AI is hot today. Almost everyone is talking about AI with all sorts of suggestions, advice, comments, and emotions. The majority of the conversations are about how to integrate AI in traditional classrooms. But given the history of educational technology, it is unlikely that AI can do much in the traditional classroom that aims to teach students the same prescribed curriculum and pass traditional exams. For AI to realize its potential, we have to reimagine education.
Artificial Intelligence and Education: End the Grammar of Schooling is an article I wrote and published …

About five years ago, all schools embraced the idea of global competence. Governments wanted their students to be globally competent; organizations such as the Asia Society led the development of the content of global competences, and international tests such the PISA even administered an assessment of global competence of 15 years old students in different countries in 2018.  International study tours, global exchange of students and teachers online and offline, joint global projects in teaching and research, as well as publications and conferences on global competence were all on the …

Learning for Uncertainty: Teaching Students How to Thrive in a Rapidly Evolving World 
By G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Taylor and Francis on Jan 31 2022
Introduction
How do we prepare our children for a world that is yet to be made? This is the question we want to know and we try to explore in this book.
As we write this, educators across the globe are struggling to educate students amidst a world-wide pandemic.  Many are being stretched to adopt and use unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies.  For their part, most students, …

My latest book Learners without Borders: New Learning Pathways for All Students is published by Corwin in July 2021. Below is Chapter One.

It may surprise you to learn that teenagers in Nepal are using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to learn English and Egyptian, study dinosaurs, and take high-level STEM courses. On Episode 33 of Silver Linings for Learning, a weekly show about educational innovations during COVID-19, we had five Nepalese students and two teachers as guests. They told an unexpected story of learning beyond their schools. Nepal, a very small country largely …

“Better-paid, better-educated workers face the most exposure” to AI, concludes a  recent report about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on jobs in the future. This conclusion should make us question the widely held belief that our children should get more education. More education is never a bad idea and has long been believed to lead to better lives, more income, for example, as illustrated in the diagram below.

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html
Historical data suggest that the premium of education has increased over the years. The payoff of more education has grown significantly from the 1960s …

Never Send a Human to do a Machine’s Job: Top 5 Mistakes in Ed Tech[1]
First published in the Answer Sheet of Washington Post on October 6 2015
A few weeks ago, the OECD released a report[2] that essentially says investing in technology does not lead to better education outcomes, measured by PISA scores. The study finds “no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in ICT for education. And perhaps the most disappointing finding of the report is that technology is …

Originally published in China-US Focus on October 23, 2015. Adapted from my book Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World.
China’s capacity for innovation has become a hot topic for China, the U.S., and the rest of the world today. There is no question that China must innovate its way out of the “middle income trap.” But whether the country – which over the last thirty years has proven to be able to make everything – can create anything …

Last year when my son graduated from college, I asked the question “can you stay out of my basement?” as I believe an important outcome of education is the ability to live out of one’s parent’s basement, that is, the ability to be an independent and contributing member of a society.
The Common Core and most education reforms around the world define the outcome of schooling as readiness for college and career readiness. But as recent statistics suggest, college-readiness, even college-graduation-readiness, does not lead to out-basement-readiness. Over 50% of recent college …

If you are reading this, you know the world didn’t end in 2012. But the world of American education may end in 2014, when the Common Core is scheduled to march into thousands of schools in the United States and end a “chaotic, fragmented, unequal, obsolete, and failing” system that has accompanied the rise of a nation with the largest economy, most scientific discoveries and technological inventions, best universities, and largest collection of Nobel laureates in the world today. In place will be a new world of education where all …

Today’s young people (8 to 18 year olds) spend on average 7 hours and 38 minutes a day with media: watching TV (TV, videos, DVDs, pre-recorded shows), playing video games, listening to music, talking on the phone, and chatting with friends online, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation report Generation-M2: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds released on January 20, 2010. This is an hour more than the group found in 2004, when young people were found to spend nearly 6 and half hours a day on entertainment media. …