Transcriber: Pei Fang Ng Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo
I'd like to share with you all
an idea which I believe
will help shape the future of personalized learning.
This is an idea that you and everyone
can put into action today, for free,
and will never be taken away.
I call it a "Lifelong Learning Blog".
In that, unlike other blogs,
the idea is not to build a large audience,
but to help young people learn.
To start is simple.
First, think of a kid or kids who you love.
Next, set them up with a Google account, or equivalent,
and help them set up their own blog.
If you think they're too young to have their own Google account,
then they can just use yours.
Final set up step,
and this is the key:
be sure to set up the email subscription widget,
and immediately enrol yourself
and at least 4 other adults who also love that kid.
Now, if your family is like mine,
you share a secret weapon:
grandparents.
There's an obvious synergy
between older people and younger people.
They provide what last year's TED talk award winner, Sugata Mitra,
a supportive nurturing presence that motives kids to do more.
If your family is not like mine,
as more and more are not,
particularly in urban environments like where I live,
then there may be just one parent,
and there may be technical and language barriers,
but with almost all kids,
there is a team of adults who cares about that kid
and wants to help.
It could be an after school provider,
or a social worker,
or a distant relative,
or a teacher.
So, it takes about 20 minutes
to set a kid up with a lifelong learning blog.
And I have free step-by-step instructions
posted at a website: blogsandbadges.com.
The next step is harder,
but where the fun begins.
With my younger son, Charlie,
it started like this:
"No, no, no, no, no!"
Charlie had seen first-hand the impact of blogging
on his older brother, Max,
and he did not think that he was ready for the responsibility.
Max had unenrolled in 6th grade last year
to pursue personalized learning for 6 months
in a "semester abroad in Geeklandia",
as we came to call it.
His experiences and blog,
"Postcards from Geeklandia",
helped show my wife and I, both lifelong public educators,
the power of blogging as a lifelong learning tool.
Unlike MOOCs and Khan Academy,
kids' blogging is fundamentally about learning by doing.
Writing in a rich media form, like a blog,
harvests 3 core characteristics that kids need
to prepare them for the future.
Number 1: Communicating with other human beings in writing
powerfully and creatively.
Number 2: Communicating with computers and devices
technically and logically.
Number 3: Developing independence and perseverance,
that engine in the brain that motivates us
to interact with humans and computers
and to persist to completion.
I struggled a bit to figure out
how to explain what I'm talking about,
because this idea is both exceedingly simple
and infinitely extensible.
Motivating kids to blog can be as simple
as getting them to post existing homework assignments
that they've already done.
Or, it could be writing a few sentences
as captions to pictures from a recent family trip.
It could be 3 times a year, or it could be near daily.
A little is good.
A lot is great.
Each post brings a burst of encouragement,
from grandparents, parents and special family friends.
Because I've subscribed to my kids' blogs,
each post arrives in my inbox.
So even I'm so busy to comment during the day,
I'm still much aware of their work,
and ready to talk with them
at dinner, or at breakfast.
The blogging platform is not dissimilar
to the Facebook platform,
but there is a crucial difference
between the Facebook peer culture
and the type of online culture created
when a kid blogs to their parents,
grandparents and special family friends.
By the time Max, Charlie and the other kids I know
have graduated from high school
and go on to higher learning, or jobs,
they'll have assembled a rich,
hypertext indexed scrapbook of their work.
They'll be able to use it to reflect
on all they've accomplished and all they've learnt,
and they'll be able to create portfolios from it,
of their best work,
badges, certificates and diplomas.
Many kids go through a phrase
where they learn to love reading,
but they still hate writing.
Both take practise and are hard at first.
Unlike reading and speaking,
where we spend endless hours with kids,
practicing with them,
from the time of their birth,
writing gets scant attention,
and is mostly outsourced to the schools.
When you outsource writing to the schools,
and I say this with total respect to the teachers,
what happens is that kids do assignments
that go into the black box for teacher feedback
and come back some time later with red ink.
I say that figuratively to make a point,
but the math is simple.
My wife is a 7th grade humanities teacher
at a local public middle school.
I see her working every weekend,
grading papers and giving feedback to kids.
In a typical elementary school,
there are roughly 20 kids in a class,
and so each kid gets roughly 1/20th of a teacher's attention.
If the kid has a learning blog,
with 5 adults following the blog,
the kid has 5 adults' attention,
100 times what kids typically get.
Now, I'm not saying
that a grandparent's comments on a blog
are the same as a teacher's written feedback on a paper.
The time and timeliness are very different.
Teachers are professionals,
paid to work with kids, full time.
But the rest of the adults in a kid's "digital village"
may not have the same skills as a teacher,
but they bring support, encouragement,
and a lifelong commitment,
that is essential in other ways.
In high school,
where teachers typically have 5 classes,
the improved ratio of blogging goes to 500 to 1,
and that assumes that only the 5 original adults
signed up for the blog.
This is a profound system improvement.
No other education initiative I'm aware of
offers the same return on investment for time and money.
So, if you believe
that learning is most effective when doing,
not passively receiving,
that writing powerfully and creatively
is an essential skill that all kids need,
and that the motivation to write is profoundly influenced
by the feedback from trusting, loving adults,
then you see the profound system breakthrough that this offers.
Kids' blogging to a team of loving adults,
creates a 100-500 fold improvement,
in one of the key cycles of learning:
writing and reflecting with others.
This is exactly like reading to your kids.
Everyone here knows to do it.
To neglect it would be to put your child in peril.
Writing is the same,
and there's something free and simple that you can do
to improve this key variable by several orders of magnitude.
So I ask you,
will you set up a lifelong learning blog with a kid?
Please raise your hand or stand,
if you're ready to put this idea into action.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)