"Having heard plenty of talk of the first three points in the past I was most interested in hearing what Negroponte had in mind with regard to the "New Constructionism". Unfortunately most of what was said doesn't really strike me as new at all.

The one thing which was quite interesting is the aspect of "Learning to Read by Yourself" which very much ties in with Negroponte's much discussed helicopter deployments which saw its first pre-pilots being launched earlier this year.

He shared that the first 30 tablets with several thousand books on them had been distributed. Not too many other details were revealed and while Negroponte mentioned that "they read themselves" it's not quite clear for example what language these books are in. What is really exciting however is that he mentions a rigorous evaluation of these efforts and working with critics which I believe should make for some interesting results and discussions down the road."

"Right after I dropped out of high school I worked at a video store where we got free rentals. Truffaut's were my first ones...

and like any self-respecting "artsy" high school drop out I immediately became obsessed with Antoine Doinel."

[That second half is from here: http://twitter.com/ThisMoiThisMoi/status/166561097753694208 ]

"Parallel school of art is a virtual and international school where those who want to self-educate themselves can share what they are doing and thinking about, as well as their interests and projects.

Parallel school wants to generate and spread work emulation through the development of self-initiated projects such as publications, meetings, lectures, workshops, etc.

Parallel school would like to bring together the knowledge, experiences and energy from students all over the world.

Parallel School is an umbrella that is free to use by anyone interested in doing so."

"You left the cocoon of Princeton when you were 16. Why?

I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the ’60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school. When they wouldn’t let me graduate early because I hadn’t taken gym, I quit altogether and went off to BC. It was a time when a lot of kids ran away from home. My father didn’t stop me…Being there was so liberating — getting my own food, making my own living…I did this for about 20 years.

And today you make your living as a historian of science and technology. How does a high school dropout get to do that?

Hey, this is America. You can do what you want! I love this idea that someone who didn’t finish high school can write books that get taken seriously. History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it’s what you write, not what your credentials are."

"Don’t Go Back to School  is a handbook for independent learning that shows you how to learn almost anything without school. If you’re thinking about going back to school or about the possibility of self-taught learning, read this book first! Don’t Go Back to School will help you figure out if you can do it on your own—and it’ll show you how. It might just save you a gazillion dollars in tuition fees, and spare you the yoke of student loans for years to come."

"MobilityShifts examines learning with digital media from a global perspective. It will foster diverse discussions about digital fluencies for a mobile world and investigate learning outside the bounds of schools and universities. The summit, comprised of a conference, exhibition, podcast series, workshops and project demos and a theater performance, will add a rich international layer to the existing research about digital learning. Building on disciplinary mobility, the summit will showcase theories, people and projects making connections between self-learning, mobile platforms, and the web.<br />
<br />
MobilityShifts is grouped around three major themes:<br />
<br />
Digital Fluencies for a Mobile World <br />
DIY U: Learning Without a School? <br />
Learning from Digital Learning Projects Globally"

"1. A huge wave of homeschooling will create a more self-directed workforce…Gen X is more comfortable working outside system than Baby Boomers…<br />
<br />
2. Homeschooling as kids will become unschooling as adults…school does not prepare people for work…Gen Y has been very vocal about this problem…<br />
3. The college degree will return to its bourgeois roots; entrepreneurship will rule. The homeschooling movement will prepare Gen Y to skip college, & Gen X is out-of-the-box enough in their parenting to support that…<br />
<br />
Baby Boomers are too competitive to risk pulling college rug out from under kids. Gen Y are rule followers—if adults tell them to go to college, they will. Gen X is very practical…1st gen in US history to have less money than parents…makes sense that Gen X would be generation to tell kids to forget about college.<br />
90% of Gen Y say they want to be entrepreneurs, but only very small % of them will ever launch full-fledged business, because Generation Y are not really risk takers."

