It's six months since Tom Barrett came on board with me on Ship NoTosh, and in that time we've done a hugely varied amount of work, much of it under wraps due to the nature of our clients, and some of it high profile.

In the latter camp, we were delighted last week to launch Tweeting for Teachers, a report (that covers a lot more than Twitter) showing policymakers and school leaders some simple recommendations that will help more teachers than ever uncover the potential for turbo-boosting their own professional development through the use of social media and offline unconference events, such as TeachMeet and its younger cousin EdCamp. From the NoTosh blog:

Tweeting for Teachers – key recommendations

School leaders should:

1. learn about and engage with the social platforms that their teachers, parents and pupils are using every day;
2. use a social media tool as part of their communications with the school community;
3. validate and support their staff in using social media tools for ongoing professional development;
4. turn online activity into offline actions, in order to harness the benefits of face to-face interaction alongside those of online interaction;
5. implement robust systems for evaluating the impact of CPD on teacher effectiveness and student outcomes.

National and local policymakers should:

1. publish guidelines and support for teachers and leaders to help them use social media in schools;
2. consider how they will begin to unfilter social media sites for use in schools;
3. recognise and celebrate self-directed professional learning by teachers using online tools, and the role of social media in this learning;
4. create a common online space where the whole education community can find each other;
5. ensure that all Initial Teacher Training courses demonstrate a strong focus on the use of social media tools for ongoing professional development.

We also undertook case studies of how businesses are using social media for professional development, and what education could learn from this. Finally, we developed recommendations for how teachers, heads and policymakers could further exploit the potential of social media to help teachers develop in a cost-effective way.

There are plenty more videos that I may well find the time to go through on the blog, but you can dive in yourself over on Vimeo now and come back over the next few weeks as more education and business video case studies are added. You can read the report on the Pearson Centre for Policy and Learning site, and read more about our role in building it on the NoTosh blog.

How many creativity gurus have you heard this past year talking about the overarching potential of our young people to solve the problems of tomorrow? Well, we thought we'd see just how good they are at solving those problems.

The photograph at the top of this post is just one example of how young people care about other people many thousands of miles away and want to make their lives better - produced in the last period of a long day in Iowa. You can read more of them on the world2011.us site.

Sure, it's just a piece of marketing. But it sums up weeks of work they've put in to harnessing design thinking to explore, synthesise and hone down problems they believe they could solve. And this past week, they've been prototyping their ideas for solving them.

Over the past 21 days, with the immense support of the UN agency for ICT, the International Telecommuncations Union (ITU), m'colleague Tom Barrett and I have been trying to make good our promise that we could bring 10,000 young people along, virtually, to "the most important ICT event in the world".

ITU Telecom World 11 gathers nearly 2500 of the world's Heads of State, CEOs of all the global telecommunications firms and policy wonks from South America to South Africa, Southampton to the Hamptons. We set up a campaign site to involve over four times the number of delegates (at perhaps four times less their average age ;-) to see whether their ideas collided or parted at their very roots. The goals were several:

• provoke the speakers into speaking in 'normal', jargon-free language, conscious that 10,000 young people were trying to get a grasp on the issues that will affect them more, perhaps, than said experts on stage;
• see if young people genuinely cared about solving what the UN has outlined as its key challenges, such as decreasing poverty and hunger, increasing access to education for all, improving gender equality and so on...
• see if they cared enough and if their teachers, increasingly confined by State requirements to "cover the curriculum", were fired up enough to break through the pedagogical red tape and create opportunities for their students to find real problems that need solving, and then go on to propose genuine, workable solutions.

Within 21 days I can confirm one thing: never underestimate what young people are capable of.

As we head into the conference week (follow on the Twitter hashtag of #world11kids for all things young-people-related, and #ituworld11 for the wider conference coverage) I'm thrilled at what we're going to be revealing to delegates through plasma screens and projections, revealing what our class of 10,000 has achieved this past three weeks.

We're also going to see hundreds of them now participating live on the podium through Twitter as Secretary-Generals, CEOs, Heads of State and inventors of the switches that make the web work seek out the concerns and ideas of 8-18 year olds around the globe.

