I will Prepare and some day my chance will come

These are the words by Abraham Lincoln. I believe now that this quote is more about the preparation than it is about the chance.  What compels us to keep going in spite of obstacles that make taking each step that much more difficult? At some point we must start to believe that the right things will happen.Such is the case with educational research.

The problem at hand is fairly simple and straight forward. How do we educate our children to confidently face 21st century challenges? To answer this question, thought processes that brought us so far may not work. The reason being that knowledge that once was very difficult to access is now almost freely available. Not only that, it can now be studied, analyzed, discussed, dissected and represented in a different form rather easily. Of course, can also be misrepresented, falsified, disproved and written off without making any real case.

Unfortunately, a considerable amount of research today is a result of seeking incremental improvements of the status quo, as long as some statistical significance is achieved. What we probably need are some radical thinkers not afraid to put forward interesting theories of learning and instruction of the future and pilot them. We could perhaps use crowdsourcing to identify and encourage these thoughts.

I am pondering these things and more as I browse through the conference catalog waiting for some colleagues to arrive on a cold, dull rainy day here at Louisville, KY. This is the view from where I am sitting. Come tomorrow, this space will fill up with some of the best educators and educational researchers in the country.