by Scott McLeod | Feb 22, 2009 | Learning and Teaching, Quotes, Reading, Reviews |
I’ve had a lot of fun these past ten days posting quotes from Robert Fried’s The Game of School. I think Fried does a fabulous job of highlighting how schools as institutions have largely moved away from many of our desired ends for students and their learning. Not always, not for every kid, but mostly… And, as I hope you have seen for the past 10 days, he’s also eminently quotable.
Here’s a quick list of all of the posts:
I also have Fried’s books, The Passionate Learner and The Passionate Teacher, sitting on my shelf. I’m looking forward to digging into those as well.
For those of you who noted that you were inspired to go out and get a copy of The Game of School, I hope that you enjoy the book as much as I did. Happy reading!
I give this one 5 highlighters.
by Scott McLeod | Sep 2, 2008 | Assessment, Leadership and Vision, Miscellaneous, Reading, Reviews |
[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]
I just finished Dr. Paul Collier's award-winning book, The Bottom Billion. An economics professor at Oxford University, Collier notes that traditionally we have thought of the world's population as being made up of '€˜a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion people'€™ (p. 3).
Instead, we need to recognize that the developing world should be divided into two groups, the middle four billion and the bottom billion. The countries in the middle group have economies that are growing, life expectancies that are rising, infant mortality rates that are dropping, and malnutrition rates that are declining. They still have a long way to go compared to the developed world, but they are making progress. India and China are both part of the middle four billion, despite once being poorer than many of the countries in the bottom billion.
In contrast, the bottom billion people continue to live in '€˜the fourteenth century, [doomed by] civil war, plague, and ignorance'€™ (p. 3). Their economies are not growing and, '€˜given the power of compound growth rates, [the] differences between the bottom billion and the rest of the developing world will rapidly cumulate into two different worlds'€™ (p. 10). The bottom billion not only are '€˜falling behind … [they are] falling apart'€™ (p. 3).
Below is a graph of the growth rates of the bottom five billion over the past few decades [note that the actual growth rates were not this linear; Collier reported his figures by decades so I had to approximate]. Growth rates were as follows:
When these growth rates are plotted cumulatively, the chart looks something like this:
As you can see, the bottom billion are barely better off than they were 35 years ago. About 70 percent of the bottom billion lives in Africa. The bottom billion includes countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Haiti, Yemen, and North Korea.
I have greatly appreciated how this book has reoriented my thinking about global economic development challenges. Being a data guy, I have jumped into some of Collier'€™s numbers in order to help me envision what the challenges are that face the bottom billion. As we look toward the plight of our own disadvantaged student populations, we would be well-advised to look for data that help us reorient our thinking so that we may appropriately address our learning challenges. What data do you have that might shake up the thinking of your educators, students, and families?
[I learned a lot from this book. I give it 4 highlighters.]
by Scott McLeod | Apr 10, 2008 | Leadership and Vision, Reviews |
Johnny Bunko: a cartoon Joe who hates his dead-end accounting job. A set of
magic chopsticks. And Diana, a Greek-anime goddess of job satisfaction. Mix ‘em
together and you have the latest business manga. That’s right, I said
business manga.
Lesson 1: There is no plan. The
average worker will have a gazillion jobs before she’s 42. Don’t do things
you hate or are worthless just ‘cause you think they’ll get you somewhere. Do
stuff ‘cause you love it and it’s valuable to you. This is the path to success
and fulfilllment, grasshopper.
Lesson 2: Think strengths, not weaknesses. Diana
invokes the sacred bobbleheads of Seligman and
Buckingham. Capitalize on what
you’re good at. End sentences with prepositions. Who cares? Screw that ‘fill in
the gaps’ crap. Allow yourself to bring out your best. Follow
your heart with a vengeance. That’s what remarkable leaders do. Be
f’n amazing.
Lesson 3: It’s not about you. It’s
not about you. It’s not about you. Really. It’s about them. Help your
students-customers-clients-stakeholders solve their problems. The
most valuable people in any job bring out the best in others. Be helpful.
Add value. It’s not about you.
Lesson 4: Persistence trumps talent. The
fall of dropping water wears away the stone. Keep
on sucking until you succeed. What are you afraid of?
Lesson 5: Make excellent mistakes.
If your strategy is to lie low, do your job, follow instructions, and hope
that nobody notices you, (a) nobody will ever notice you, and (b)
you’re actually increasing the chances of something bad happening.
If, on the other hand, you develop a reputation as the person who is always
pushing the envelope, challenging the organization to go to the next level, and
using your influence to get good stuff done, you’ve got the world’s best job
security.
You
can’t shrink your way to greatness.
Try again. Fail again.
Fail better. Fail smarter. Being
safe is risky. Being risky is safe.
Lesson 6: Leave an imprint. Make a difference. Do
something meaningful. Stand
for something big and important. Stop being ordinary. Make the world a
better place. What are you waiting for?
A rehash of earlier works? Absolutely. A super fun way to spend an hour? You
betcha.
Watch the trailer.
Buy
the book. But whatever you do, don’t let your local adolescents get hold of
it or they’ll really start asking questions about whatever it is you’re
‘teaching’ them.
Oh, did I mention it’s written by Daniel
Pink? Rock on.
[I loved this book. I give it 5 highlighters.]
by Scott McLeod | Mar 24, 2007 | Gaming, Miscellaneous, Quotes, Reading, Reviews |
I just finished reading Everything
Bad Is Good For You. The author, Steven Johnson, makes a quite-convincing
case that today's popular culture and media (video games, television, Internet,
movies), rather than being 'cheap pleasures that pale beside the intellectual
riches of yesterday,' are much more cognitively complex than what we had
available to us just a decade or two ago. If you haven't yet read this book, I
highly recommend it. Kottke.org
has a short blurb on the book along with a number of excellent links to other
resources and commentary.
One of my favorite parts of the book is at the beginning. First Johnson
quotes Marshall
McLuhan:
The student of media soon comes to expect the new media of any period
whatever to be classed as pseudo by those who acquired the patterns of earlier
media, whatever they may happen to be.
Johnson then hypothesizes what critics might have said if video games
preceded books rather than the other way around:
Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the
long-standing tradition of game playing – which engages the child in a vivid,
three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes,
navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements – books are simply a
barren string of words on the page.
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years
engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and
exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him- or herself in
a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. These new
‘libraries’ that have arisen in recent years to facilitate reading activities
are a frightening sight: dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and
socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to
their peers.
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that
they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any
fashion – you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. This risks
instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though
they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active,
participatory process; it’s a submissive one. The book readers of the younger
generation are learning to ‘follow the plot’ instead of learning to lead.
As Johnson notes, these new forms of communication, participation, and
learning have worth. They're not the vast intellectual wastelands that cultural
critics often claim them to be. Reading still has a great deal of value, as Johnson clearly
states in other parts of his book, but so do these other forms of media. We might sometimes wish that the
subject matter or content matter of these media forms were different – for
example, I personally wish that some video games weren't so violent and gory – but the
bottom line is that the intellectual complexity of popular media is much greater
than before. We would be better served to tap into the affordances of these new
media forms rather than criticizing them simply because they're new and
different.
I give this one 4 higlighters.
