Last week I had the privilege of visiting the Met School in Providence, RI and spending the day with legendary educator Dennis Littky, his team, and his Big Picture Learning students both at the Met and the new College Unbound program. Dennis and I have been talking about the best ways to tap into the tech tools available to enhance and inform his high-touch, personal-development approach to education, which focuses on the whole student and on getting the student out into the community to learn from everyone and everything they come across and pursue their passions. I was so struck by the respect that everyone in his learning communities showed each other. He’s sending one of his team members to Mozilla Drumbeat in Barcelona next week.

I fortuitously happened to be there on the day of the college students’ Midterm Exhibition. Michael McCarthy, a College Unbound student in his late 20s who is an Afghan war vet, produced this video as part of his exhibition. It is stunningly high quality and lays out the challenges facing everyone who is concerned with the intersection of ed and tech so very well. His thinking is several steps ahead of the majority of administrators & teachers I’ve talked to. I am hoping that everyone who reads this blog wants to help him out with his project–I know I do.

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nginx

10 Responses to “Watch this Awesome Video on the Future of Education”

  1. cucmike says:

    Awesome!

  2. Josh Baron says:

    This IS an AWESOME video, especially because it speaks from the student’s voice.

    Much of what Michael describes with regards to technology resonated a lot with me as it is much of what we’re talking about in the Sakai Project as we work on creating the new Open Academic Environment (http://sakaiproject.org/welcome-sakai-oae). It would be great to have more students like Michael involved in “visioning” the future of this system. Please have him e-mail me if he is interested.

    Thanks for sharing!
    Josh

  3. Bruce says:

    Yeah, what Josh said.

  4. The ideas that Michael discusses are enlightening. I’m not sure how to incorporate some of these ideas in my classes, but I’ll start to move in the direction Michael recommends.

  5. Brad Felix says:

    Thanks for getting this out there Anya.

  6. Fab inspiring video. I was wondering how did you crate the 3d effect with a plugin? what video editing software did you use?

  7. Michael says:

    Thank you everyone for your support in the video.

    @Josh: I would love to hear more about Sakai OAE. I am close friends with a URI professor who uses Sakai extensively, and it’s good to see that you are going even further with opening up the possibilities! Anya is away in Spain, so I will not be able to get your email from you through her. Mine is mmccarthy [at] metmail [dot] org, if you’re still interested in getting in touch.

    @William: I believe, and I could be wrong, that my friend’s program is Vegas, for Windows. I am not sure what version etc. Taking the 3D required two stable, side-by-side mounted cameras, as close as they can get. Good, up close 3D would require a beam-splitter. Not to mention, we’d love to have better cameras!

    I am going to do a great deal more whiteboard videos to assist my fellow students, cover the Philosophy I am studying, local political events, etc. There are a great many others doing stuff like this out there. It’s exciting!

    Thanks for the support,

    Mike @ College Unbound

  8. Danger says:

    An awesome video indeed. I was wondering if anyone had seen Ken Robinson’s RSA speech (link below). It very deftly illustrates some similar ideas, and I highly recommend watching it…

    http://comment.rsablogs.org.uk/2010/10/14/rsa-animate-changing-education-paradigms/

  9. [...] Watch this Awesome Video on the Future of Education » DIY U [...]

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