In a local op-ed I recently concluded that curriculum change in education is like fixing a plane in mid-flight especially when the first principles of public education are not clear while the curriculum is the same for everyone. Basically, standardized curriculum is the confinement of the human experience. It is a blunt tool that winds… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Learning
how ideas become ideology
Several times I have referred to this observation about how ideas connect to ideology. “Ideas lead technology. Technology leads organizations. Organizations lead institutions. Then ideology brings up the rear, lagging all the rest — that’s when things really get set in concrete.”—Charles Green (2009) Here are some examples of these shifts. Ideas lead technology Hedy… Read more »
reflecting on a decade past
Looking back on my blog posts from 10 years ago — March 2013 — here are some that remain valid [in my opinion anyway]. perpetual beta is the new reality Work in networks requires different skills than in directed hierarchies. Cooperation is a foundational behaviour for effectively working in networks, and it’s in networks where… Read more »
Kieran Egan 1942-2022
I found out the other day that another person who has inspired my work has passed away. Kieran Egan’s book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding greatly influenced my thinking on public education. I have curated some of his work that has been shared on this blog over the past two decades…. Read more »
Farewell Roger Schank
“Learning by doing is really how we learn: Teaching others to do this is the next step in the education revolution.” —Roger Schank I found out yesterday from Socratic Arts that its founder, Roger Schank has died. Roger’s work has been an inspiration for my own over the past two decades. Roger’s work on story-centered… Read more »
fixing a plane in flight
The following opinion article was published this weekend in local newspapers — Telegraph Journal, Times & Transcript, & Daily Gleaner. Education changes: ‘like fixing a plane in mid-flight’ By Harold Jarche Politicians constantly tinker with our public education system because it is designed without a solid foundation, just a series of cobbled-together initiatives based on whatever was… Read more »
the fifth discipline redux
Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. In 2017 I reviewed mastery and models and showed how they still pertain to organizations 30 years later. I concluded that the challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations. It… Read more »
start planting
Social learning is a regular topic on this blog and I gave a presentation on the power of social learning earlier this year. The following quotes show how learning from and with each other is a critical part of human and societal development. “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had… Read more »
“the future cracked open”
Race Bannon sees AI (or really machine learning) changing many jobs, such as technical writing, in the near future. “I believe within 5-10 years much of technical documentation will be written by AI. Certainly, the basic procedural stuff (Step 1, Step 2, and so on) will be written by AI, but even the contextual stuff… Read more »
revisiting self-determination theory
Self-determination theory states that there are three universal human drivers — autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We need some control over our lives, we want to be good at something, and we want to feel that we can relate to other people. These three drivers are what make us do what we do. Skills are just… Read more »
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