"What would schools look like if students developed their own curriculum? How would education and the experience of being in school differ for students if they had more power to direct their learning? In this lesson, students consider an experiment in public education in which a small group of high school students planned and executed a model for their own learning. They then develop and implement their own self-directed projects and reflect on the results." [See also: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/opinion/15engel.html AND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmH1wS2NJY ]

"Schools everywhere could initiate an Independent Project. All it takes are serious, committed students and a supportive faculty. These projects might not be exactly alike: students might apportion their time differently, or add another discipline to the mix. But if the Independent Project students are any indication, participants will end up more accomplished, more engaged and more knowledgeable than they would have been taking regular courses.<br />
<br />
We have tried making the school day longer and blanketing students with standardized tests. But perhaps children don’t need another reform imposed on them. Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education."

[See also: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/independence-day-developing-self-directed-learning-projects/ AND http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmH1wS2NJY ]

"child becomes agent of change, as opposed to object of change"<br />
"If you have to measure (result), it's not big enough." (Answering question, how do you measure success of the OLPC ?)"<br />
<br />
“Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.”<br />
“Paper books will not exist in 5 years. The argument against books as paper objects turns out to be the developing world.”<br />
<br />
"Every time the project is carried out, children all over the developing world ‘swim like fish’ in the digital environment …Ironically while often seen as a damaging distraction to western kids, ownership & use of a personal laptop in deprived areas is a huge advantage. Perhaps it’s because we have so much that we’re so bored & cynical.<br />
…to own a networked laptop w/ access to internet means you’ve got access to the global conversation. You’re part of what’s happening all over world & can have digital presence as influential & dynamic as any kid in SF. OLPC machines are inspiring some interesting behaviour too…"

"Keeping one's children out of school & not imposing home-curriculum is a fringe choice…Given that, I think part of the reason this conversation doesn't happen is many of us prefer to think of fringe people as being wrong. When we see their choices working out well it's a bit uncomfortable. Thus it's much easier to think of my kids or myself as some kind of an exception…The kids are either "bright", or I am a super-hard working mama administrating organized curriculum & have extraordinary "patience" to spend so much of my time w/ my own children (why children are assumed to be such a horrible group of people to be forced to mingle w/ is subject of another article)…<br />
<br />
unschoolers know exactly where B went next…"How long are you planning on keeping them out of school?"…<br />
<br />
if we were to admit that autodidactic children in a loving & secure environment perform very well in aggregate (given nearly any marker of success), we'd have to then question the many tenets of the school model"

"“Well, I say, being an anarchist, that I don’t believe in taking people by the hand and force-feeding them culture. I think they should make their own decisions. If they want to go to museums and concerts, that’s fine, but they shouldn’t be seduced into doing it or shamed into doing it.”<br />
<br />
— Dwight MacDonald, who called himself a “conservative anarchist.” This is an important idea in my forthcoming book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction."

The paradox of self-education is that there are intellectually stimulating endeavors which don’t have a direct impact in the job market or in school. While learning is generally a valued skill, and the knowledge attained by it sought after, there is a limitation of the desire to learn (and by extension, produce) due to these systematic social constructs...

[Response to: http://www.adambossy.com/blog/2009/02/19/the-paradox-of-self-education/ ] [Very close to my concept of taking retirement every few years as creative sabbaticals rather than in a lump sum at the end of my career.]

"My goal now is to live frugally so I can set aside big enough bucket of money to get me through year w/out work. Then...I’ll spend a year learning something of interest, possibly making small amounts of money on side. When needed, I’ll start working & hopefully keep repeating this process. If something I do makes me tons of money, great. If not…well it’s not about money.

"With endearing honesty and vulnerability, Raghava KK tells the colorful tale of how art has taken his life to new places, and how life experiences in turn have driven his multiple reincarnations as an artist -- from cartoonist to painter, media darling to social outcast, and son to father."

