This video resonated with me. It is quite scary how art and music are being neglected in our schools.  

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.  

Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance. Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006.

Kudos to a brave individual who stood up for her belief. Unfortunately Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student, lost her job because she chooses to be non-violent. Read this story from SF Chronicle:

California State University East Bay has fired a math teacher after six weeks on the job because she inserted the word “nonviolently” in her state-required Oath of Allegiance form.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student who began teaching remedial math to undergrads Jan. 7, lost her $700-a-month part-time job after refusing to sign an 87-word Oath of Allegiance to the Constitution that the state requires of elected officials and public employees.

“I don’t think it was fair at all,” said Kearney-Brown. “All they care about is my name on an unaltered loyalty oath. They don’t care if I meant it, and it didn’t seem connected to the spirit of the oath. Nothing else mattered. My teaching didn’t matter. Nothing.”

A veteran public school math teacher who specializes in helping struggling students, Kearney-Brown, 50, had signed the oath before – but had modified it each time.

She signed the oath 15 years ago, when she taught eighth-grade math in Sonoma. And she signed it again when she began a 12-year stint in Vallejo high schools.

Each time, when asked to “swear (or affirm)” that she would “support and defend” the U.S. and state Constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Kearney-Brown inserted revisions: She wrote “nonviolently” in front of the word “support,” crossed out “swear,” and circled “affirm.” All were to conform with her Quaker beliefs, she said.

The school districts always accepted her modifications, Kearney-Brown said. But Cal State East Bay wouldn’t, and she was fired on Thursday.

Modifying the oath “is very clearly not permissible,” the university’s attorney, Eunice Chan, said, citing various laws. “It’s an unfortunate situation. If she’d just signed the oath, the campus would have been more than willing to continue her employment.”

Modifying oaths is open to different legal interpretations. Without commenting on the specific situation, a spokesman for state Attorney General Jerry Brown said that “as a general matter, oaths may be modified to conform with individual values.” For example, court oaths may be modified so that atheists don’t have to refer to a deity, said spokesman Gareth Lacy.

Kearney-Brown said she could not sign an oath that, to her, suggested she was agreeing to take up arms in defense of the country.

Click here to read the rest.

My dear friend and fellow HMBer, Lisa Petrides is the president of ISKME and her company just won a prestigious award from the Tech Museum. Below is info from their press release. Congrats Lisa!!

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME), a leader in education research and innovation, was today named one of five innovators from around the world to be honored for achievement in education by this year’s Tech Museum Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity. Sponsored by The Tech Museum of Innovation and presented by Applied Materials, Inc., the Awards honor organizations that are applying technology to benefit humanity and spark global change. ISKME was selected from hundreds of nominations sent from 68 countries.

ISKME received this honor for its leadership in developing OER Commons (www.oercommons.org), a teaching and learning network that expands educational opportunities for all by increasing access to high-quality, freely available educational materials online. OER Commons is the first comprehensive network that aggregates free teaching and learning resources from around the globe and enables teachers and students to add their own ratings, reviews, and strategies to the materials.

“There’s a quiet revolution about how educational materials are developed, shared, accessed and improved, and OER Commons is helping to lead this transformation,” said Lisa Petrides, president of ISKME. “We appreciate this recognition of our work, and we will continue to use research in innovative, practical ways to impact classrooms, educational systems, and learning worldwide.”

“The Tech Awards are an incredible honor, recognizing individuals and organizations whose vision and execution are changing the world,” said Mark Milliron, board chair of ISKME. ”What’s truly exciting about OER Commons is the door it opens to the future, where the resources of education and knowledge are more freely available to all.”

OER Commons (www.oercommons.org) has brought together over 15,000 high-quality educational resources available for anyone to use. The site has over 3,000 registered users, averages about 40,000 visits a month during the school year, and has visitors from 193 countries.

By aggregating resources from around the globe, OER Commons makes it possible to find educational materials quickly. OER Commons adds social networking features to the resources, which allows teachers, students, and others to tag, rate, review the materials. In the process, OER Commons is helping to transform how K-12 teachers and college faculty view their roles in collaborating around the development and improvement of educational materials from kindergarten through college.

“Open source technologies and social networking transformed the music industry by making it easy for users to download, share, remix, and reuse music,” said Amee Godwin, director of OER Commons. “Can faculty, teachers, students, and others collaborate to share, remix, translate, and improve curriculum, lesson plans, and assignments? It’s already happening at OER Commons. Teachers are energized when they find they can download resources for free, modify them to meet their students’ needs, and write reviews and comments about what works best—so other teachers can benefit from their expertise.”

About the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME)

ISKME is an independent, nonprofit research institute that helps schools, colleges, universities, and the organizations that support them expand their capacity to collect and share information, apply it to well-defined problems, and create human-centered, knowledge-driven environments focused on learning and success. ISKME achieves this goal by conducting social science research and evaluation, developing research-based tools and innovations, and facilitating knowledge sharing and field building.

About The Tech Museum Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity

The Tech Museum Awards: Technology Benefiting Humanity, presented by Applied Materials, Inc., is one of the premier annual humanitarian awards programs in the world, recognizing and supporting innovations that benefit humanity and address some of the most critical issues facing our planet and its people. Established in 2001, The Tech Museum Awards recognize 25 Laureates in five categories: Education, Equality, Environment, Economic Development and Health. Laureates are selected by a prestigious, independent panel of international judges organized by the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University, and made up of Santa Clara University faculty as well as leaders from educational and research institutions, industry and the public sector around the world. The 25 Laureates will be showcased at The Tech in San Jose and featured on The Tech Award’s official Web site, www.techawards.org. One Laureate in each category will receive a $50,000 cash prize, announced during the annual Awards Gala, which takes place this year on November 7^th.