders is to come up with answers for your school in the near term and help all of us solve the more systemic challenges in the long term.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.