RSAmazing - Changing Educational Paradigms

[If the embedded video isn't showing here, click here to YouTube Link]

Wow!  I was recently introduced to RSA Animate, and their Vision Video Webcasts (above and more later).  This is such cool stuff!   And here's the scoop...

The 250 year old Royal Society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce is now tagged "RSA - 21st Century Enlightenment."  An idea lab and exchange for creative thinking, design, innovation and social progress that hosts a network of RSA Fellows, provides platforms for experts to fuel public discourse, and supports interdisciplinary projects for social change solutions.  Unfortunately, the website is not nearly as well-presented and organized, as their individual products.  Creativity and brilliant minds are messy, I guess.  But I digress.

When I first came across RSA Animate, we were discussing how to present and package relatively complex research and ideas so they are easy to follow, understand, and ultimately stick.  If you take 12 minutes or so to watch the video link, you will see what I mean.  [Please pause to watch video link here, then continue after the jump]  

... See what I mean?  Awesome, right?  I had previously been into TED: Ideas worth spreading - Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world.  Over at TED, you can enjoy Hans Rosling - Swedish physician, researcher, software developer, Gapminder founder, genius - present the most exciting, spellbinding statistical data analysis show you have ever seen.  The guy makes data sing!   If you don't believe me, just watch his incredible TED Talk - Let my dataset change your mindset!  But, back on topic, the RSA Animate video casts are quite remarkable, as well.  The RSA video on this post is a bit like Hans Rosling riffing on education reform.  There'a a lot more to check out at the RSA site, and if you're mobile, there's even an iPhone app to search RSA Animate topics and presentations and enjoy on the go.  Ingenious, of course.

The video animation of Sir Ken Robinson's presentation on education reform is thought-provoking.  How are today's schools and educational systems designed?  He argues that education in the 21st century rests on the outdating paradigms of the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, and is not appropriate for today's learners.  Why, he asks, are children grouped by age, not learning interests or learning styles?  And why is collaboration stifled in today's classroom?  It discussed a longitudinal study of divergent thinking, in which 98% cohort of kindergardeners ranked genius on the divergent thinking, but slowly lost this genius as they aged and the educational system, arguably, beat them down.   And it questioned the ADHD epidemic, in which we may be anesthetizing our children from stimulated exploration.   And while it did not explicitly make any reference, it seemed to make the best case ever for the Montessori learning elementary school program that my Dear Daughter attends, in which mixed age classrooms, collaborative and individual learning models are encouraged, self-guided and self-paced interdisciplinary learning are the norm.  

I can be a skeptic.  And I am often one who questions the premise or at least the counterpoint of many arguments.  I am a modern traditionalist who questions the latest fads, often due to the very nature of being new.  But here, I am 100% jazzed, am excited to learn more.