Questions to Ponder

Will Richardson led a session at EduCon 2.2 focused on answering the question:

What are the ‘big’ conversations that schools should be having in relation to the ‘tectonic’ shifts that are occurring with social learning online?

From the session, Richardson was able to compile a fairly long list, from which he generated a Google Form and encouraged his blog readers to vote on the top ten. We've listed the top ten below, along with three questions that just missed the top ten. These are all great questions! Wouldn't it be wonderful to spend entire faculty days discussing some of these questions with your colleagues?

The Big Questions: Now What?

So as of today, 220 of you were kind enough to vote on what you thought were the 10 most important questions from the list that we generated at Educon. Here are the ‘winners’ at the moment:

1. How do we support the changing role of teacher? 116
   
2. What is the role of the teacher? 110
   
3. How do we help students discover their passions? 110
   
4. What is the essential learning that schools impart to students? 109
   
5. What is the purpose of school? 102
   
6. How do we adapt our curriculum to the technologies that kids are already using? 100
   
7. What does and educated person look like today? 97
   
8. How do we change policy to support more flexible time and place learning? 97
   
9. What are the essential practices of teachers in a system where students are learning outside of school? 92
   
10. How do we ensure those without privilege have equal access to quality education and opportunity? 92

And here were the next three that didn’t quite make the cut:
- What is preventing us from being adaptable to change? 79
- How do you validate or evaluate informal learning? 77
- How do we measure or assess the effectiveness of individualized self-directed learning outside of school? 68