Blogs and badges - the future of learning: Greg Nadeau at TEDxBeaconStreet

Over the next 20 years, learning will be profoundly transformed. Nadeau brings his personal and professional experiences to bear in describing the two simple concepts which will define learning in the future: (1) personal learning blogs and (2) lifelong learning badges.

I'd like to share with you all

an idea which I believe

will help shape the future
of personalized learning.

This is an idea that you and everyone

can put into action today, for free,

and will never be taken away.

I call it a "Lifelong Learning Blog".

In that, unlike other blogs,

the idea is not to build a large audience,

but to help young people learn.

To start is simple.

First, think of a kid or kids
who you love.

Next, set them up
with a Google account, or equivalent,

and help them set up their own blog.

If you think they're too young
to have their own Google account,

then they can just use yours.

Final set up step,

and this is the key:

be sure to set up
the email subscription widget,

and immediately enrol yourself

and at least 4 other adults
who also love that kid.

Now, if your family is like mine,

you share a secret weapon:

grandparents.

There's an obvious synergy

between older people
and younger people.

They provide what last year's
TED talk award winner, Sugata Mitra,

calls the "Granny Cloud",

a supportive nurturing presence
that motives kids to do more.

If your family is not like mine,

as more and more are not,

particularly in urban environments
like where I live,

then there may be just one parent,

and there may be technical
and language barriers,

but with almost all kids,

there is a team of adults
who cares about that kid

and wants to help.

It could be an after school provider,

or a social worker,

or a distant relative,

or a teacher.

So, it takes about 20 minutes

to set a kid up
with a lifelong learning blog.

And I have free step-by-step instructions

posted at a website:
blogsandbadges.com.

The next step is harder,

but where the fun begins.

With my younger son, Charlie,

it started like this:

"No, no, no, no, no!"

Charlie had seen first-hand
the impact of blogging

on his older brother, Max,

and he did not think that he was ready
for the responsibility.

Max had unenrolled
in 6th grade last year

to pursue personalized learning
for 6 months

in a "semester abroad in Geeklandia",

as we came to call it.

His experiences and blog,

"Postcards from Geeklandia",

helped show my wife and I,
both lifelong public educators,

the power of blogging
as a lifelong learning tool.

Unlike MOOCs and Khan Academy,

kids' blogging is fundamentally
about learning by doing.

Writing in a rich media form,
like a blog,

harvests 3 core characteristics
that kids need

to prepare them for the future.

Number 1: Communicating with
other human beings in writing

powerfully and creatively.

Number 2: Communicating
with computers and devices

technically and logically.

Number 3: Developing
independence and perseverance,

that engine in the brain
that motivates us

to interact with humans and computers

and to persist to completion.

I struggled a bit to figure out

how to explain what I'm talking about,

because this idea is both
exceedingly simple

and infinitely extensible.

Motivating kids to blog
can be as simple

as getting them to post
existing homework assignments

that they've already done.

Or, it could be writing a few sentences

as captions to pictures
from a recent family trip.

It could be 3 times a year,
or it could be near daily.

A little is good.

A lot is great.

Each post brings
a burst of encouragement,

from grandparents, parents
and special family friends.

Because I've subscribed
to my kids' blogs,

each post arrives in my inbox.

So even I'm so busy
to comment during the day,

I'm still much aware of their work,

and ready to talk with them

at dinner, or at breakfast.

The blogging platform is not dissimilar

to the Facebook platform,

but there is a crucial difference

between the Facebook peer culture

and the type of online culture created

when a kid blogs to their parents,

grandparents and special family friends.

By the time Max, Charlie
and the other kids I know

have graduated from high school

and go on to higher learning, or jobs,

they'll have assembled a rich,

hypertext indexed scrapbook of their work.

They'll be able to use it to reflect

on all they've accomplished
and all they've learnt,

and they'll be able
to create portfolios from it,

of their best work,

badges, certificates and diplomas.

Many kids go through a phrase

where they learn to love reading,

but they still hate writing.

Both take practise and are hard at first.

Unlike reading and speaking,

where we spend endless hours with kids,

practicing with them,

from the time of their birth,

writing gets scant attention,

and is mostly outsourced to the schools.

When you outsource writing
to the schools,

and I say this with
total respect to the teachers,

what happens is that kids do assignments

that go into the black box
for teacher feedback

and come back
some time later with red ink.

I say that figuratively to make a point,

but the math is simple.

My wife is a 7th grade humanities teacher

at a local public middle school.

I see her working every weekend,

grading papers
and giving feedback to kids.

In a typical elementary school,

there are roughly 20 kids in a class,

and so each kid gets roughly
1/20th of a teacher's attention.

If the kid has a learning blog,

with 5 adults following the blog,

the kid has 5 adults' attention,

100 times what kids typically get.

Now, I'm not saying

that a grandparent's comments on a blog

are the same as a teacher's
written feedback on a paper.

The time and timeliness
are very different.

Teachers are professionals,

paid to work with kids, full time.

But the rest of the adults
in a kid's "digital village"

may not have
the same skills as a teacher,

but they bring support, encouragement,

and a lifelong commitment,

that is essential in other ways.

In high school,

where teachers typically have 5 classes,

the improved ratio of blogging
goes to 500 to 1,

and that assumes
that only the 5 original adults

signed up for the blog.

This is a profound system improvement.

No other education initiative I'm aware of

offers the same return on investment
for time and money.

So, if you believe

that learning
is most effective when doing,

not passively receiving,

that writing powerfully and creatively

is an essential skill that all kids need,

and that the motivation to write
is profoundly influenced

by the feedback
from trusting, loving adults,

then you see the profound system
breakthrough that this offers.

Kids' blogging to a team of loving adults,

creates a 100-500 fold improvement,

in one of the key cycles of learning:

writing and reflecting with others.

This is exactly like reading to your kids.

Everyone here knows to do it.

To neglect it would be
to put your child in peril.

Writing is the same,

and there's something
free and simple that you can do

to improve this key variable
by several orders of magnitude.

So I ask you,

will you set up a lifelong
learning blog with a kid?

Please raise your hand or stand,

if you're ready
to put this idea into action.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)