Survival of the Fittest

"In the long history of humankind...those who learned to collaborate & improvise most effectively have prevailed" - Charles Darwin

I saw this post in my twitter feed tonight from @archivesinfo and could only think about the work that we do as teachers everyday to help students "prevail." Small group learning, "think, pair, share," and other ideas like that have been a part of teaching for a long time. We want our students to share the information that they have learned with each other and we want them to ask questions of each other to improve their own knowledge.

Now, however, more and more of us are asking out students to "improvise," to create things from nothing, and figure out how to donate to the greater culture around them. This has become a process of "cloud computing," tools like blogs, wikis, VoiceThread, timetoast, twitter, etc. are the ones that more often than not are the sites that host that improvisation.

I am proud to be helping those who will be the next to "prevail."