"The Homogenizing Hopper...The Home-Schooling Revolution...Free Agent Teaching...The End of High School...A renaissance of apprenticeships...A flowering of teenage entrepreneurship...A greater diversity of academic courses...A boom of national service...A backlash against standards...The Unschooling of Adults...The devaluation of degrees...Older students...Free agent teaching...Big trouble for elite colleges...Learning groupies"

"*...I don’t understand why these online educationaly enterprises even need to *pretend* to be a “college.” If we’re really looking at Clayton Christensen style “disruption,” we ought to be abandoning the whole idea of “education,” of degrees, schooling, grades, papers, publishing, theses, doctorates, any of that. *You just get on line and you start messing with stuff. At some point, the other practitioners notice you and start linking to you. And they buy stuff from you, or they praise you for what you are doing. And then you know that you know it. And that’s an end to it. *Maybe somebody could invent some formal tests for you, if they were all worried about it. Otherwise, what the heck: bring on the rocket-science and the brain surgery! Got all the instructables you can eat! *...we’re not “formally educated,” but...who cares about that? You can’t *make us* care. You are Main Stream Education and you are so over."

"What are we really criticizing when we deride the graduates of MFA and PhD programs for nothing more than simply having done what one would expect them to do, which is to go and learn about the enterprise in which they are interested? I suspect that lurking behind such statements lies a romanticized and outmoded notion of the artistic subject—which is to say, of the kind of subjectivity (autodidactic, at odds with decorum and the status quo, sometimes tortured, often difficult, always independent—i.e. an ideal of bourgeois bohemianism) that continues to cling to the definition of the “artist” today like some itchy fungus." + response in comments which begins: "Just as the marriage of poststructuralism and the invasion of academe by the baby-boomer generation produced political correctness and decades of right thinking by a neutered liberal establishment, many MFA programs...often promote less a canon of critical ideas than an effective art world catechism..."

Around the 39:00 mark, when discussing hacker collectives Pettis says that he thinks "school is basically dead. What can replace school is this idea of communities that care enough about learning that they're willing to figure stuff things out and then share what they've learned and document it. I don't know exactly what this is called, but I really like it better than schools." via: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/07/bre-pettiss-rapid-pr.html video at: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/25C3/video_h264_720x576/25c3-3015-en-rapid_prototype_your_life.mp4

"The Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) was founded in 1989 by Jerry Mintz. AERO is a branch of the School of Living, a non-profit organization founded in 1934 by Ralph Borsodi. AERO's goal is to advance student-driven, learner-centered approaches to education. AERO is considered by many to be the primary hub of communications and support for educational alternatives around the world. Education Alternatives include, but are not limited to, Montessori, Waldorf (Steiner) Choice, Democratic, Homeschool, Open, Charter, Free, Sudbury, Holistic, Virtual, Magnet, Early Childhood, Reggio Emilia, Indigo, Krishnamurti, Quaker, Libertarian, Independent, Progressive, Community, Cooperative, and Unschooling. One of AERO's areas of expertise is democratic process and democratic education, but equally important is the networking of all forms of educational alternatives. It is through our work and mission that we hope to create an education revolution."

"Whitehead's address The Aims of Education (1916) pointedly criticized the formalistic approach of modern British teachers who do not care about culture and self-education of their disciples: "Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it.""

"This handbook teaches you how to learn any language on your own, in the language's home turf, by teaching a native speaker to be your teacher.

"Philippe was so impressed by Sugata Mitra’s presentation of his hole in the wall project (which received more than 25′000 views on liftconference.com and ended up being published on TED talks) that he flew to India to shoot street kids experimenting with self-education." see also: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phitar/sets/72157609414016354/

"He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty. Now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was."

"We are a group of people, who have dedicated ourselves to the promotion of a new educational system with the student in the center. Thirty odd members have written a book which was published in August 2000. This book is the core theme of our home page. B

"This blog is going to be all about self-education - people learning what they want to know

"big need for change when it comes to professional development. Individuals need to do more to take the initiative, since they’re ultimately in it for themselves...employers need to open up their definitions of training and learning"

Hadley, MA