Will Richardson - real work for real audiences(Schimbarea de paradigmă și reinventarea școlii)

A must read : Will Richardson’s book : Why School: How Education Must Change When Learning and Information Are Everywhere.

In the chapter, “Real Work for Real Audiences,” Richardson envisions students creating work that is relevant and useful in the world outside school:

”Don’t know about you, but as a parent, I’d much rather see this kind of work than the paper that comes home in the Friday Folder (or the Friday backpack). I’d rather know that my kids were creating something of meaning, value, and I hope, beauty for people other than just their teachers, and that those creations had the opportunity to live in the world. That they were thinking hard about audience. That they were learning how to network and collaborate with others.”

”I’m not even necessarily talking about doing something with technology. (Let’s face it, though: Paper is a 20th-century staple that has severely limited potential, compared to digital spaces.) There’s lots of creating our kids can do with traditional tools that can serve a real audience. Publishing books, putting on plays, and doing community service are just a few examples.”

”But what if we got a little crazy and added some technology into the mix? We could tell our kids, “You know, in addition to taking that test on the Vietnam War, we want you to go and interview some veterans, then collect those stories into a series of podcasts that people all over the world could listen to and learn from.”

Or, rather than having our students do that science lab write-up on the tadpoles in the pond behind their school, what if we rounded up a bunch of schools with ponds and tadpoles from all over the world, and then we all shared our data and observations with each other, analyzing how the differences in climate and geography affected native habitats? What if then published this global analysis online?

Or, instead of reading scenes from Romeo and Juliet to one another in the classroom, students could put on an interpretive performance, one we then broadcast through a password-protected live stream to parents and aunts and uncles and friends online, posting it also as a video on YouTube. Maybe we could even run a competition with other schools to see who could come up with the most profound or creative way of bringing the themes of Shakespeare into the modern world.”
(source:  http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2012/10/should-kids-schoolwork-impact-the-real-world/)