Education 2.0 & 3.0

Upgrading Connectivity

The ConnectED initiative will, within five years, connect 99 percent of America’s students to next-generation broadband and high-speed wireless in their schools and libraries. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon are already providing their support, collectively pledging to connect more than 20 million more students over the next two years.

ConnectED will also provide better broadband access for students in rural areas, by expanding successful efforts to connect parts of the country that typically have trouble attracting investment in broadband infrastructure.

Training Teachers

Our teachers need better tools to help them succeed – and technology can play a central role. For example, new digital education tools can allow for real-time assessments of student learning, provide faster feedback to drive professional development, and enable the creation of interactive online lessons, helping teachers understand each student’s strengths and weaknesses and design lessons and activities to better meet their needs.

ConnectED invests in improving the skills of teachers, ensuring that every educator in America receives support and training in using education technology tools that can improve student learning. ConnectED will also lead to new resources for teachers from any school to open their classrooms to interactive demonstrations and lessons from world-renowned experts, and to collaborate with other educators worldwide.

Via Dr. Susan Bainbridge, Miloš Bajčetić

"Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning and implementing Education 3.0. This post seeks to to compare the developments of the Internet-Web to those of education."

Via Beth Dichter

Increasingly, the effect of the global connected mind will emerge as a social phenomenon. There are representations of this in popular culture. In Star Trek, the Next Generation, the Borg are a powerful, marauding society of nomadic cybernetic organisms - or cyborgs - that assimilate every society they encounter. They do so by absorbing the collective intelligence of each new world into their own vast, already existing hive mind. Resistance is futile, because everyone they encounter is overpowered, and integrated. Although I don't foresee a time when we will ever be invaded by such cyborgs, it serves to illustrate the fact that we are better when we are connected and are working concertedly toward a shared goal.

There is a growing feeling amongst the networked nation that we can do so much more together than we can as isolated individuals. To be a truly globally connected community, we must learn to work together, freely share and exchange our ideas and resources, and ultimately, teach each other about the world around us. We have the tools to do so. It is already beginning to happen.

"We have 3 billion new minds coming on line to work with us to help us solve our grand challenges." - Peter Diamandis (TED Talk)

Via Miloš Bajčetić

A lot of the work we have been doing as part of the connected learning community has focused on children and young people. We design digital tools that create new ways for young people to learn. We create environments in which learning starts with a young person's interest.

Via Elizabeth E Charles