Bud's Blog and links

Reading through chapter 2 again, I found a mention of Bud's Blog Experiment. That is "sleeping" at the moment, so I linked into his real blog. Right off, I saw a post that made me click through. It was a posted video about new literacy and 21st century learning. His video link was dead, so I clicked through to another website that still had the video posted.

Go watch the video please, then return. I'm going to re-watch it to make sure I was listening! (Short-around 6 minutes he says).

Here are some notes I took:
-Schools = factories
-Current school format locks out the knowledge that kids have in technologies
-"Technology isn't a choice."
-Students live in the "nearly now"
-We have to build bridges between what they are doing outside the classroom to what they can do/use to learn inside the classroom. In other words, use what your kids have and know
-Emphasis on a worldwide community of learning
-Teachers need the tools first but we're missing a clearing house of info on that
-New literacy = Do you know how to find info? Validate it? Use it to solve novel problems? Collaborate with it?

Now if you read that person's commentary, you may agree with a great number of things that he says. I don't want to make the value judgement for you, just present the ideas. Reading the comments to this post was even more enlightening, so scroll down and make sure to have a look through there.

Now back to Bud. He maintains that it's not a group hug kind of video that we should all just imbibe and walk away from- we should watch and then talk. Check the comments, you'll know a name listed there!

As I've scrolled down his current blogs, he seems to be a thoughtful kind of guy. His blogs are current, topical, and written in a conversational tone. I like that his blog is approachable and not too techy or high handed in its treatment of information. He also has a sense of humor, see the post about buttons. For an educator who is thinking, planning, and reflecting on his or her craft, I'd say Bud's is a good place to start thinking out loud with like-minded adults.