Community Schools, Distance Learning and Exponential Network Growth
May 27, 2007
Although I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, I have been thinking ...
I have been egregiously lax in not posting since Mother’s Day – in part because Leah and I were on our annual mother/daughter retreat in Deerfield Beach, Florida where we notoriously do nothing but sun, swim, shop, sleep, and read ‘beach’ novels. (I haven’t quite finished Susan Gilman’s Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, but have been enjoying it a great deal. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, her memories of growing up with hippy parents in NYC in the late 60’s, reminded me of the far less ‘fashionable’ NYC I knew when I lived there during my college and my early career years [and where I wish to return ASAP!])
I have been thinking, however, largely inspired by the following three things:
1 – a rare visit from my brother David (just before we left for FL), during which we seriously discussed my idea of creating a network of small community charter schools which would potentially employ a broad range of educational practices we know work: small learning communities, differentiated/individualized instruction, one-room schoolhouse characteristics, service-learning, peer-tutoring, etc. David also suggested an entrepreneurial aspect to this, possibly engaging upper-level students in curriculum development, which I think would be fascinating. As I’ve discussed before, I think we need to tease ‘content’ and ‘delivery’ apart in the classroom of the future. I think the adults in our classrooms will not be teachers of content knowledge, but rather, facilitators of learning that I’ve come to think of as a combination of web-based, community-based, and courtesy of periodic visits from ‘content experts’ – gifted content specialists who will be enabled to serve as consultants to many schools as opposed to being tied to the more mundane daily classroom experience. This is a VERY simplistic explanation of an extremely complex undertaking, so before he left, David and I agreed that our next step should be a brainstorming session to think through all the elements necessary to build this kind of network. Anyone interested in joining us?
2 – the distance-learning course Leah just started on Gender & Communication. She’s been sharing some of her readings and discussion boards with me, and we’ve had some terrific talks, not just about the coursework, but about school and learning in general. (There’s a lot of stuff going on in conventional colleges and universities that’s really stuck in the analog world … even newer, digital coursework offered through asynchronous, discussion board formats can be disappointingly old-fashioned in their approaches. … but that’s a topic for another day.) At one point in our weeklong conversation, Leah asked me why I didn’t go back to school for my PhD – an idea I have toyed with in the past. It was the rapidity of my response this time that surprised me, “What would be the point? What could a school teach me that I can’t learn on my own?” I realize that the internet has given me a priceless gift: access to as much as I want to know, and to an extraordinary range of experts to whom I can turn with questions. The social aspect of school might have been lost, but blogs and interactive podcasts serve much of that purpose, and who knows, maybe I’ll join Noah’s likemind network and meet others with similar interests in person.
3 – a brief conversation with Noah yesterday about power laws and scale-free exponential growth during which I was reminded that Noah has the gift of being able to explain complex mathematical and scientific concepts to me in ways that I can understand – something I really appreciate because I tend to develop brain freeze when confronted with such things – a result of Mr. Pace’s 8th grade algebra class, which thrust me brutally off the fast track in math forever after. In following up on our talk, I found Jim Robertson's very useful site, which included the following quote on Metcalf’s law by Marc Andreesen, one of the founders of the web:
A network in general behaves in such a way that the more nodes that are added to it, the whole thing gets more valuable for everyone on it because all of a sudden there's all this new stuff that wasn't there before. You saw it with the phone system. The more phones that are on the network, the more valuable it is to everyone because then you can call these people. Federal Express, in order to grow their business, would add a node in Topeka and business in New York would spike. You see it on the Internet all the time. Every new node, every new server, every new user expands the possibilities for everyone else who's already there. (Quoted from the Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories.)
I may be beating a dead horse, but this is how the brain works! Hopefully, it will also be how the 'community charter school network' (discussed under #1) will work.
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