Future of Learning

I've hardly been writing about technology these days, instead focusing on how our perceptions about learning are changing. I think technology (especially the web) is at the root of much of this thinking, changing our relationship with information and putting individuals in charge of their learning. There are so many good thought spinning around this concept that I'm barely keeping up. Stephen Harlow tied together a bunch of great posts on the subject, including this article by author Philip Pullman, which is chock full of great ideas about how writing should be learned. A sample:

"It's when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won't make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It's when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading."

Pat Kane linked to the same article last week and added another quote I liked: "true education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility". And finally, Will Richardson has been on fire with his thinking about the future of learning, and this post (bouncing off this one) really nails it: Curriculum as Conversation. Pulling the Cluetrain Manifesto's ethos into education is exciting and necessary.