You want problem-based learning? This kinda fits the bill. I can't wait to unpack with our teachers and schools how on earth they've managed to achieve so much with so little time and such epic challenges to solve. It's not too late to get involved... what's holding you back?

When you see a list of endings from Hemingway stories, you can also see the even more intriguing beginnings of stories not yet written. Here are some from the 50 Hemingway endings over here, and don't forget to blog and link back to any stories you (or your students) come up with!

But they could not help his fear because he was up against an older magic now.

“We’ll have to go,” Nick said. “I can see we’ll have to go.”

Looking back from the mounting grade before the track curved into the hills he could see the firelight in the clearing.

Then he was dead.

When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.

A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

It was a good thing to have in reserve.

They all came just like that.

The little devil, he thought, I wonder if he lied to me.

The hold over himself relaxed, too, finally, and the next day it was very slack and he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance.

In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.

I am not really a good bull fighter.

Now they would have the run home together.

He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.

The priest skipped back onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.

 

What happens next? The 50 Hemingway endings via my friend Matt, who runs a company that helps other companies build stories.

Over the past week I've twice heard twenty-somethings ponder whether kids growing up today—kids who were practically born with iPhones in hand—will still have the capacity for wonder.

Yesterday as a present for his first day of second grade I brought home an erasable gel pen for my iPhone savvy six year old. After a brief demonstration, he spontaneously hugged me, "I've been waiting for this pen my entire life!"

I think the kids are alright.

Lovely post from Heading East, via Bobulate, which reminds me of the wonder Catriona had the first time she used Skype (and felt comfortable with it by about 90 seconds into the call), the desire she has to get on the iPad every day, but the total delight she gets when the craft kit comes out of its box on a rainy day (which, being Edinburgh in the autumn, is rather often).

At TEDxLondon, BLC, Naace and a few other events this summer I asked if people wanted to join me in trying to encourage more curricula that were based less on students solving the irrelevant, contrived pseudo problems given to them in textbooks, and based more on finding great, real world problems that need solved.

A superb opportunity for action has come along.

Ever wondered what 10,000 young people could do to solve some of the world’s greatest problems? We want to know for the world’s most important ICT event, ITU Telecom World 11, by gathering young people's vision for the future on world2011.us.

The October 24-27 event is the flagship meeting of the world’s telecoms industries, brought together by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the specialised United Nations agency responsible for information and communication technologies. In the run up to the event, and during it, we’ll be showcasing the ideas of young people, aged 8-18, alongside the debates, panels and corridor discussions of these influential delegates.

I've been at so many events recently that have either totally lacked the student voice, or made third party reference to it through second-hand reportag from their teachers. This is a real chance for your students to make a global impact on problems that matter, wherever they are.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime real world project-based learning opportunity, that ties into most teachers’ curriculum at any given point in the year.

We’re providing some brief points of inspiration to get you started, over the seven key themes, and will open up a wiki space today where teachers can collaborate and add to each other’s resources on the areas.

By October 24, we hope to have videos, photos, blogs and examples or prototypes of what young people believe might help solve challenges on their own doorstep. Sign up your class, school or district to begin sharing the ideas of your students. We want you to tell us how technology could be harnessed to:

• alleviate poverty and hunger
• improve education for all
• address gender inequality
• make sure everyone has access to health care
• protect our environment
• make disabled people’s lives easier
• close the gap between the developed and developing world

To take part, you just have to sign up your interest, and from there you’re able to submit posts to the project.

Pic: some problem finders in one of our schools in Ormeau, Brisbane, Australia.

I don't normally write out talks before I give them, but to get a point and a passion across in six minutes, I went through the exercise for TEDxLondon. There will be a call to action later this week at theproblemfinders.com. In the meantime, this is the talk I gave:

I’ve been lucky enough to see our education system from several sides. I’ve been a teacher, an education advisor for governments and I’ve worked as a talent spotter for TV companies and Venture Capitalists, working alongside digital startups in the creative industries. It's through the lens of these last encounters that I’ve noticed something in the way that we teach our young people that has a negative knock-on effect on their very ability later in life to contribute to a creative, sustainable world. With my teams of educators all over the world I’ve also seen the impact of a simple mindshift that every teacher in every classroom can make.

