168 Access :: Future
questions, or think in really wild ways. No limits. Just start at the scale of a single space for learning...and work up/out.
We need to stop employing students as fast-food servers and sales clerks. They are capable of much better than that, and an exercise in corporate demeaning is probably not the best way to introduce them to society. We should begin offering students full-time employment in certain fields as alternatives to their formal studies. Such a program should logically begin at the higher grades (grades 11 and 12) as well as being brought on-stream as an alternative to college and university. Most such employment involves the creation of some sort of content or another. The ranges of possible employment are covered in my diagram: - students could provide ultra-local news, entertainment and sports reporting - students could provide up-to-date surveying and inventories of civic property - students could conduct scientific field-research such as bird-counting, ecosystem sampling, pollutionmeasuring and the like - students could help supervise younger children and more - the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations. The trick to making this attractive is to present it, not as the dog-eat-dog struggle for survival that characterizes our existing economy, but rather as a large and complex game, played partially on the computer and partially in RL, in which they play an increasingly important role. The task we should be undertaking is not one of trying to stuff more and more knowledge into students' heads, but rather, finding more and more ways they can make meaningful contributions to society. (I'll post this to my blog - feel free to re-use however you wish) Moncton, Monday, April 02, 2007