Hey, remember when, as a kid, you read or heard about Rip Van Winkle? Yeah, he was the dude who went into the mountains, got intoxicated by gnomes or elves or whatever and fell asleep for a hundred years. Then he woke up and everything was crazy and different.

Well, check out “Mr. Winkle” by Mathew Needleman, primary author of Creating Lifelong Learners, a blog dedicated “to offer[ing] practical tips for elementary teachers in teaching language arts, valuing students and their cultures, appealing to different learning modalities, and integrating technology in the curriculum.”

“Mr. Winkle” is short and silly, but it makes a crucial point—that the world is changing fast around us, and some of us have done a good job of keeping up. But it’s also been changing without regard to those who haven’t kept up—in short, around our educators, educational institutions, and yes, even our students. The question is not: can education keep up? The question is: what must we do to get education up to speed?

More and more educators are realizing the power of technology—that the internet and the Open Educational Resources offered are what is integral to learning today. ccLearn hopes this realization will continue to spread and reach those not yet involved. We encourage you to check out these other videos, if you haven’t already:

• “Did You Know 2.0” is a fantastic video with an equally fantastic soundtrack—commenting on the rapidly changing state of information. Last updated in June of last year, the statistics are mind-boggling. Did you know, for instance, that if MySpace were a country, it would be the 8th largest country in the world? “Shift Happens”—that’s their gimmick, and it works. Check out their page at http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com.
• “A Vision of Students Today” effectively captures just that—have you ever wondered how college students lug all those books around and read them? Well, the truth is, most of them don’t.

Both of these videos (and Mr. Winkle) are licensed CC BY-NC-SA.

Finally, in one more video—Ken Robinson affirms that “intelligence is dynamic” and hence, creative. Instead of “educating people out of their creative capacities,” he makes a case for nurturing the creativity we are born with. Check out “Do Schools Today Kill Creativity?” on TEDTalks. All TEDTalks are distributed under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.