Over the past four years I've sought out ideas that people had come up with and invest in them. The key: they had to find a problem that no-one else had solved. Out of 3000 ideas, this past three years, I think I’ve recommended about 30 of them. That means that our most creative people have about a 1% success rate in finding problems that need solving.

Currently, the world’s education systems are crazy about problem-based learning, but they’re obsessed with the wrong bit of it. While everyone looks at how we could help young people become better problem-solvers, we’re not thinking how we could create a generation of problem finders.

And I’ve discovered just how many per cent of our learners are working in a problem finding curriculum.

This summer, I met Simon Breakspear, an educator from Sydney living in Cambridge. He told me that the biggest headache he had in his current venture was finding a problem that no-one else had looked at. He went on to point out that he had never had to find a problem like this until this very moment, 25 years into his life. Simon was part of the one percent of us who undertake that bastion of quality learning: a PhD.

Another educator and good friend, Alan November, told me story a little later this summer. He once taught a Community Problem Solving course where, on the first day, he set students the task of finding a problem in the local community that they could then go off and solve using whatever technology they had available.From the front row a hand shot up. “Mr November?” began one of the girls in the class. “You’re the teacher, we’re the students. It’s your job to come up with the problems and give them to us to solve.” This was in 1983.

All our students, their parents and the people teaching them, have been indoctrinated that is teachers who sift through all the things we can learn, find the areas worth exploring, and make up theoretical problems for students to solve. On top of this, most educators believe that it is their job to invent problems at just the right level of difficulty to appeal to every one of the 30 children in front of them.

So we see this disingenuous belief that framing fake problems in different coloured books (the pink ones for the clever kids, the yellow ones for those “who need support”) is the best way to create problem solvers.

It is not.

Teachers, for too long, have actually been doing the richest work of learning for their students. Teachers find problems, frame them and the resources young people can use to solve them. Young people get a sliver of learning from coming up with ideas, based on some basic principles upon which the teacher has briefed them, and the teacher then comes back on the scene to run the whole feedback procedure.

How about something different?

In the classrooms in which I work, students explore the twenty or so themes upon which our planet really depends, immerse themselves in the ideas and information their teachers, peers and whole communities can impart, find the problems they feel are worth solving, theorise which ones will work and then try them out in a prototype. In their world, we don’t just write an essay or create yet another wiki or blog to describe what our idea is, but we actually build the solution to the problem with our own hands – in this case, these seven year olds built the world’s youngest TEDxKids event, and talked about their research and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing – or simply most interesting - problems. Do animals talk? Do babies have a secret language? Which cancer should we invest in curing first? Why do slugs needs slime?

Others in a Brisbane primary school we’re working chose to explore living for 24 hours without technology to immerse themselves not just in what makes technology so vital, but also the challenges and problems to our wellbeing that technology brings.

It takes courage for a teacher to let go of the reins of learning sufficiently to inspire problem finding where no textbook, teacher or standardized test knows the answer, where the teacher’s voice is but one of 30, 300 or 3000 others chipping in, guiding, coaxing and coaching through the ether. But this kind of learning surpasses the depth of thinking demanding by any traditional textbook, teaching or standardized test. The teachers and learners I work on problem finding with say it's the most rewarding learning experience they've ever had.

I began with a story about my friend Alan’s class, his students protesting that “he was the teacher, and they were the students”. Well, he persisted. After a year of problem-finding, those students insisted on the school opening up over the summer vacation so they could continue to find problems and solve them. When a new computer arrived, a student broke into school over the vacation – he didn’t break in to steal the computer, but to practice coding it. It’s rare we hear of students breaking into school to learn. But, I guess that’s what Problem-finding does to people.

I pledge that before the end of 2011 I will help 10,000 young people discover a problem-finding curriculum, through the development of confidence and skills in their teachers. If you want to be part of that journey, help add the next 10,000 problem finders, or come up with ideas about how we can help young people find more worthwhile problems, please add your support.

