50 year old Education needs Change

Those of you who know me a bit better know how much I care about education, and the lack of good education possibilities in the world. We have basically had the same educational system for over 50 years. The same method for pedagogic and didactic teaching and the same belief of molding people into boxes.

With the overflow of information out there on the web, the access to information has spread and the way in which we could learn has moved from plain text, to sound, to video to emotional NLP methods. All is accessible if we choose to make it accessible. New collaboration tools such as Google Wave and Apps has made it free from costs to collaborate in real time over the Internet.

Still, Nothing happens in our Schools

Yet nothing has happened to our educational system. We continue to complain at our teachers and try to change their education content and context, but we do not change the structure of the way we educate teachers. To use my favorite quote by Einstein – it requires a new way of thinking to solve the problems we created with the old way of thinking. However, we do not change the way we try to learn.

There are ways in which we can change with the social web

I found this video at the Google Channel on YouTube and although I do not agree with everything said, I believe it takes aim at something extremely important namely, the access to information is not enough. What we need to teach is how people can make use of this information and how it can be accessed to further our ambitions in life rather than work against us.

Do you have any suggestions on how we could use the social web to learn in new ways?