Book Study.1: A Whole New Mind

Our assignment for the upcoming April 4th meeting is to read the first two chapters in Daniel Pink's book and post our highlights, what stuck, what's interesting, what's questionable, or what needs clarification, about it here. The following are my thoughts.

"The future belongs to a very different kind of mind." Do we agree so far? Could it be the "Revenge of the Righ Brain"?

I like Pink's term for this new age, the "conceptual age", and his reference to the "six senses". Design~Story~Symphony~Empathy~Play~Meaning. I also read with interest "The Conceptual Age Orgainzation".

L-Directed Thinking vs. R-Directed Thinking

Now, R-Directed Thinking is suddenly grabbing the wheel, stepping on the gas, and determining where we're going and how we'll get there.

This quote on page 27, drew an instant mental image of all social networking sites such as Blogs, Wikis, Flickr, Superglu, Del.icio.us, Wikipedia, Google Apps, MySpace, and the list goes on. R-Directed Thinking????

I also like the term he coined "SAT-ocracy" as he referred to the many tollbooths we had to pass through to reach the land of knowledge work.

What struck me most was the relevance of scarcity vs. abundance and how we have lost so much in this transition.

Part 1: Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts......

At our first Kal-Tech team meeting at FHSU our assignment was to read the first two chapters of Will Richardson's book.

This is a direct quote from Chapter 1, page 5:

Without question, our ability to easily publish content online will force us to rethink the way we communicate with our constituents, the way we deliver our curriculum, and the expectations we have of our students. It also has the potential to radically change what we assume about teaching and learning, and it presents us with important questions to consider:

What needs to change about our curriculum when our students have the ability to reach audiences far beyond our classroom walls?

What changes must we make in our teaching as it becomes eaasier to brig primary sources to our students?

How do we need to rethink our ideas of literacy when we must prepare our students to become not only readers and writers, but editors and collaborators as well?

How do we best put to use the reams and reams of "digital paper" that Weblogs provide?

Are we ready to create School 2.0? Chris Lehmann writes:

It's really not about the computers. School 2.0 is older than that. School 2.0 is the tradition of Dewey. School 2.0 is born out of the idea that active, engaged, constructivist learning will lead to active, engaged students and people.

It's about the pedagogy.

Can we really afford to continue to take baby steps?