In the week that I'm giving my own TEDx talk for the first time, at TEDxLondon, I was over the moon to see NoTosh's last project with Thorney Close Primary School in Sunderland hit the homepage of the TEDx talks site.

My own talk this afternoon is about the very shift in vision that enabled the teachers at Thorney Close to let go of many of their reins of learning, and furnish seven and eight year old children with the power, and challenge, to find problems worth solving, or epic questions worth tapping into.

Layton's talk on Why Do Slugs Need Slime? was one of many that passed the "so what?" test of their peers, and their teachers. You can view it on the TEDx site along with a few others, and see more of the thinking behind how we handed over more of the learning process to young people on our NoTosh site.

TED is a revolution... for my students

Now, some grown ups have been getting their knickers in a twist about the TED movement and whether or not it can represent a revolution:

For these children and their teachers this was, to date, the most powerful learning experience they had ever had: read their comments for yourself. That concentration of effort, the real sense of audience, both in the room and out in the virtual world, and the responsibility given to them for their own learning, make this an invaluable life experience for adults and kids alike.

I'd encourage any educator wanting to experiment with handing over the reins of learning, and getting their students to find the problems they will explore, to consider undertaking a TEDx process with them. 

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt was the first non-television exec to deliver the McTaggart Lecture at the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival last night. A core part of his talk was on the state of "UK education", and how "over the past century, the UK has stopped nurturing its polymaths. You need to bring art and science back together." Britain should look to the "glory days" of the Victorian era for reminders of how the two disciplines can work together, he said. 

"It was a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges. Lewis Carroll didn't just write one of the classic fairytales of all time. He was also a mathematics tutor at Oxford. James Clerk Maxwell was described by Einstein as among the best physicists since Newton – but was also a published poet."

"I was flabbergasted to learn that today computer science isn't even taught as standard in UK schools. Your IT curriculum focuses on teaching how to use software, but gives no insight into how it's made."

It's a shame, though, that he didn't Google a little more on the education system of the country in which he was speaking. Scotland.

There is no such thing as "UK education", only English and Welsh, Northern Irish and Scottish. The latter is significantly different from the others, and programming is a core part of our curriculum for excellence Technologies strand, from age 3 through to 18.

It's why my daughter learns input-process-output at nursery school (kindergarten) through computer programmes and robots. It's why the literary structure and coding expertise needed to create a computer game is taught in more and more primary (elementary) schools. It's the reason that the very "learn how to use, not how to make it" approach to software has been questioned for the last eight years or more in Scottish computer science circles, and moves are made to reinstate the importance of programming at secondary (high school) level.

It's why our definition of 'text' in the Literacy (arts) guidance moves well beyond "the three Rs" and includes the likes of text messaging, computer games and the web at large.

In England, the education minister has gone from not mentioning technology at all in his curriculum and policy plans, to making piecemeal and out-dated contributions about how technology provides a great carrot and stick for learning. The differences between this and the forward-looking ambition of his Scottish counterpart are stark.

Yes, the McTaggart lecture is designed to "boil down to anger and arch-villains, impossible proposals and insults". But, Mr Schmidt, before going in for a great, potentially constructive insult for our neighbours, please accept an invitation to discover more about the country - and its own education system - that you have been kind enough to visit.

Read the McTaggart lecture in full.

Photo from TechCrunch

I'm thrilled to have been given the platform at TEDxLondon this September 17th to share my big idea for education, building on my plea to change learning from a pseudo-problem-filled irrelevance to a universe that inspires young people to become expert problem finders.

A very limited number of tickets are available on application from the site to hear an amazing bunch of speakers give their vision and call to action for learning, including a virtual beamover from Sir Ken Robinson in LA.

This week is, ahem, a busy one at Building Learning Communities (#BLC11) in Boston, MA. I'm getting a chance to hear plenty of other talks, seminars and keynotes and will do that now seemingly old-fashioned thing of live blogging each session as it happens, as is my wont.

