Most people conceive of K-12 and college as a classroom experience. Students sit in neat, geometrically aligned rows facing the ultimate source of knowledge: the teacher / professor. The learning is structured and has a start time and an end time. Let's look at some not so atypical schedules: a) K-12 student time in a classroom: 07:30 - 14:30 / 08:30 - 15:30 = 6 to 7 hours of classroom for 30 - 43 hours per week. b) Typical 15 hour semester (5 3 hour courses) college curriculum: 15 hours per week in the classroom. c) Summers off d) Homework time in the evenings, play time on the weekendse) 86 Instructional days per semester. f) Yields around 1032 hours per year for K-12 where my kids go to school This leaves 1032 of 8736 hours filled. Meals and sleeping occupy just north of 3000 hours per year, and it still leaves over 4700 hours per year of unoccupied time. Does learning STOP during this time? These traditional structures, geared around pre-industrial agricultural calendars, move students through systems which certify certain learning outcomes and general convey a certificate of some form at the end of the cycle. The goal is generally to certify these students to the marketplace. These schedules were born of an era before YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and vast choice in entertainment and news choices. Up until the 1980s, people even still only had 3 television networks and major news print for sources of information and entertainment. Now, these sources are democratized and unlimited. Today, everyone can be a teacher and a learner. Even the professional teachers are going live on the Internet. I reference video learning on Google. Berkeley and Google team up to deliver many interesting and full length courses to anyone on the Internet. I posit that these sorts of inch forward movements are really precursors to amazing leaps forward in the way new generations of learners acquire new knowledge.
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