ABSTRACT

Thirty years of spirited school reforms have failed to improve our schools and instead have left our public school systems in disarray. Meanwhile, employment prospects for high school and college graduates are fading, and the public is losing faith in its schools. The education paradigm inherited from the Industrial Era is in crisis. In the last decade, however, the Internet and new Web 2.0 technologies have placed the entirety of human knowledge in the hands of everyone. What will our educational institutions make of this unprecedented flood of Web-based learning resources? How can schools be transformed to accommodate the new possibilities for personal and social learning? Leonard Waks gathers all the pieces of our current educational puzzle together in this groundbreaking book. Drawing on new organizational models grounded in complexity theory, Waks maps out an inspiring new paradigm for education in the Internet age, and connects all the dots in constructing detailed models for new schools-now transformed into "open learning centers." Finally, Waks details action steps readers can take to speed this transformative process along in their own locations.

part |65 pages

Schooling—The Industrial Paradigm

chapter |9 pages

Young People

chapter |22 pages

Education and Change

chapter |9 pages

High Schools

chapter |11 pages

School Failure I

Academic Underperformance and Administrative Inefficiency

chapter |13 pages

School Failure II

Social Irrelevance and the Loss of Political Legitimacy

part |61 pages

Learning Networks

chapter |16 pages

Web 2.0 and the Net Culture

chapter |18 pages

The Learningweb

chapter |16 pages

The Web in the School

part |66 pages

Education 2.0: A Network Paradigm for Education

chapter |17 pages

New Educational Visions

chapter |12 pages

Complex Organizations

chapter |23 pages

Open Learning Centers

chapter |13 pages

The Clash of Paradigms

part |29 pages

Educational Revolution

chapter |16 pages

The Learningweb Revolution

chapter |12 pages

What Needs to Be Done?