I’m 59 and delighted to be actively learning new things every day. Everyone in my family own an iPad. I gave two of them as Christmas presents this year. The other two were purchased earlier in the year. I own a MacBook Pro and each of our children own MacBooks. Our daughter, daughter-in-law and I have iPhones. My son has a Blackberry and my wife a feature phone. I think it’s safe to say that we are tech savvy. Four of the five of us earn our living as teachers. Our daughter is beginning to use Edmodo. I use Moodle. Four of us use Twitter. We are all Facebookers. We all have read ebooks. We all have bachelors degrees and four of us hold masters degrees. We’re educated in other words and the one masters free member of the family holds the equivalent of a masters in sales. We are well read and much of our content comes from the Internet.

I mention this not to brag but to invite a conversation about learning and what it means to be educated in the 21st century. An amazing amount of lip service is paid to 21st century skills but how much or how many of those skills are actually measured in today’s schools. It has been nearly thirty-five years since Jobs and Wozniak introduced the Apple II. It has been nearly twenty years since the graphical Internet made its way into our lives. Yet, most schools continue to operate as if we were still living in 1975. Up to this point in most of our lives technology in education has been made to fit education as it existed rather than education being forced to re-fit itself to technology and a society that has been dramatically transformed by the ubiquitous presence of technology.

It all reminds me a bit of the scene in Borat where a horse is pulling an automobile around the village as if the automobile required an external power source. What will it take to change the dynamic? How can we re-tool education to fit technology rather than the other way around?