This is mostly for the conference aggregator that I’ve set up for the North Carolina Educational Technology Conference (NCETC), starting next Monday. We’ve encouraged presenters to talk about their sessions, and here’s my first entry.
At 3:00 PM on Wednesday, I’ll be delivering a presentation called, Telling the New Story. This will be only the third time that I have done this session. The first time was for the SIG Technology Coordinators gathering at NECC in Philadelphia, and the second was for the New Hampshire ISTE affiliate’s meeting a couple of months ago (think Hogwarts Banquet Hall). As stories go, this one is evolving. It is an intriguing venue for me to express some of the current conversations that are going on around me and to stack them into a structure that makes a lot of sense to me.
The session begins with some of the stories that we’ve been hearing and telling for decades, and how they continue to drive a big part of what schooling is about. It is a testament to the continuing power of stories, even when they are old.
The rest of the presentation is structured around some writings of Dr. Jennifer James on telling a compelling story as a function of leadership. She talks about the leader who is the master, and the leader who is so creative that people follow. But she says that the leader who affects real change is one who can tell a compelling new story.
James continues by saying that compelling new stories must include three components:
- They must fit the market place and our sense of the future. (I’ll include a lot of flat world information here)
- They must resonate with deeply held values. (Here, I’ll focus on our students, include a lot of material from Prensky and Beck on the gaming generation, Flynn on rising general intelligence, and remix culture)
- We must be able to model the story. (This will be a number of shifts in focus for education from students as merely consumers of content to producers of content, classrooms as conversations, digital textbook, and whatever else I can think of between now and then)
If you’re going to be at the NCETC conference, I’ll be in Auditorium III the whole time.
..spinning my 2¢ worth.