Museums were one of the great inventions of the 19th century. People loved collecting, collecting all sorts, and often funded buildings to display those collections for others to enjoy and admire. The museum craze ran from animals to furniture, stamps to tools, swords to seeds, fossils to bottle caps, rocks to coins, baseball cards to cars. Museums graced big cities and barns were stopping places in many small towns. This collecting craze was more than just putting things into glass cases, it made names and naming conventions, classification, and classification systems critical intellectual activities. Collecting and collections were the central learning activity in schools.

I have in my house one of those school exemplars, a wonderful small antique 19th century cabinet with drawers filled with collections for classroom learning. It has a drawer for products of corn, another for cotton, for flax, fiber, and more. This iconic cabinet was built to grace a 19th century school classroom in Philadelphia and for us as a visual representation and definition of 19th century schooling. It continues to represent the essential nature of schooling today. We still view our students as collectors, filling their mental drawers with labelled mental things. We think of our students as museums, filling up empty cases, collecting the facts and ideas they will need as adults. We have them collect by practicing words, algorithms, science concepts and formulas, history dates and people. We plaster classroom walls with these collections, the Periodic Table, lists of formulas, images of geometric shapes, words of the day, or timelines of history. School for most of our students is the place to fill their personal mental museum, to become good collectors, and to use these collections in their work.

Our Digital Age today is no longer about making collections. It is nearly always about making connections. There is no longer a need to memorize most information when we can instantly look it up. It is indeed impossible to even collect a tiny portion of the data we receive each day. We don’t use the Web to make collections, we use it to make connections. That is what we do when we search, when we link, when we post, and when we social network. Of course, the Web is a rich treasure chest of collections, its great innovation and great power is in making connections. Good sites are full of links, well-structured spreadsheets are rich in links, and coding is in essence linking. Search engines and search engine optimization count links. Links both to physical sites and to people are central to the Web and to the Web economy.

If our schools are to prepare students for their work in their future then we must learn to make connections and not collections. They must learn to search for links and make new ones, to use links and explore them, to appreciate links and select valuable ones. They must use links to become problem solvers with “flow charts.” Our new Explorations projects are focused on connections building and using links. Rich in links and problem solving experiences using links, they help students develop the connecting skills so critical for the digital age. We share Explorations with you and invite you to explore them. They are free and require no sign in. We look forward to your links.

Recently, in a history of physics magazine, I came across this picture and a short story on Harvard Project Physics, and I thought about the effect that this project, and these three people in particular, have had on my view of education. We all have mentors and I have the great good fortune to have had some wonderful ones. Fletcher Watson, Gerald Holton, and Jim Rutherford, in the physics project/curriculum they created, vectored me to think first about physics education and then all education as a human enterprise full of fascinating stories, real people, living concepts, and the history of ideas.

Their Harvard Project Physics program brought me to Fort Lauderdale to teach it’s beta version at Nova High School for two years, meet my wife Betty, then go to Cambridge to write a lab manual for some of its electronic equipment which turned into a stint making educational films and from there to teaching and developing a math curriculum with the same goals and objectives. It’s humanistic vision has underpinned all of my efforts to reenvision and redesign education in each of my entrepreneurial enterprises.

Today, I am working with some new mentors on a new, next generation, project to bring this same fundamental philosophy and pedagogy to learning in the digital age. I am as excited about this as I was about teaching Harvard Project Physics so long ago, and to bringing a new vision of online learning to all of our kids. Our Challenges Project follows on the work Peter, Ryan and I developed in What if Math and that is described in detail in my new book Make it Real, and the Grand Challenges work that Larry Myatt has brought to us. You can follow our progress here or send me an email if you want to join us to rethink education for our digital age.

Our education model is broken.

Despite the economic promise of and documented need for a bachelor’s degree: graduation rates are stagnant, achievement gaps are widening, and costs are bankrupting our kids. While Digital-technology has transformed work, our schools retain their 19th century form and function defined by medieval paper-technology. The problems confronting our schools are caused by this new technology and requires it to solve them.

Despite my long career as a STEM educator and digital learning entrepreneur, I only very recently discovered the unique role technology plays in not just how we learn but in what we learn. I found it in the table of contents of a math book written in the year 1202. This has reshaped my work and will reinvent education. In my new book Make it Real, I tell the story of building a new foundation for learning math on spreadsheets, asking “What would math education look like if it were reinvented for the 21st century.” In its 6 chapters you will learn to use the content and digital tools of the Web to reimagine and redesign schools for the digital age.

1.  “Lord Knows it Needs Something”
The role of technology in both what and how we learn
2. The Aims of Education
The need for a college degree for a thriving middle class
3.  Make Room for the Future
Subtracting paper-age skills and adding digital-age skills
4.  The Idea that Changed the World
Functions and functional thinking for problem solving
5.  Learning Math as an Experimental Science
Lessons for learning math using spreadsheets
6.  What if…
Revolutionizing education by making it real and Open-Web

You will learn about the power of technology to transform, to make people more effective, efficient, and relevant learners. You will learn how Open-Web schools will reinvent education, turn teachers into students and students into teachers, integrate disciplines, and use the business world to redesign schools, redefine intelligence, and reevaluate progress. And you will learn how digital learning can prepare our kids for their future, not our past, and enable us to set an audacious goal: Double the number of college degrees at half the cost within the next decade.

Walt Hunter was a quiet man, slight and balding with a Great Plains accent. You might mark him as a teacher, but likely not the dynamic personality with a certain brashness that you would think of as a “favorite” teacher. He did not convince me to change my major from physics to chemistry even though he made me his chemistry lab assistant and spent untold hours talking with me about chemistry and teaching in his small office off my high school Chem lab. He did not convince me even though I learned to blow glass and enough chemistry to place out of two quarters of the first course at the University of Chicago. He did convince me to become a teacher.

I came across his name recently while searching my house for old letters, pictures, and documents. He had sent me a letter, while I was then a new teacher at our old high school, inviting me to come to Missouri to see him at Meramec Community College where he had become a dean of instruction. I never went. Instead I headed to Fort Lauderdale to stay in high school teaching and to my great good fortune to meet the woman who I would spend most of my life with.

So as our digital world calls us to do, I looked him up and found an article he published in 1971 called Self-Directed Learning at Meramec Community College. It was a short report on a program he had initiated. It was written in his plain style and tells an amazing story, for this program he developed some 50 years ago reverberates in our time. He argues for Universal Higher Education and for a system of education under the heading Modern Challenge in which:

“…college departments need to develop more learning modes, leading to individualized achievement of well defined objectives. Thus, the student can, with guidance, select objectives which are appropriate to his needs and learning modes which fit his learning style.”

He calls for “A New Kind of College”

“a college based on a new philosophy of student learning and achievement.” “…colleges will be able to make significant gains in the efficient and effective utilization of available talents, spaces and facilities. Students would be freed to pursue learning individually via the most appropriate pathway…colleges would become learning centers…”

You can see why I now think him my favorite teacher. Teach as he taught. I learned so much from him including the vision of learning as a laboratory science. I wonder what he would have imagined if he had the technology we have today. I wish I could tell him that his student is continuing to carry on his mission.