The bedroom of the average connected young person today is a much more powerful learning environment than most classrooms in most schools.

Think about it.

In the comfort of their bedrooms, connected learners can access all the information they wish, freed, mostly, from the petty and pointless restrictions that are be placed in their way by most classroom connections. They can communicate and collaborate freely with their friends, near and far, when they choose, in the way they choose, using the tools and applications they are most comfortable with. They can choose to work in peace, in quiet isolation, or they can work in distributed groups using collaborative tools of many kinds. And, most powerfully of all, they can learn what they want to learn and at the pace that suits them.

Even when they are working on tasks set by their teachers, they are still able to work and learn within an environment that is considerably more appropriate in so many ways to effective learning than their classroom at school.

Some will no doubt point out that the very lack of restrictions poses a problem, or even a threat, for our kids. As I have said many times, that is why free and open access to information, applications and environments in school is so important - so that teachers can teach young people how to behave responsibly online, how to protect their own immediate and long-term reputations, and how to discriminate between what is useful and what is not.