Oh What A Web We Weave

Okay, I'm admitting this post will get very little editing. So many things have "hit me" within just a few hours, and I've been thinking about why school matters, it it does in the traditional sense, and in trying to separate myself from thinking for a while, here's what happens.

Young son (19) comes home last night and says, "Dad you gotta see the professor on the MIT site. He's a physics prof, but he's cool...and old...but funny in a good way...kinda like the Einstein picture with his tongue out." So we watch Dr. Lewin for a while, through iTunes.

A few minutes later I'm floating through Twitter and see someone link to an article on 71-year-old Professor Lewin - http://tinyurl.com/2syhzb

Coincidence?

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While I'm in Twitterdom, I follow Clay Burrel, and he is an angry young man -- in a great way. "He is so starting his own school." He has a conversation throughout my evening with Sylvia Martinez and others. They begin talking about Papert (another MIT guy I believe) who was a Piaget protege, and constructivism proponent.

I had just finished reading some information from Piaget three days ago, and Papert's work was mentioned as further reading material.

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This morning, I decide it is time to check on Sir Ken Robinson's progress on "Epiphanies," a book he promised in his 2006 TED Talk. As I'm checking, I get a Twitter update that Sir Ken's website is now functioning. Weird.

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A few minutes later, I get to thinking about Will Richardson's all-time-great post (IMO) about how his kids don't need to go to college to get the education they need, nor do any of us. I'm really, really trying to accept this concept. Honestly, I can, but I don't know if employers can...yet. So I watch all of the MIT, DUKE, U of Wisconsin undergrad classes. It's like an audit, at best, in the minds of people who still have the view that the college from which you graduated really means anything.

I'm the guy who believes that most employers don't care where you graduated college, but rather that you did graduate. Graduation from most institutions proves to an employer that if you can put up with the garbage in college, you can probably handle in garbage from the business world. But can they, will they, make the leap to acceptance of an audited education?

Then, I decide I will try to blog something. I go into Blogger and I notice the Blog List of 10 you should see. Usually these are a waste of time, but I decide to see what topic are big at Blogger now. Why? Based on Clay Burrel's comment about how bad educators are at making networks outside our arena. So I click the first one...It has Buenos Aires in the title, so I expect a travel site, or something. As it loads, I notice it is Sexy Spanish Club in Buenos Aires. Yikes, I don't have time for this...THEN KAPOW...

I'm an American writer, researcher, teacher and mother of four college students. I'm currently living in beautiful Buenos Aires, Argentina where I'm busy writing a book about creative education...

Her name is Mary Frost. She is writing a book titled: The World Is Your Campus: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands On Tuition, and Get An Outrageously Relevant Global Education.

She has another site dedicated to her writing, called The World Is Your Campus. Good stuff.

What is all this telling me? My wife says, "It's telling you to get away from your computer and go grocery shopping. Let's go already. Tell you're playmates you'll be back later." Reality.