I’m off today for Ausburg college and the 2006 Minnesota e-Learning Summit, in Minneapolis. I do not know very much about this conference. It’s organized by Minnesota Government Training Services, which appears to do a lot of professional development activities and not just in education.
I’ll be delivering the opening Keynote tomorrow on twenty-first century literacy and then sessions on Telling the New Story session and Web 2.0. Friday will be kicked off by Marc Prensky, and I’m dang disappointed I’ll miss that. I’ve heard Marc speak once, and I like his style and his message. I’ll be tagging this conference with MELS, for Minnesota e-Learning Summit, if anyone wants to follow along.
The first half of this week had me at the NC Distance Learning Alliance conference in Asheville. It was a small conference on the beautiful campus of Asheville-Buncombe Community College. Many of the attendees were community college instructors and administrators, quite a few university level folks, and a surprising number of K-12 educators. I guess I think of distance learning as being more of a post-secondary thing, but some of the most passionate ideas were coming out of the K-12.
I commented on Susan Patrick’s keynote the first of the week, and although I do not agree with everything that she said, I believe now that it is a valuable conversation to be having. In two sentences:
I do not believe that distance learning is a solution for a teacher shortage. The solution is retooling the profession so that many many more talented college students will want to enter the field, and more teachers will want to stay.
That said, I love any conference that I walk away from with new ideas, new validations — and when I walk away a different man, because the vista of my professional vision is broadened. And that certainly happened in Asheville.
So much of what I heard people talking about in sessions and in casual conversations resonated richly with my rantings about contemporary literacy. As I said earlier this week, distance learning happens in a digital, networked, and overwhelming information environment. Teachers and students must practice contemporary literacy in order to do their jobs. The model is there, and it is evolving very rapidly, much more so than in traditional classrooms — and the reason is that you can’t push paper through the Internet. Only bits and bytes. This is a group I’m going to pay a lot of attention to.
And they went “gaga” over blogging and Web 2.0.