Why Cloud+Classroom will help:

Here is a point by point on how Cloud+Classroom will help

1. We are surrounded with new tools that are powerful, mobile, cheap, easy to learn, easy to use, and soon will be ubiquitous. (Jeff Howe)

Cloud+Classroom will bring these tools to students, assisting them in their primary education, as well as adults, because we never stop learning.

2. With these tools it is increasingly easy to learn, to contruct and express one's knowledge and insights, to exchange, to cooperate and collaborate, and to act collectively (Clay Shirky).
By using these tools together, we will learn what is missing, and what we need. Cloud+Classroom will be an open ear and advocate for its network. Also the power of collaboration needn't be explained to this crowd ^_^

3. Late teen and early adult years are cognitively peak years (Bob Epstein) and the young people are the primary users of the new tools (Kaiser Family Foundation and others). Cloud+Classroom will be the link between info and student, allowing them to learn and delve deep into their interests

4. All of the world's useful knowledge is already on-line or soon will be, and is readily acquired and mashed up for re-use by the new digital tools. This knowledge, circulating in open access formats, is better than the official knowledge because it is subject to rapid correction and augmentation (Judy Breck and others).
Cloud+Classroom is based around this concept, and combines it with the training of liscenced teachers and the energy of student leaders.

5. As a result teens and adults do not need schools and teachers, and in fact are infantilized and humiliated by their constraints (Epstein).

By intellectually freeing students with the empowerment of the Cloud+Classroom network and tools, they can more easily grasp their primary education, while also carrying on a purpose driven pursuit of their interests.

6. As a result the overwhelming percent of them hate their schools (Collins and Halverson).

By using Cloud+Classroom to distinguish the difference between school, and education and learning, students can begin to love education, and also begin to see the point, and hopefully be more engaged in their schooling.

7. At the same time all sorts of outside the system innovation is being generated by educational entrepreneurs, such as Live Mocha.(Curt Bonk).

Cloud+Classroom will operate in a thriving educational market

8. Meanwhile college diplomas are increasingly worthless as links to advantageous jobs, unless they come from elite colleges -- it is the elite college link, not the diploma, that pays. And elite colleges are pricing the middle class out (as Kramanatz said this evening -- though this is hardly fresh news).

Employers are starting to realize that the human resource produced by the school system is not the tool for the job. By supplimenting and supporting a students education, Cloud+Classroom will have many positive affects, such as: creating a network of employers and employees around the globe, giving students a community to support their endeavors, offering tangible training for in demand skills like conversational Chinese, or English.

9. Larry Cuban is probably right that the schools have great internal capacity to adjust without changing in very fundamental ways -- they'll continue to be age-graded egg-crated curricularized test-oriented factories as long as they can. I might agree with Cuban not to expect much change from within.

Can we afford to let another generation pass by without the ability or desire to solve the world's problems? How long will we be around if we dont create an atmosphere of collaboration, and use it to work together for the greater good. Stephen Hawkings says that we dont see any aliens flying around, or hear and radio from outer space, because civilizations usually kill themselves off. Do we want to be other casualty of ignorance?

*questions by Leonard Waks*