I guess the ranting tech-part of me felt obligated to point to this. I’m leaving it at that … for now. I am thinking through current acceptable use policies at school and their implications; this will be the final brick that will need to fall before pedagogy can be addressed.

And this is pretty much a solid read for any writer. A Visit From the Goon Squad is one of the best books I’ve read this year (the Pulitzer folks got this one right).  The much-discussed “Powerpoint“ chapter is touching (and probably one of the few palatable uses of the clunky program). And this quote’s resonance on teaching implications is profound:

The desire to become a writer struck suddenly and without warning when she was a teenage backpacker in the early 1980s, traipsing across Europe, lonely and depressed, missing her family. This was the era of queuing for the public phone box: “There was a kind of intensity to the isolation of travel at that time that’s completely gone now. You had to wait in line at a phone place, and then there weren’t even answering machines. That feeling of waiting in line, paying for the phone and then not only having no one answer, but not being able to leave a message so that they would never know you called. It’s hard to fathom what that disconnection felt like. But I’m actually very grateful for it. Because it was extreme. And that kind of extreme isolation showed me that I wanted to be a writer.” [Hat tip to Ms. Hopper for pointing me toward both quote and profile.]

The human sense of isolation, loneliness, and disconnection as ascetic transformation is instantly recognizable and the kinds of feelings we strive (understandably) to avoid within formal learning spaces. However, apprenticeship/internship spaces to nurture, support and cultivate growth and occasional discomfort could be a useful area to think through educational reform.