Supercool School

Supercool principal & his crew iFly to the next level

Last weekend we celebrated that our supercool principal got one year wiser! As you can see it was great fun even though some weren't too optimistic beforehand...

Assessment for Understanding

As you know @ Supercool School we emphasize social learning instead of competitive test-preparation. Our approach will focus on validating understanding while building up a reputation through teaching a class on supercool school.

We are currently working on our learning assessment methodology, and the work of the folks of Edutopia (George Lucas' Educational Foundation) stuck out as particularly supportive of our thinking. The video below sums up the arguments pretty well:   

Supercool learning = to inquire and to create

I just finished Chomsky's essay "Toward a humanistic conception of education", which also nicely elaborates on themes evoked in the Supercool Educational Philosophy.  Chomsky's main concern is that "the purpose of education must be to permit the growing principle of to take its own individual course and to facilitate this process by sympathy, encouragement, and challenge...". This stands in stark contrast to the dominating utilitaristic view of education "On this conception of human nature the goal of education should be to train children and provide them with the skills and habits that will fit them in an optimal way for the productive mechanism, which is meaningless in itself from a human point of view, but necessary to provide them with the opportunity to exercise their freedom as consumers, a freedom that can be enjoyed in the hours when they are free from the onerous burden of labor".

He then develops the argument that learning and even work are immanent motivations; or as Wilhelm von Humboldt put it "to inquire and to create - these are the centers around which all human pursuits more or less directly revolve" (von Humboldt, 1969).

Even more to the point of learning to be: "Whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness" (ibid). In this case we may "admire what he does, but despise what he is".

So the BIG question is how to encourage people to choose learning rather than to consume entertainment? Von Humboldt believes that "...all peasants and craftsmen might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labor for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures.(ibid)"

In other words the Enlightenment project - to awake people from their “self-incurred tutelage" (Kant)- is still very current and indeed necessary. The demand driven social learning marketplace setup by Supercool School is but one attempt to provide technology which allows "to free people from the role of tools of production in the industrial process It provides the possibility, perhaps for the first time in modern history, to free human beings from the activities that, as Adam Smith pointed out, turn them into imbeciles through the burden of specialized labor" (Chomsky).

So while we of course allow the participants of the marketplace to determine what is learned on Supercool School, there can be no doubt that supercool learning is promoting an entrepreneurial mindset (and knowledge entrepreneurship in particular) and therefore a conscious choice of shaping the learners being.

von Humboldt (1969) The limits of state action, ed. J.W. Burrow, Cambridge University Press

Dr. Max Senges, Supercool Hausmeister

Supercool School will set minds on fire

Eminent knowledge entrepreneur John Seely Brown (a.k.a. Chief of Confusion) published a great paper entitled "Minds on Fire", which not only outlines "the perfect storm of opportunity" supercool school is playing in, he also nails down our ventures leitmotiv - social learning / learning to be [free].

Here are some of the key points of his paper:

"As we move from career to career, much of what we will need to know will not be what we learned in school decades earlier. We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis."

He continues to state that society is facing a real challenge to develop the institutions and the methodology to meet this growing global demand for education. Of course this is exactly the challenge we @ Supercool School believe we are developing a solution for.

Next he elaborates on his understanding of social learning. His argument here is that, as we have to learn new stuff all the time, "the focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning". He refers to research which showed that "students who studied in groups, even only once a week, were more engaged in their studies, were better prepared for class, and learned significantly more than students who worked on their own". In his view study groups are so effective, because "students in these groups can ask questions to clarify areas of uncertainty or confusion, can improve their grasp of the material by hearing the answers to questions from fellow students, and perhaps most powerfully, can take on the role of teacher to help other group members benefit from their understanding" and here it comes "one of the best ways to learn something is, after all, to teach it to others".

While he commends social learning as a superior method for learning, there is - and we couldn't agree more - another effect of learning in groups: One is not only "'learning about' the subject matter, but also 'learning to be' a full participant in the field". This reminds me of Sartre's existentialist thinking along the lines of "if you want to be a writer you need to write, if you want to be a politician you need to debate, lobby and engage in politics"; and what better way is there to start to become an expert in X than to take that role within a group of peers?

In the next two sections of the paper he supports his assessments with a number of real world examples and introduces some interesting toughts about the long tail in learning (something that Supercool School should/will strategically exploit as well).

      

He then turns to describe his analysis of the learning ecosystem as a circle of knowledge building and sharing (see pic), an approach that we also foresee to support within the supercool learning environment. It is however his last point "from the web 2.0 to learning 2.0" where he (implicitly of course)  describes supercool school: "We now need a new approach to learning - one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up in an inventory of knowledge in students heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on 'learning to be' through enculturation into practice as well as on collateral learning"

Supercool Philosophy - Learning to be Free

When I joined supercool school i was really inspired and won over by Steli's "7 Lessons You Learned @ School That Could Possibly Ruin Your Life", so I couldn't hold back and  now i published my thoughts on our Supercool Educational Philosophy.

I am still in the process of un-learning the useless academic formalities i had to conform to when doing my phd, while continuing to delve deeper into philosophical insight. So please be prepared for some hegelian big picture thinking! Also you are all invited to help make this manifesto as readable as possible!

The full paper has 20 pages and i also distilled a short version (3 pages)

Dr. Max Senges, Supercool Hausmeister

If you want to look Supercool

If you want to look Supercool, you now have to chance to obtain an official Supercool School t-shirt!

But it doesnt stop there. If you feel creative please don't hold back: We invite everybody to come up with other Supercool T-shirt designs! We'll happily add them to our spreadshirt site.

PS: if you need the supercool logo or just want to touch base with us regarding your designs, please write to max@supercoolschool.com

3 Minute How To Video About Supercool School

This is the new 3 minute screencast about our Supercool School App. Expect a new and improved version this . Thanks again to Max "The Voice" Senges for recording it. It's tough because we change so much these days that we need a new screencast almost weekly ;) So stay tuned for more to come!

“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens” Jimi Hendrix

Listen.