Regarding educational progress, suppose that establishing equity in providing opportunities where considered to be the “inputs” in your initial post. As you note, “systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. Practically speaking for schools, this means the choices we make matter. The ideas we listen do, refine and share have an impact on our behavior and the behavior of others. Through our ideas and our actions, we change the world.”

I believe this statement holds true for everyone involved in education. Now, in striving for this common goal that we’ll call “educational progress”, our the initial conditions or inputs (the way we treat people) are that much more important considered within this chaotic design. (The chaotic analogy may not fit so well, but suppose it did)

Imagine what a mess we would have if we have differing inputs influencing many different entities within this system. The possible outcome presents a risk that I would not be willing to take with my students, and I believe that many other educators would agree.

Is that considered to be “NOT innovative” or simply reasonable?

I really appreciate your enthusiasm and creativeness. These attributes are very important to effective leadership and technological advances. I just intend to point out that other perspectives need to be valued and incorporated. I believe that reaching our goal may take all of us, or as many as wish to take part.

In terms of labeling people, I do agree we are all “learners” and should strive to be lifelong learners. I am now in the habit of using the word “learners” to describe everyone in school contexts, rather than more traditional terms of “teachers” and “students.” I agree with those who have observed we all move between roles of “expert learner” and “novice learner” depending on the context.

I do find, however, big differences in the ways people look at innovations, with educational technology as well as other things. That is what Everett Rogers noticed and wrote about in 1962 in the context of agricultural innovations in technology, and I think those ideas have value in the context of educational change and specifically adoption of new technologies and pedagogies.

In terms of bounds, I think we all have both physical as well as cognitive boundaries. It may be romantic to think of the human brain as being unlimited in its potential, and I certainly can agree that our potentials are generally far beyond what others expect of us, but as humans I see us as finite beings. That implies limits.

I agree we want to move toward educational progress and mutual respect. Equity is a tougher goal– we want to support equal treatment of human beings certainly. Equality of treatment and opportunities is different than equality of outcomes, which would imply some sort of centralized authority redistributing resources, I think. I’m not supportive of that type of political regime, although I suppose it can be argued that all the social programs we see in the U.S. really amount to wealth distribution in a less extreme version than what a totalitarian communist state like the USSR strove to accomplish.

Thanks for the challenges, I certainly didn’t take any of your comments to be personally offensive. Thinking about and questioning ideas is what this blogspace is all about, and I appreciate your reflective and thought-provoking contributions.

I don’t intend to be offensive to you personally, but these types of classifications have been around for years and have done little to further educational progress.

All people are life-long learners. If we can’t observe and/or appreciate their knowledge, we still should accept that it exists. (yeah, I know, that’s a “scientific” debate for another day

I prefer to think about each person’s knowledge or wisdom base as a bounded, but limitless region. We are bounded by physicalities, but unlimited cognitively.

This is something that all of us have in common, no matter where we may be at present on the spectrum introduced. Changing our focus to connect may introduce some tension, but tension can be good…as long as it pulls us in the right direction…towards educational progress, equity, and mutual respect.

What this means for education is that what (and how) we tell teachers about these technologies may actually be a disincentive for many. Students, however, I think would be a better, more responsive audience.