In case you missed them in Jim’s post on Ignite Philly II, there are two great 5m talks on education online that you should really check out.
Mark Yim: Engineering Education and the GRASP Lab is really cool. Dropping students into a problem with no
lessons, no readings, etc. reminds me of Rilke’s poem “The Man Watching”, which Tim likes to quote: “What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated, decisively, by successively greater things.” Makes me want to take that class REAL BAD.
A lifelong learner might simply want progressively harder problems and a
discussion group behind them. In fact, they do.
The second talk, Chris Lehmann: The Schools We Need, is also fantastic. Chris Lehmann is my hero. Dan Meyer, the other teacher blogger I worship, is a big fan of Chris’s. Chris is an ex-geek and principal at an amazing school. His kids built their own biodiesel generator, patented it, and are sharing it with the third world. Fast, but inspirational, talk.
Two talks on learning and education that are well worth watching.