One of my favorite education-related videos over the last ten years is Richard Culatta’s “Rethinking Digital Citizenship.” It explores how and why we teach our students from a young age the dangers and prohibitions associated with technology, but now the proper ways to use technology for good, nor praise them for their good uses. It is an amazing deconstruction of why, as a society, we have determined that students can only understand technology in terms of the evils it can perform.

There was a point reading Education Nation where all I could think about was Spring/Fall 2020. Milton Chen wrote Education Nation over a decade ago when many of the ideas he espoused (personalized learning, technology driven learning, blended learning) were radical. In fact he points, like Sir Ken Robinson, to the idea that ‘alternative’ schools should be the norm; meaning skills based, deep learning based instruction should take the place of traditional teacher as lecturer instruction. I would like to think that these radical ideas are now normalized and used nationwide to create the titular ‘Education Nation’. However, one lesson I took away in Spring/Fall 2020 was we are working to build our capacity for these ideals, but we are not quite there yet. The book ends on a optimistic note by examining what a potential future would look like where the practices he discusses are integrated into schools. Although that optimistic chapter was based in the 2020 school year, I agree that the picture he creates is one that educators are working towards and building capacity for.

During the Thanksgiving break, I spent a lot of time thinking about Shankar Vedantam’s TED talk. The idea is simple: the person you are is not the same person you will be in 5 or 10 years, maybe even tomorrow. Given that we will all change in myriad ways, many unknowable to us, how can we plan for that future self? Shankar offers simple ideas: stay curious, add humility to your work, and to be brave in our choices. We often forget to look beyond the few minutes each day we have to reflect on our lives; what Shankar is proposing is that we think about the person we will become and start building towards that goal today. Simple, but not common.