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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Edutopia... A celebration of effective school reforms, February 14, 2003
This review is from: EDUTOPIA: Success Stories for Learning in the Digital Age (Paperback)
During a time of state budget crises that are calling for drastic changes to the educational system as we know it, Edutopia provides a breath of fresh air and a sense of hope for teachers and parents. With the budget cuts looming , and demand for accountability as measured by performance on simplified tests, and the need to do more with less, the more is, unfortunately, focused on increasing test performance. Conspicuously absent from the center of concerns is the children's learning process. In creating Edutopia, the book, the newsletter and the web resources, The George Lucas Educational Foundation's work finds our children and their learning processes at the heart of the educational system. While many of us have grown weary of reforming education, and have resigned ourselves to the concept of "tinkering" with the system (Tyack and Cuban, 1995, Tinkering Toward Utopia), Edutopia has held on to the belief in the power of the people to make significant, lasting, and positive changes to the way our children learn, develop, and grow through the educational process. While there is great value to tinkering, Edutopia shows us that the only limitations we have are those that we place on ourselves. The contributors to this book shows us how much power is unleashed when we allow ourselves to let go of our fears of change and our reluctance to embrace the possibilities that lie in the amazing digital age. Edutopia is not a traditional educational book. If you are looking for a book on learning theories, research studies, or foundations of a discipline, Amazon will be able to help you locate them. There are also books that will tell you how poorly we are doing at educating all children. Edutopia is a unique book filled with creative approaches to learning, assessment, community involvement, expanding the classroom, creatively shaping the learning environment. This book is about the passion that we have for the development of our children. The authors urge us to break out of the lament which plagues our practice, to free our imagination to use emerging technology to energize learning. The book is filled with real life examples with ordinary teachers who take extraordinary steps to inculcate innovative and substantial changes to the children's learning process. These are examples of people who believe that they can make a difference, that real learning can occur despite budget cuts and "uncontrollable" outside forces. The stories are about people who refuse to settle. When I read the newspapers or listen to the evening news and get discouraged with talks of the demise of our children's education, and I am tempted to settle for the mere tinkering of our children's educational process, I pick up Edutopia and am reminded that there are people out there who are making incredible differences in the lives of children.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eutopia--examining the present to discover the future, February 12, 2003
This review is from: EDUTOPIA: Success Stories for Learning in the Digital Age (Paperback)
This is exactly what it promises to be --a very informative description of the best learning contexts that are being built with new technologies. Rather than celebrating the technology it focuses on the relationship between and among people and the way in which new forms of information and communication are reshaping these relationships. If you want to think beyond the two covers of a book and 4 walls of a classroom, if you want to redesign schools and their communities as places of serious, playful learning in social contexts, this book will push your thinking. Yes, this book (and the 11 short movies) celebrates learning. No, this book is a not a critical examination of research that validates the learning outcomes although, for some of these projects, such studies exist. A "success story" has value because it shows us how people have come to work together to create projects that push the boundaries past the routine. The purpose of these stories is to not simply to inform. We need stories like the ones in this book to inspire us, to energize us to move beyond what is now, and to realize that each of us can and should be thinking about what can be. I use this book in my graduate courses to expose students to the range of project-based learning applications of technology, the evolving role in technology in assessment, the ways in which communities have become more involved in education and how communication technology is reshaping professional development into a continual everyday process. While a consistent philosophical and theoretical position underlies the examples, students need to abstract the principles. The range and choice of stories is excellent but the stories are brief. Personally, I would have preferred a single spaced book with twice the information on each of the projects and examples. But in a multimedia connected world, stories can link to web sites, videos, and more extensive information on the Edutopia site and on the web. Celebrating success may not fit the critical stance that some take toward the work of education, but with all of the challenges, it is inspiring when people connect.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Critical Starting Point for Global Transformation, September 17, 2007
This review is from: EDUTOPIA: Success Stories for Learning in the Digital Age (Paperback)
I respectfully encourage all serious reviewers to avoid the video review option. The video review sacrifices both rapid scanning of diverse views, and the ability to create added value from automated text search.
edutopia is a true gift to humanity from the George Lucas foundation. I consider the book and the DVD to be a superb starting pointfor the necessary global transformation.
Chapter Nine discusses a dozen promising practices that work:
01 Peer Instruction
02 Cross-age tutoring
03 Bringing local experts into the classroom
04 Multi-age classrooms
05 Cooperative learning
06 Class-size reduction
07 Team teaching
08 Looping (teachers stay with same students for several years)
09 Block scheduling
10 Schools within schools
11 School teams
12 Community service
This is a superbly crafted multi-media teaching tool that every teacher, parent, and administrator will learn from and be strengthened by.
My only disappointment is that the book's sponsors and authors focused so narrowly on just the USA and how the wisdom in this book might be applied within our existing academic and vocational infrastructure. My own focus is on the five billion poor who do not have the time for 18 years of rote education. Simply by subsidizing cells phones and creating a global network of 100 million volunteers using Telelanguage.com, we could offer free education to the five billion poor, and our own population, "one cell call at a time." Education is the only way we can create stabilizing wealth--this excellent book set its sights too low.
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