I believe that the Flat World, Flat Web, Flat Schools keynote was a hit yesterday, in that it connected with issues of distance learning professionals. I was concerned, as I am with every address, but especially with audiences whose work is somewhat different from my experiences. But we’re all in the process of re-inventing ourselves and what we do as educators, and distance learning folks are still joyously inventing their work and tools for the very first time. We all need new, large, and slightly off-kilter ideas to keep us thinking.
The one miss is the fact that many in the audience are involved in teaching students who are not millennials, who are old, even as old as me. The statement that many of our students are more literate than we are, from the perspective of their information landscape, does not fit. However, it is critical to understand that even when we are teaching adults, helping them to develop their teaching skills or retooling for a new job, we are preparing them for a future that will be dominated by people who have grown up with information experiences that are difficult for must of us (over 35) to imagine. We have to understand it.
2¢ Worth
Dave, you say “…we are preparing them for a future that will be dominated by people who have grown up with information experiences that are difficult for must of us (over 35) to imagine. We have to understand it.”
I think back.. when I was 5 years old, TV was an oddity. When I was 10 COLOR TV was a remarkable thing. When I was 20, we experienced VideoTape. When I turned 30, the first microcomputer “kits” could be built. By the time I was 40, modems allowed information transfer, and when I turned 50, Al Gore invented the Internet. Now I’m 60 and making private thoughts public here, to you and countless others.
How would my 50 year old kindergarten teacher in 1951 prepare me for 1966, much less for 2007? Could she possibly have understood it? What would she have done differently if she did?
Perhaps we don’t have to understand “it”- the future. Maybe we can only move slightly toward our best guess of “it”, knowing we could be wrong, hoping we are right, and adjusting as we go alongside everyone else?
We need a good “futurist” blog to imagine in.
Yes David I would have to agree that your keynote and all your presentations were successes because you have the distance learning professionals in North Carolina thinking. Thinking in new ways. Questioning what they are doing – as you say…rethinking education and the learning process. As you know…I blogged your final presentation – check it out.
http://keoughp.wordpress.com/
cheers and keep on preching the Web 2.0 Gospel
Patrick
Dan,
I’m not quite 60, but darn close — and you are right, my first grade teacher (we didn’t have kindergarten back then) could not possibly have prepared me for today, because she had no reason to believe that today (2007) would be nearly so different from that time.
Today (2007) we do. We can be fairly sure that the changes that will occur in the next 50 years, or even 10 years, will be dramatic. That’s the difference — that we know.
So can we prepare people for that future. I think so — by not spending so much time teaching students how to be taught, and instead, teaching them how to teach themselves. Our notions of literacy must change. I was taught to read so that I could read my assignments. We need to teach learning literacies, which are different. It’s not merely being able to read your assignment. It’s about learning within a universe of information and ideas and being able to identify the valuable information and ideas and reject the valueless.
Thanks for the conversation.
Dave, thank you for the time you spent responding.
I worry a bit about the notion of new learning literacy. It seems that whenever I turn around, there is a new tool developed that everyone is trying to “figure out” and apply to learning tasks. Each tool seems to morph and change in an eyeblink.
Applying a blog… a wiki.. or a tool being mashed together as we exchange this writing? – is knowing how to do this “literacy” if the tools will disappear?
I saw the K-12 Online Conference RFP and the term “perpetual beta” jumped out at me. I had seen it a few days before too.
I have used at least 4 podcast/audio creation sites this past year. All were labeled as “beta” and all went away. I loved two of them.
I like the tool sites I see like bubbl and picnik.
I understand the group processes and tagging, the power of the Web2.0.
But “learning literacies” for the future may be a slippery fish to latch onto if our ideas and tools are in “perpetual beta”.
Sometimes I am excited and sometimes I think we are creating chaos out of order!
Again, thanks for the response during your busy days…
I’d still love to host your blogmeister somewhere within our NY BOCES!
Dan
Just one quick thought…20 years ago, when I was a new teacher, I went to a conference where the speaker, whose name is a distant memory, said something that stuck with me for 20 years. She said something like this: “Teachers used to teach everything…math for computing profits from the farm, reading for the bible, writing for ledgers. Today, there is too much information for us to teach everything. It is now our job to teach children how to learn.” I heard this 20 years ago and it’s still true today. And, 20 years ago, I couldn’t have imagined what’s possible today. So we keep plugging along…teaching children how to learn…and dealing with standards tests that tell us what they’re supposed to have learned. Ah well, I digress.