I'm also offering up a fair few sessions in this packed week:

• Design Thinking: A 4-hour Sell-Out Pre-Conference
• Data Reveals Stories: A 4-hour Pre-Conference on Tuesday with some limited spaces still available
• Managing Risk-Reward with Digital Media in Education
• A wrap-up keynote on Wednesday with Cisco's Director of Global Education, which the BLC in situe and online audience is helping to write
• Celebrating the Speech: the TEDxKids @ Sunderland story
• Augmented Reality and Learning in the Ether

Most of these, including the keynote, are real hands on, brains on workshops, and I want to be aiming, in fact, to be talking as little as possible, providing some great frameworks for people to play and learn something new for themselves, with prompts and support to take them further beyond the often brief sessions we have together.

I can't wait to catch up with so many people, including the chaps and chapesses at AlasMedia, with whom I first sailed up the Charles River four years ago as they toyed with the idea of setting up a film, media and education company. They're a roaring success and steal the show every time they come to BLC. Their FlickSchool is a delightful place to learn how to make some great films and shoot super photos. Above all, their friendship over all those miles means  a lot to me, and the connection I feel always makes me stop off in LA when I'm off to New Zealand or Oz to say hi, eat some (too much!) great food and trade stories. They also caught on camera the first time Catriona was ever really scared of something (it was a microphone windshield).

And that's what BLC is about - connections. I'm grateful to Alan November for his invite which, after a three year break, I'm finally able to take again. He's the only person I jump onto American Airlines for, in the hope that I might catch even just one fish off the shore at Marblehead. And I'm grateful beyond words to Jennfier Beine who took over the task of organising the event, sorting me out for tickets, hotels, round tables for my pre-conference in a room that shouldn't really have them, and introducing me to the world of Kinko's. 

Enough of the politesse, and on with the show! Fasten your seatbelts, fire up the aggregator and get ready for some good, old fashioned reflection and reportage on the blog.

This week I'm back at Building Learning Communities (#BLC11), Boston, MA, after a three year hiatus (as I dipped my toes into something totally different). I can't wait to see old friends and make some new ones, and to hang out with some of the brightest thinking you can get in the education space.

The keynote is the one thing both Alan November, the host, and I wanted to do differently. Based on NoTosh's work with Cisco this past 18 months, I'm delighted to be in a conversation with their Director Global Education, Bill Fowler, a conversation we want you to help shape, whether you're at the event, or spectating from afar.

There are seven key questions we're probably going totally fail to tackle over the hour, but I vouch on my part to follow them through for the next few months in the work I do with schools around the world with Tom. Most of the readers of this blog have influence - on their school, their district, their government. We want you to join the already burgeoning debate and contribute your own take on things.

Can you add your own thoughts, arguments, research pieces to these questions and help us create a long-lasting set of strong arguments with which to influence the Governments, districts and schools with whom we all work?

1. What are the main opportunities from around the world in building more effective learning communities?
2. What binds learners from around the world, regardless of geography? (my personal issue here is the hidden digital divide of time zones - technology alone can't be enough).
3. What leads to more engaging learning for under-motivated/disengaged young people?
4. How do we adapt pedagogical approaches?
5. What is the balance of control between the teacher and the learner?
   
   Are you currently satisfied with relationships within your education community (leadership, parents, community, etc)?
6. What strategies can we employ to empower the learner to take more responsibility for managing/leading their own learning?
7. What are the process skills needed to leverage technology?

The questions are co-written, and those of you who know me well will know what my own angle would be on some of them - but I want challenged, pushed, cajoled into thinking about others' views on the same subjects.

There is also a less chunked up discussion on the same issues over on the GETideas site, for those of you who are members there or want to sign up today.

The keynote later this week will be tweeted live, hopefully webcast, too, and I'll be doing my best to keep up with the live online action as well as responding to points from Bill and the audience. I look forward to seeing you there, in person or online!

On my recent holidays in Florence I was lucky enough to once more bump into my former Channel 4 Education Board co-member, James Bradburne, who is the enigmatic Direttore of the Palazzo Strozzi in the home of the Italian rennaissance. He was kind enough to invite my young family into the Picasso and Dalí exhibition, and Catriona had great fun inventing her own cubist creations our of fuzzy felt.

