Need to Know (Part 2 of 2)

How do educational leaders accomplish this difficult task of bringing students -- and even citizens -- out of their self-made caves of ignorance? How can they be brought to interact with different, even contrary ideas?

You tell me.

Need to Know (Part 1 of 2)

On May 7, 2010, PBS debuted a weekly news magazine with the title Need to Know. Within one minute, the mission and vision of the program was pronounced in crystal clarity.

Co-anchor Jon Meachem provided the context: “We live in an odd moment. Never before has there been so much access to so much information, but if you’re anything like us, inundation does not necessarily translate into insight.”

Yet the sentence that preceded his, spoken by co-anchor Alison Stewart, illuminated how the show would attempt just such a translation: “Our goal is to turn up the light, not the heat, on the topics that inflame passions on all sides.”

Game

**Seems only fitting that, for my first post in several weeks, I publish an entry that I actually started the night of December 1, 2010. I'm discussing a game we played in grad school on that night.

It gets harder for me, as I age, to find opportunities where I can genuinely learn – especially in a formal setting. Most of the workshops I’m required to attend leave me uninspired and often insulted. I’ve walked away from several classes and seminars believing that I not only knew everything presented, but I could have taught it to the same group in half the time with twice the buy-in.