I had an interesting day. I started it by sending the video above to my faculty and then ended up sending details of the one below to them. I get why you might not watch the second one, but please, please watch the first one. You might not want to watch something on iPads, but Clay Shirky brilliantly explains why we should care about SOPA and PIPA, even if they never pass the House. (And, he also mentions College Bakery, which I used to live above in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.)
Education is changing. We don’t consume information anymore; we create it. We have to make that shift. Chris Lehmann absolutely nails it in the Apple video by saying that we shouldn’t be teaching students with the same tools we did in 1950, preparing them for a world that has already past.
But wait. We just got through spending a whole day worrying — and we’re not done worrying yet — about what happens when we create information and get threatened because of it. Like a breath of fresh air, we just got a bunch of *free* tools that make it easy to create and consume brand new content in a new and dynamic way. This is the perfect remedy.
Teachers need to create new experiences for their students, and get their students to create and share new knowledge. This is the time to do it, proving that content creation by folks other than big studios and publishers is a very big deal.