I’ll have to wear my son’s shirt again, because I must have been in the zone yesterday. It was a fantastic morning with just over 700 educators from central Ontario yesterday. The address was also videocast to eight other locations across the Bluewater District on Ontario. I talked about the stories around education, the millennial generation, and closed with information about what I call, contemporary literacy. I had lots of conversations afterward, during lunch, and during an afternoon workshop that served as a follup.
The workshop began with a deep and sometimes very animated conversation about education, the future, today’s child, and about the new story. I learned a lot, and also recorded it, hoping to make this discussion part of an upcoming podcast. One theme that connected well with conversations I’ve had in the U.S. and other writing I’ve done is the challenges of Being Digital in a rural area. A lot of the teachers do not enjoy broadband Internet at home, because the service is not offer so far away from a town, and they seem pessimistic about its coming anytime soon.
As I recall, (I don’t have time to look it up right now) one of the findings of a recent Pew in American Life report was that one of the only late-adopting demographics that is not seeing an increase in broadband access is rural populations. When we rely solely on the market to drive penetration of digital networked information, then rural areas will continue to be left out.
I heard on the radio that Ontario is enjoying a 13 billion dollar (cd) surplus. It seems to me, and this is just me, that expanding the reach of convenient digital networked content could do a great deal to strengthen Ontario’s economic position in the future, and perhaps even slow the brain-drain that is being experienced by most rural locations.
That’s just me!
technorati tags:warlick, education, bluewater, ontario
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I think that this is the particular Pew report to which you referred:
http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Rural_Broadband.pdf
In it, they report that only about 25% of rural households have high-speed Internet connections, vs. around 40% for urban and suburban households.
Rich
David,
I really want to know what you thought of the afternoon session. Did you feel the frustration in that room?
I did feel the frustration, though it was pretty much par for the course. Teachers are frustrated by the demands of rapidly changing times. They are being asked to adapt, but given little or no resources, and no additional time to retool. It is very frustrating. My message is not only for teachers, but also administrators, and for the public — we have no choice. We either invest in our classrooms or your country and mine become third-world nations in 30 years. This sounds melodramatic, but I’m old enough to know how fast things can change.
I was also frustrated by an element that I hope to blog about very soon!
— dave —