I'm Just Playing with Crayons

I have come to a realization this week.  I'm not being innovative at all.  I'm actually working in the past. I'm merely colouring with crayons.


What prompted this?


Singularityu. "Singularity University  is an interdisciplinary university whose mission is to assemble, educate and inspire leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges. With the support of a broad range of leaders in academia, business and government, Singularity University hopes to stimulate groundbreaking, disruptive thinking and solutions aimed at solving some of the planet’s most pressing challenges. Singularity University is based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley. http://singularityu.org/

I've been following tweets of attendees and more significantly visiting their websites and blogs.  My brain now hurts. What I have seen is the future, visions of how the world might be.  Which has made me realize that as educators who are blogging, who are connecting our classrooms globally, who are developing models for project-based learning, who are exploring how to encourage our students to develop personal learning networks, who are integrating technology into our practices, we in fact are toddlers playing with the tools of the past.  Our tools and possibly processes are already outdated.

One need look no farther than the 2011 Thiel Foundation candidates: 20 remarkable under 20s to confirm this.   http://thielfoundation.org/index.php? ption=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=19  These thinkers have already left behind the world that the rest of us are busily constructing and are working in a sphere well beyond what some of us can even comprehend.

Centres like Singularityu and the Thiel Foundation  make me realize just how outdated most current educational practices are.  We are changing at a snail's pace and failing to provide the kind of thinking opportunities that learners require in order to fully participate in the vision.  I'm worried.  How many learners are going to be excluded from this new world because they haven't been provided with opportunities to think in the way that innovation requires? How many brilliant ideas will never have the opportunity to surface because the thinkers have been too busy learning how to write standardized tests rather than engaging in deep thinking and problem solving?

As I restructure my practice knowing that an even more profound shift is required,  I'm asking those at the forefront of this vision,  what should I be doing?