One painting drew my attention in particular - the one at the top of this post. It's The Sailor, painted while Dalí was in Madrid's Neocubist Academy, and at about the same time he was thrown out of art school. The reason? He said that one of the professors was not good enough to grade him.

It's a lovely, wry story, because it gets at the very heart of what we know about assessment - that children do better when they compare themselves to their own past performances, rather than to a sliding scale of comparative grading - and Dalí called into question what we're still grappling with today: who decides what is 'good' and, in the end, does it really matter for a true lifelong learner what they say at one given point of time anyway?

Rupert Murdoch isn't someone I'd normally have flocked to for advice on how to transform education, but I was delighted when a contact at the EU forwarded me a speech he had delivered to senior government officials from around the world this May.

Murdoch makes some powerful points that speak the language of Government and business, two groups that must be convinced the current conservative and Conservative means of bullying learning into doing better just will not do. Here are some of the most compelling parts:

Every CEO will tell you that we compete in a world that is changing faster than ever. That it is more competitive than ever and that it rewards success and punishes failure to a greater degree than ever before.

In other words, our world is increasingly, and rightly, a world of merit. In such a world, the greatest challenge for any enterprise is human capital: how to find it, develop it and keep it.

No one in this room needs a lecture about how talented people in tandem with technology are making our lives richer and fuller.

Everywhere we turn, digital advances are making workers more productive - creating jobs that did not exist only a few years ago, and liberating us from the old tyrannies of time and distance.

This is true in every area except one: Education.

Think about that. In every other part of life, someone who woke up after a fifty-year nap would not recognize the world around him.

…

My friends, what we have here is a colossal failure of imagination. Worse, it is an abdication of our responsibility to our children and grandchildren - and a limitation on our future. As Stendhal wrote: "Qui s'excuse, s'accuse".

We know the old answer - simply throwing money at the problem - doesn't work. In my own country, we've doubled our spending on primary and secondary education over the last three decades - while our test scores have remained largely flat. The reason this hasn't worked is that more money has fed a system that is no longer designed to educate - it's become a jobs program for teachers and administrators. And yet we Americans wonder why we have cities like Detroit where nearly half the population can't read and the disadvantaged are on a fast-track to failure.

The mandarins of mediocrity will tell you that the problem is that the kids they are teaching are too poor, or come from bad families, or are immigrants who do not understand the culture. This is absolute rubbish. It is arrogant, elitist and utterly unacceptable.

…

If we knew we had a gold mine on our property, we would do whatever it took to get that gold out of the ground. In education, by contrast, we keep the potential of millions of children buried in the ground.

Fortunately, we have the means at our disposal to transform lives.

...

Technology will never replace the teacher. What we can do is relieve some of the drudgery of teaching. And we can take advantage of the increasingly sophisticated analytics that will help teachers spend more time on the things that make us all more human and more creative.

Let me be clear. What I am speaking about is not the outline of some exotic, distant, fictional future. Everything I have mentioned is something I have seen in the here and now.

Download Murdoch on Education - The Last Frontier, May 2011 - it's worth 10 minutes of your time.

Photo from the World Economic Forum.

Jeremy Clarkson in the Sunday Times (UK) a few weeks ago touched on the supremacy of shaky mobile phone footage in deciding the pecking order of what we, generally, consider important and what we care less about (below). In this tree-falls-down-nobody-sees-it philosophy, have we become dependent on the loudest, clearest, best presented stories to make our decisions, at the expense of more valuable but less tangible ones we need to chew over for longer?

For me, this move towards talking about what we hear about loudest and clearest, rather than talking about the hard stuff that does not come in this "chicken nugget" form of information bundle, is absolutely reflected in the world of education discourse, particularly around discussions on what learning is for.

The echo chambers of the blogosphere, the political classes, the civil servants, parents... they - we - are all as guilty as each other for paying too much attention to the loudest, not necessarily the most vital, discussions for our children's future.

