If you needed an argument for banishing publishers from the field of educational assessment, here is the best one I've heard so far. Just to be clear, John Seely Brown doesn't talk about publishers at all; that's just my two cents. He talks about what we used to think was the way we should teach and learn, and what an evolving, networked world could learn from the one-room school house of old.  The 'classroom' not about content anymore; it's about risk taking, about learners tinkering with their learning, about a communal network of learners and teachers. 

Peggy's rant:
Here's the connection between this video and educational publishers, for me. Publishers can only insert themselves into education, instruction and assessment if they can fix the content and assessment tools. Publishers can only create (and make money from) assessment tools that allow them to crunch numbers, so test items must be statistically quantifiable; this doesn't mean they are valuable or informative to teachers and learners. Once a publisher takes over such things as defining standards, or assessing student performance, it's not about about teaching or learning anymore; it's about what works best within the circumscribed limitations of publishing media and expertise. Radical educators, dump your publishers! 

John Seely Brown's message:
At a digital learning conference, JSB proposes that, in a time when information and knowledge change constantly and nobody, even experts, agree on anything, learning is more about context, about play, about risk taking, about tinkering, about being learner entrepreneurs, and teaching is about coaching, being mentors who guide their students to some learning epiphany that will last that child's whole life. 

The present state of education is a bit depressing, with it's obsession with standards and assessments, but I think it's the last throes of a dying state. The future of learning is amazing! And this inspirational video is the most uplifting one I've watched in a long time. 
-Peggy Tharpe

I finally got a chance to watch the video post below by Teresa Almeida D'Eca, about the TedTalk video 'The Birth of a Word'. Thanks Teresa, for sharing it with us...it's remarkable. 
It has special implications for me because I'm a pronunciation teacher. I'm always interested in how speech and language develops in L1 and L2 (first languages and second languages). Dr. Roy is an MIT researcher who studied his child's first words and created 3-D "wordscapes" illustrating the connection between the evolution of his speech and his environment. Dr. Roy discovered there is a tight feedback loop and a kind of scaffolding that takes place just before his son formed each of his new words coherently. 
What does this mean for pronunciation teachers? Well, it matches what I've learned teaching student after student in one2one courses: Instruction works best when students are allowed to experiment making new sounds and get immediate feedback on their successes and failures. After all, how can they know if their sound is meaningful or not without feedback! And scaffolding breaks the goal down into smaller segments, so students can become aware of them, learn to recognize them, work on them, and control them, step by step. 
We have a lot to learn from babies! Scroll down to Teresa's post and watch this fascinating study and it's implications for how we communicate socially (and how we can improve pronunciation teaching).