Rethinking Learning
conversations about the future of teaching and learning
Barbara Bray
be creative, innovate, take risks, unlearn to learn
Oakland, CA

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Are you blocking creativity?

By Barbara Bray      January 29, 2010 -- 08:45 AM
After reading Brian Clark's post "Do you recognize these 10 mental blocks to creative thinking?", I get it why it takes so long to change education. Clark wrote:

People like to call this “thinking outside of the box,” which is the wrong way to look at it. Just like Neo needed to understand that “there is no spoon” in the film The Matrix, you need to realize “there is no box” to step outside of.

You create your own imaginary boxes simply by living life and accepting certain things as “real” when they are just as illusory as the beliefs of a paranoid delusional. The difference is, enough people ...   more...
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A Whole New Mind about Education

By Barbara Bray      January 23, 2010 -- 05:27 PM
My eCoach’s Book Club
book until 2/15/10.
I just finished "A Whole New Mind" by Daniel Pink for our book club. I’ve participated in conferences, read books, and watched TED videos that talk about bringing creativity and innovation back to the classroom. My last post was about how Piaget explains that schools were designed to train our factory workers and where that model isn’t working anymore. From Pink’s book, Piaget’s explanation, and so many other sources that I am learning about, we are in the midst of CHANGE, if we like it or not.

Educators created a system, just like the QWERTY keyboard, ...   more...
Comments: 2   Last Comment By small Barbara Bray  January 25, 2010 -- 05:38 PM

Passive vs Active Education

By Barbara Bray      January 21, 2010 -- 06:43 PM
Today's schools are not much different than schools in the early 1900s. Most schools in the US continue to have a 180 day schedule with almost 3 months off in the summer. Schools are open about 6 hours a day. Teachers usually work isolated in their classrooms behind closed doors. Schools were designed to complement our factory model. We needed factory workers who would follow orders and not think on their own. Anyway, that's what we got: a passive education. A few of us (including me) didn't fit in this model very well. I tried but found that I wanted to go in a different direction or had a better ...   more...
Comments: 1   Last Comment By Cheri  July 26, 2010 -- 06:33 PM

Linking Data

By Barbara Bray      January 4, 2010 -- 12:58 PM
I’m sitting in the Oakland airport waiting for my delayed plane. Thought I’d post a new blog after listening to a Ted Talk from Tim Berners-Lee about Linked Data. How cool that the airport has free Wifi. Berners-Lee actually is the inventor of the Internet 20 years ago. In this talk he shares what the future of the web will be all about. This talk was almost a year ago yet is still timely. We are connecting, sharing, and uploading pictures (data) all over the web. What does this mean to you, your data, and your future?



I see this happening more with social networks and other types of online communities like Ning and My eCoach. However, our school structure is still built around closed systems. Administrators and those continuing to protect the past state that "the data is to be protected." Students hand in papers to their teacher and no one else ever sees that report. What if the research that a student does solves a universal problem that could help mankind? Will that teacher recognize that the research (data) is valuable and needs to be shared?

How do you encourage teachers to open their classroom doors and let students share? What about teachers sharing best practices? This can be done pretty easily by putting up examples of student work, reflections on the process, short video clips of the lesson being implemented, etc.

Just imagine if students could connect their research and ideas (data) on global warming. Students might even come up with a solution.

After all it is their future.
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