Setting minds or cranial concrete

The weekly newsletter came in from school the other day. On the back was a little graph and a heading about windspeed. I thought, neat, kids have been looking at wind, etc. Well, it was true that they were doing all sorts of measurements but what was depicted in the graph was data taken from the bureau of meteorology of that week!!!!

The mindset that says that kids can only do pretend stuff, stuff that no one is really interested in, stuff that no one will pay attention to is so pervasive among teachers. What possesses a teacher to discard however many days of data gathering and defer to the "official" data, taken over 100 kilometers from the school?

The "other" world is rapidly appreciating that having lots of eyeballs, minds, data collections, can in fact work pretty well in terms of tackling the interesting challenges the world poses. Crowd sourcing as it is sometimes referred to is emerging as a sometime very useful and efficient means of tackling certain kinds of problems. The one thing that schools have is lots and lots of minds, eyeballs, folk to collect, observe, record. And for the most part, this resource is ignored and made to do dumb, pretend, patently stupid activities that benefit no-one.