It's too easy to believe that you are collaborating and gaining some kind of otherness just because you've ticked the "collaboration box" of using Skype, a wiki, a blog, whatever medium you wish. Gary Stager picks this up nicely in this Will Richardson post. Will despairs at a teacher's 'inability' to grasp the value of a change to his methods, particularly the perceived value of collaboration to achieve the same goals that the teacher was gaining within his four classroom walls. Rightly, Gary calls into question whether collaboration is really all that worthwhile, all of the time. The answer is: most times not. Small active mixed ability and mixed interest teams, coming up quickly with their own ideas, is often just as effective (if not more so) than a more drawn out collaborative process through technology with teams from around the world, but where those teams consist of people who share the same values, aptitudes and interests as the home crew.

All too often, though, the accents of those with whom we are collaborating, in the broadest sense of the word 'accent', are merely reflections of the views with which we are most comfortable. In this way, we fall for the trap Jeremy Clarkson outlines in his column: "It used to be said if it bleeds, it leads. Now, though, if you want it to stick, you need a pic."

May 24th, 2006, John Johnston, David Muir, Andrew Brown, Bob Hill and a visiting Will Richardson were amongst a small but merry band who got together for the first time to talk about the potential we saw for learning as a relatively new set of democratising platforms and attitudes came together in a perfect storm. Between May 24th and the Scottish Learning Festival that year, I'd coined the phrase "TeachMeet" to describe this meeting of minds.

Five years on, the movement of professional development for teachers, by teachers has never been more vibrant, never been seen as so important by those holding ever tighter purse strings and looking for alternative models.

To celebrate five years of work by thousands, and to shine a light on the movement for those who've maybe still not come across it and its cousins around the world, I've brought together some voices to show the spread of ideas, and to suggest their own tips on organising the perfect 'unconference' professional development:

• From one year ago: Open Professional Development: How to Motivate Your Staff to Create Their Own Learning Experiences
• From me, this week: A Reader Challenge: Five Years On, Is Do-It-Yourself Professional Development Alive and Kicking?
• Jeff Utecht: Creating an Unconference Culture
• Con Morris: LeadMeet: an unconference for professional development
• More posts coming this week from Tom Barrett, Iain Hallahan and from TeachMeet Newcastle, this Wednesday night.

If you want to contribute your own post, tag it #teachmeet - I'll do my best to pick up on them and bring together a summary of your favourite moments and learnings from the past five years.

Pic from Ian Usher

I don't normally write out talks before I give them, but to get a point and a passion across in six minutes, I went through the exercise for TEDxLondon. There will be a call to action later this week at theproblemfinders.com. In the meantime, this is the talk I gave:

I’ve been lucky enough to see our education system from several sides. I’ve been a teacher, an education advisor for governments and I’ve worked as a talent spotter for TV companies and Venture Capitalists, working alongside digital startups in the creative industries. It's through the lens of these last encounters that I’ve noticed something in the way that we teach our young people that has a negative knock-on effect on their very ability later in life to contribute to a creative, sustainable world. With my teams of educators all over the world I’ve also seen the impact of a simple mindshift that every teacher in every classroom can make.

Over the past four years I've sought out ideas that people had come up with and invest in them. The key: they had to find a problem that no-one else had solved. Out of 3000 ideas, this past three years, I think I’ve recommended about 30 of them. That means that our most creative people have about a 1% success rate in finding problems that need solving.

Currently, the world’s education systems are crazy about problem-based learning, but they’re obsessed with the wrong bit of it. While everyone looks at how we could help young people become better problem-solvers, we’re not thinking how we could create a generation of problem finders.
And I’ve discovered just how many per cent of our learners are working in a problem finding curriculum.

This summer, I met Simon Breakspear, an educator from Sydney living in Cambridge. He told me that the biggest headache he had in his current venture was finding a problem that no-one else had looked at. He went on to point out that he had never had to find a problem like this until this very moment, 25 years into his life. Simon was part of the one percent of us who undertake that bastion of quality learning: a PhD.

Another educator and good friend, Alan November, told me story a little later this summer. He once taught a Community Problem Solving course where, on the first day, he set students the task of finding a problem in the local community that they could then go off and solve using whatever technology they had available.From the front row a hand shot up. “Mr November?” began one of the girls in the class. “You’re the teacher, we’re the students. It’s your job to come up with the problems and give them to us to solve.” This was in 1983.

