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Boiled to death!

The Boiling Frog Syndrome: If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, he'll jump out. But if you place a frog into a pot of lukewarm water and slowly turn up the heat, it will boil to death. Seth writes about "The Mediocre Emergency, For years, you've been designing, making and marketing stuff in a mediocre way. No one dropped what they were doing to fix the problem.
It's not an emergency.

Of course, it is an emergency. It's a bigger emergency than the things you can buy insurance against, because it's endemic, hard to measure and ultimately fatal."

Last week I wrote, Employee plots to Corporate Scenarios to draw attention to the way we think about our organizations and what we can do to change them. IMHO This all gets down to how we learn new things, how we get knowledge. I came across several really good sites related to the National Education Conference, held last week in Philly. Stay with me here as I try to weave it all together.

The New Shape of Knowledge

The first was NECC talk - New Shape of Knowledge from Dave Weinberger where Dave was the keynote speaker.

Ideascaping the Blogosphere!

My next click was over to technorati to search on the NECC tag to discover what other bloggers had to say. Lucky me, I found an excellent video of Dave and several post-conference discussions.

Dave Weinberger Speaks at NECC by David Warlick, 2cents worth blog. "Knowledge as conversation

  1. Multi-dispute-ism — dispute is trying to get the other person to admit when he is wrong. But in the blogsphere, you disagree, talk about it, and then ’s over. In digital conversations, the dispute is never going to be resolved, and you accept it.
  2. In the real world, we accept “good enough”. In the web,“ good enough” needs to be enough. with 3 million hits on google, you won’t find perfect. Print knowledge looks for what’s perfect.

This is probably the most profound statement in Weinbergers talk as it relates to education. It cuts through to our reluctance to let go of our authority as keepers of the knowledge and allow our children to truly become explorers in the world of information and construct their own knowledge. They need supervision, counciling, and consulting from us. They need us to craft their activities so that their exploration remain relevant to the curriculum expectations. We need to stop teaching students to be students, and start teaching them to be learners, teaching them how to teach themselves."

Cluetrain + Education + Moodle + Bookstudy, John Pederson, For those of you interested in further exploring the educational implications of “knowledge as conversation” and other aspects of Dave Weinberger’s book (with Chris Locke, Rick Levine, and Doc Searls), The Cluetrain Manifesto, John Pederson is organizing a summer online book study.

Back to the boiling frog, we can ignore ("Dell hell: Where's the flack when you need him?") what's happening, conversations, in the blogosphere and inside our own organizations, but only for so long. Listen to this podcast from Julie Leung, recorded this year at Gnomedex, to get a real feel for what blogging and podcasting is all about. Your call on what to do next!

Bonus:
Problems in American Education - Part 13: Teachers and Unions
. I think - or in my opinion, this last link deals with our commitment as professionals in any field.