Glimpsing the Future

This morning Jami forwarded to me an email from AJ Juliani, an educator in Pennsylvania. I had come across AJ earlier, when I was researching the Genius Hour while writing Curiosity and the Genius Hour. Genius Hour is a concept that he has been instrumental in promoting.

This email from AJ linked back to his blog that he has been using to tell a larger story - one with an aspiration to empower teachers to unleash the creative curiosity of their students.

Very powerful stuff and very much aligned with the work that Jami has been doing in Dayton.

But I also received another email today, this one from Ward. It contained a single link to a fed wiki page.

On that page I found a test concept for building a collective "ideaspace" - a way in which individuals can share their creative ideation in a specific area. One that could be used within a classroom, school, or within an open community.

Ward and I have recently been exploring the concept of a collective Ideaspace - a powerful paradigm that was utilized by Alan Kay and others during the Camelot years of PARC - the ten years that laid the foundation of our creative economy.

Here is some initial pondering: Creating an Ideaspace

It is still a fragment of a solution, but it allows us to begin to imagine what a framework might look like for the collective telling and sharing of stories.

How are these two emails linked? Well, clearly AJ, a prolific and passionate writer that has many stories to share about this path, one that is unleashing the creative genius of students.

But, as these new paradigms of learning roll out into the mainstream, every teacher, and indeed, every student, will have their own stories of discovery, epiphanies rich with meaning, that guide and supercharge their learning journeys.

What if we were able to hear each of their stories and learn from all of them, not just the published few?

That is the promise that I glimpsed today. One that has the potential to be truly revolutionary.