I am so psyched about this Thursday's Open Source Learning Future Salon. If you check out the following video interviews with our speaker John Taylor Gatto, you may be too. That we are able to access this kind of information with a simple search and a broadband connection just blows my mind. Just another search away and you can enjoy Olga Korbut's Uneven Bar exercise from 1972, but I digress ;-).
All of John's 19 lectures are located at edflix (Educational Video Downloads) site. They are part of World Prosperity Ltd. who's mission is to determine how to make social systems such as education, healthcare, government, and families work more effectively. They do this by examining basic, underlying causes and their solutions. Current project is to teach others how to make educational movies easily and cheaply. They are coordinating the free distribution of these movies and be a central resource for locating them. This will support K-12, university, and postgraduate education. I am wondering whether that should all go into the Wikiversity.
John Taylor Gatto just finished his latest book: Weapons of Mass Instruction, which is unfortunately not yet available. He will talk about Open Source Learning. Looking like edflix is one of the sources to it.
Most focus of raising a child today is put on education and schooling in particular. The big shift in schooling lately has been towards standardized testing and teaching towards these tests.
John makes a convincing case, that this is exactly the wrong direction. He thinks, and has a lifetime of teaching as proof , that institutionalized schooling is the wrong approach, is actually dumbing us down. With this opinion he is rattling one of the foundation of our society. It is going to be very interesting this Thursday.
Open Source Learning Future Salon with John Taylor Gatto Thursday August 21st at SAP in Palo Alto. Future Salons have the following structure: 6-7pm is networking with light refreshments proudly sponsored by SAP; 7-9+pm is the presentation followed by questions and discussion.