Out of all the discussions around the purpose of school and the goal of education, no one argues that the idea of developing "life long learners" is critical. Some use the phrase in mission statements, others emphasize it less but I don't know anyone who doesn't value that concept.  Yet we do very little to achieve that goal.  One of my...

While this remains my primary place of learning and contact, the fact that we continue to play and learn in other spaces makes the idea of a home or portal more important. Last year I purchased shareski.ca but wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. For a while I used it as a place to try and sell our house. This weekend I went ahead and built a portal page much...

Inspired by Doug Peterson, who was inpsired by ZeFrank that then inspired Stephen Downes and others I’ve created a little video of my life growing up in Morden, Manitoba.  Thanks to the every growing database of Google Streetview, it’s now reaching even small towns like the one I grew up in. This one’s mostly for me. Yet, it’s been...

This post will be double posted to the tech learning blog shortly. Schools are text snobs. Most people reading this are text snobs. Our institutions are built around the written word. That in itself is not bad and we owe much of our culture, knowledge and understanding to the written word. It’s not our fault, we’ve been living in a world that up until a...

I’ve struggled with the term 21st Century skill since many of these skills have been around for a long time. It’s not a discussion I’m passionate about but sometimes I’m struck but the clarity of a skill that is clearly new to this century. Video is indeed a 21st century skill. Take the recent contest for the Best Job in the World. Applicants...