As part of this weeks Education in Focus series, the White House asks:

What does a 21st century education mean to you?

So, tell us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. We look forward to your responses and want to give a hat tip to @GOOD for a good idea.

Back eons ago (i.e. on Thurs in NC, today is Sat in La Jolla), at the CHAT Festival at UNC, John McGowan and I had a dialogue with a ferociously interesting audience on "The Future of Learning Institutions."  We made a radical decision before our panel to not have prepared papers or even prepared remarks and to not use any other form of technology either.  Nada.  Unscripted.  Unplugged.

We’re good at learning from authority, but how do we learn to question authority? That’s an invaluable skill in this collaborative, Internet age, says a professor of interdisciplinary studies.

Let’s try a thought experiment.   Let’s assume we live in a culture where all forms of educational achievement tests have been banned and no one is allowed to assign a letter or numerical grade for anything.   How would we evaluate what students are learning?

This review of PBS's Digital Nation is a reblog from my own blog, buried yesterday in an announcement that our "Reimagining Learning" competition was opening yesterday.  I got carried away.   For those who have emailed me confused about where I offered my comments on the PBS special, I'm reblogging here.   Feel free to add your own comments and opinions below.

This year the Department of Education, as provided by their 2010 appropriations legislation, will make available the initial funding required to launch the National Center.   In the words of the Center’s authorizing legislation, “The purpose of the Center shall be to support a comprehensive research and development program to harness the increasing capability of advanced information and digital technologies to improve all levels of learning and education, formal and informal, in order to provide Americans with the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the global economy.”
 

Over the past two decades, the way we learn has changed dramatically. We have new sources of information and new ways to exchange and to interact with information. But our schools and the way we teach have remained largely the same for years, even centuries. What happens to traditional educational institutions when learning also takes place on a vast range of Internet sites, from Pokemon Web pages to Wikipedia? This book investigates how traditional learning institutions can become as innovative, flexible, robust, and collaborative as the best social networking sites. The authors propose an alternative definition of "institution" as a "mobilizing network"—emphasizing its flexibility, the permeability of its boundaries, its interactive productivity, and its potential as a catalyst for change—and explore the implications for higher education.

In the rich culture of search engine optimization, there lies a thin wall between black hat and white SEO - both techniques are different based on application.