Wow. Project Dream School kicked off and it was truly amazing having that many beautiful minds available to think along. We met at a beautiful place, De Havixhorst chateauhotel and restaurant located on the countryside of Meppel. And it the weather was just perfect, the most beautiful day of the year so far.

Project Dream School starts with a simple question: If you could build a dream school, what would you do? Furthermore: What would the building look like? The methods? The teachers? Technology? The mission? …does it need to be a school, or should it be a bootcamp for designing futures… life… the perfect job? So yesterday these minds assembled to discuss just this… and how to make it happen. It was beautiful and the start of something. Something great, with next to John Moravec, Jeff Jarvis and Sir Ken Robinson via Skype, 22 passionate people joining the kick-off of this project.

I asked Roel to perform the role of moderator for the gathering. After he welcome everyone and everyone introduced him-/herself, I shared why we were there. Peter shared the current state of the schools together with what he dreams about. That’s so great about him, he is really brave in doing things different, to change for the better. A highly complicated task as we found out during the gathering. Roel simplified our task into a simple question: What does Peter need to think about when he wants to reach this goal of creating a dream school? That same question we also asked to our international participants. Because this project is NOT about dreaming about the ideal of perfect school. It’s about thinking, acting and creating the circumstances, means, tools, and everything else we still need to find out to actually create a dream school — to make it happen. And we do not have to much time to create the right point of departure, listening to Peter’s story. We have one year, and the clock is already ticking. Why? The new school, the building needs to be realized before 2014. So everything we come up with after coming year, might be too late to incorporate into the plans or can make realization more expensive.

At 5.30 PM we called Ken Robinson who was in Toronto. We virtually met him in his hotel room. Magical that technology enables the opportunity to talks with people you admire everywhere. Pitty though we couldn’t share the great food we had :). Ken was just great. If you look up great storyteller and inspiration in the dictionary, you will find his name. Amazing. Ken really took the time for us and we even co-created a new form of conferencing along the way: conferenceroulette. He told about the beauty of technology enabling gatherings as we had, giving him the opportunity to disconnect at any time if he didn’t like a question. I think it should be the next format next to conferences, unconferences, etc. He shared a lot of examples, from architecture to insights that really helped in our thinking. We invited him to open the school at the end of 2013, he offered to stay om board in the process. Couldn’t be any better.

After Ken, John Moravec joined us live from his basement in Minneapolis. This is what he shared:
The organization abandons the word “school” — in reinventing education, it becomes a bootcamp for design where youth and collaborating community members apply their creativity toward innovative applications.

The traditional classroom is abandoned in favor of space that favors multidirectional collaboration. Moreover, building that houses the organization is designed to be more than just a box. Rather, it is designed to be easily transformed and reconfigured as quickly as our ideas regarding teaching and learning evolve and transform.

An infrastructure is created to support technologies, but the technologies themselves are not deeply embeded (because they will likely change by the time they’re institutionalized). Students are responsible for bringing in and supporting their own technology, perhaps by providing them with a technology grant/budget. (Update: Kraft Foods is trying out this approach.)

The school is not just a tool for youth, but is a resource for the entire community it serves: Provides co-working and incubator resources for people with ideas that want to involve youth, and facilitates innovative, non-formal, informal and “invisible” learning opportunities.

A new breed of teacher/facilitators are trained and recruited to do away with download-style pedagogy, and rather serve as curators of ideas and enablers of creativity and innovation.

That’s John’s dream… which is like he says easier said than done. But, it is what it is: A dream.

While John shared his thoughts, we had dinner. And then we split up into two separate groups into the beautiful garden to generate ideas on how to help Peter. After an hour of sharing thoughts, ideas and insights, I tried to locate Jeff Jarvis. He was rushing up from downtown New York to Times Square at 01.30 PM NYC time and was a bit nervous about being exactly on time. But he was. While the rest of the group was still discussing the first results, I got Jeff up to speed on the status so far. When the group was back, Jeff shared his thoughts, also linking back to hid TED talk:



After Jeff, we focussed on the big How. Having ideas is great, but how can we make them come true? How can we help Peter? How can we create this dream school? Everyone had his own thoughts on this. Sharing ideas is easy. Now actually having the opportunity makes things more complicated. Because we have to choose and have to do. And there’s so much to think about. We just need to start.

I look back to a great day. The day itself is already that you can do things differently. In itself it was already a small ‘distributed Oxford’ as Jeff puts it. We had three of the best people joining us through technology to share their story. We had 22 passionate people, all having their own contribution to this day. We do not have the answers yet. We will quite likely never have them. And that’s fine. No situation is the same, no context. So enough ground to make this local project into something bigger. To learn from everyone en everywhere and share what we learn along the way in our quest to a dream school.

The project will have a website up-and-running soon at projectdreamschool.org, and also in Dutch at: projectdroomschool.org. Dutch to stay local and make sure everyone can follow it, English to be open for the entire world. Project Dream School is not about designing or developing something from scratch. It can be, but its also about learning, identifying great existing initiatives, ideas, methods, etc. and how to copy > morph them in to tangible results.

Writings
Report on the day by Fons van den Berg (Dutch)
Report on the day by Bart Hoekstra
Post by John Moravec with some additional thoughts