The definition of educational leader needs to shift from the person with the title to the person with the vision.

Our schools need to harness each student’s natural propensity for participating in online spaces and funnel that energy into building powerful networks for learning that are used in every class almost every day.

They tried to take the same content, produced by the same people, in the same ways, and get subscribers and advertisers to pay for it on the web in a traditional model.

We need, first, to take charge of our own learning, and next, help others take charge of their own learning. We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves. It is time, in other words, that we change our attitude toward learning

We have to ask our teachers to learn in different ways than how they learned in their high schools and colleges in order to leverage the power of modern networks, not only for their own personal learning but to better deliver these new skills and literacies to the students in their classrooms.

It means that teachers’ professional learning will take place in online connected spaces that span the globe.

When asked to design the school of the future, “communication tools” was the number one student pick, according to Speak Up 2009, a survey of almost 300,000 K–12 students (Project Tomorrow, 2010).

Learning networks are very different both in form and purpose in that we instead connect with people we don’t already know—helpful strangers who share our passion for a particular topic.

Knowledge itself is moving from the individual to the individual and his contacts”