All our students, their parents and the people teaching them, have been indoctrinated that is teachers who sift through all the things we can learn, find the areas worth exploring, and make up theoretical problems for students to solve. On top of this, most educators believe that it is their job to invent problems at just the right level of difficulty to appeal to every one of the 30 children in front of them.

So we see this disingenuous belief that framing fake problems in different coloured books (the pink ones for the clever kids, the yellow ones for those “who need support”) is the best way to create problem solvers.

It is not.

Teachers, for too long, have actually been doing the richest work of learning for their students. Teachers find problems, frame them and the resources young people can use to solve them. Young people get a sliver of learning from coming up with ideas, based on some basic principles upon which the teacher has briefed them, and the teacher then comes back on the scene to run the whole feedback procedure.

How about something different?

In the classrooms in which I work, students explore the twenty or so themes upon which our planet really depends, immerse themselves in the ideas and information their teachers, peers and whole communities can impart, find the problems they feel are worth solving, theorise which ones will work and then try them out in a prototype. In their world, we don’t just write an essay or create yet another wiki or blog to describe what our idea is, but we actually build the solution to the problem with our own hands – in this case, these seven year olds built the world’s youngest TEDxKids event, and talked about their research and solutions to some of the world’s most pressing – or simply most interesting - problems. Do animals talk? Do babies have a secret language? Which cancer should we invest in curing first? Why do slugs needs slime?

Others in a Brisbane primary school we’re working chose to explore living for 24 hours without technology to immerse themselves not just in what makes technology so vital, but also the challenges and problems to our wellbeing that technology brings.

It takes courage for a teacher to let go of the reins of learning sufficiently to inspire problem finding where no textbook, teacher or standardized test knows the answer, where the teacher’s voice is but one of 30, 300 or 3000 others chipping in, guiding, coaxing and coaching through the ether. But this kind of learning surpasses the depth of thinking demanding by any traditional textbook, teaching or standardized test. The teachers and learners I work on problem finding with say it's the most rewarding learning experience they've ever had.

I began with a story about my friend Alan’s class, his students protesting that “he was the teacher, and they were the students”. Well, he persisted. After a year of problem-finding, those students insisted on the school opening up over the summer vacation so they could continue to find problems and solve them. When a new computer arrived, a student broke into school over the vacation – he didn’t break in to steal the computer, but to practice coding it. It’s rare we hear of students breaking into school to learn. But, I guess that’s what Problem-finding does to people.

I pledge that before the end of 2011 I will help 10,000 young people discover a problem-finding curriculum, through the development of confidence and skills in their teachers. If you want to be part of that journey, help add the next 10,000 problem finders, or come up with ideas about how we can help young people find more worthwhile problems, please add your support.

In the week that I'm giving my own TEDx talk for the first time, at TEDxLondon, I was over the moon to see NoTosh's last project with Thorney Close Primary School in Sunderland hit the homepage of the TEDx talks site.

My own talk this afternoon is about the very shift in vision that enabled the teachers at Thorney Close to let go of many of their reins of learning, and furnish seven and eight year old children with the power, and challenge, to find problems worth solving, or epic questions worth tapping into.

Layton's talk on Why Do Slugs Need Slime? was one of many that passed the "so what?" test of their peers, and their teachers. You can view it on the TEDx site along with a few others, and see more of the thinking behind how we handed over more of the learning process to young people on our NoTosh site.

TED is a revolution... for my students

Now, some grown ups have been getting their knickers in a twist about the TED movement and whether or not it can represent a revolution:

For these children and their teachers this was, to date, the most powerful learning experience they had ever had: read their comments for yourself. That concentration of effort, the real sense of audience, both in the room and out in the virtual world, and the responsibility given to them for their own learning, make this an invaluable life experience for adults and kids alike.

I'd encourage any educator wanting to experiment with handing over the reins of learning, and getting their students to find the problems they will explore, to consider undertaking a TEDx process with them.