Aug 30

Literacy & Learning in the Digital Age

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The title only tells part of the story. Today’s environment of life, work, and play is not only based on digital information, but an other essential asspect of the information environment is networks. Digital content flows seemingly effortlessly through networks that reach almost every human inhabited spot on the planet. Because information is made to be machined (computer processed) and shared (through the networks) is is also abundant. This shear abundance of information is evidenced by the fact that today, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. This is well over 86,000 feature length movies every week.

A very colorful school entry way

These three qualities of today’s information environment have direct and profound implications to learning, as well as work and play. Because information is networked, digital, and abundant, we must expand our notions of what it means to be literate in the early 21st century — even in the great white north.

It is an honor to be back in the Edmonton area. That people such as myself continue to be called back to Alberta, speaks significantly of the vision and dedication that is being applied to the education environment. ..and it is not that we have the answers for you. But our ideas serve a fuel for your continued efforts to reinvent education for your children and their future.

There is no doubt that literacy has changed. Because it is networked, what it means to be a reader has expanded into something that is richer and far more interesting. When all information is digital — defined by numbers — what it means to process information has become far more empowering. Because information is abundant, communication has become more challenging, because we are competing for the attention of our readers.

Lists

But literacy is only the beginning of what teaching and learning look like in the early 21st century. Authentic and inquiry-based learning have long been a part of the education conversation. But perhaps new clues for implementing a more authentic learning experience might be found in our students and their “native” information experience. We know that their outside-the-classroom experience is compelling and even distracting. But it is crucial that we realize that it is an information experience and that a focal part of that experience is learning.

Many educators advocate that we bring video games and social networking into the class room to better engage our learners — and I do not dispute that position. But perhaps another approach is to examine that experience and itemize and understand the qualities of that experience that make them so compelling and effective. We will be looking at that experience and some of those qualities and explore what that means to teaching and learning in Sturgeon County today.

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Aug 26

Literacy and Learning in Thunder Bay Ontario

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At this writing, I have very little idea about what Thunder Bay is. There are some very impressive photos on Flickrnthat are labeled with Thunder Bay, so it must be very beautiful. I am pretty sure that the temperature is going to be better than the 95 degrees that will almost certainly be experienced in my home, Raleigh.

One of several pictures I took yesterday near the conference hotel. You can see them all here.

All that aside, and focusing on this time of the year when school will be starting soon, and this time in history, when so much is changing, we are going to explore the basics. But we are going to be coming at this critical topic from the perspective of how we will think of this time many years from now, and knowing what we can only speculate today about the coming years. The question that we ask today is, “Are we going to teach our children with tradition?”. ..or “Are we going to teach them with vision?”

Of course the answer is not one or the other. It is an appropriate measure of both. But it is the vision that is the most difficult and risky. But there are some aspects of our time and our future that we can be fairly certain of.

  1. We Are Preparing A New Generation Of Learners
  2. Within A New Information Environment
  3. For A Future That We Can Not Clearly Describe

There is no denying that our children are growing up within a culture, a millennial culture that is absolutely unique. It is a culture whose experiences a tightly bound to information, far more than to technology. Technology is merely the conduit. ..and there are qualities of that experience that show much promise for is as we rethink the pedagogies that harness our information experience. You might read this continually updated document to explore some of these.

But today, we are going to pay more attention to the information — the changing nature of information. In the past few decades information has become increasingly,

  • Networked
  • Digital
  • Abundant

..and each of these shifts has had an effect on what it means to be digital. So our questions become:

  • What Does It Mean To Be A Reader When Information Is Netwoeked?
  • What Does It Mean To Be A Processor Of Information When Information Is Digital?
  • What Does It Mean To Be A Communitor When We Are Overwhelmed With Messages?

We will also spend time looking at what contemporary literacy means to professional educators. I believe that a valid definition of literacy today is “..the skills involved in using your information environment to learn what you need to know to do what you need to do.” we will explore a concept that I am calling “a gardener’s approach to learning,” cultivating your information environment to produced new knowledge — often called personal learning networks.

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Aug 24

Engagement For Achievement in Toronto

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?It is a pleasure to be back in Toronto. This is certainly one of the most rich and exciting cities in the world, and one of the most alluring to folks just south of the border. One day I will be able to spend much more time here.

I’ve certainly been looking forward to this one

Today, we are exploring a topic that is much on the mind of many who are participating in the education conversation. The topic is “engagement,” and it is a word that I have some difficulty with. It is the same with many of the tools, plans, and concepts that surface through the months and years. Too often the tool (technology for instance) plan or concept becomes the goal, rather than the avenue for reaching the goal that has largely not changed — preparing our children for their future.

We are interested in engagement because we believe that learners who are engaged in their learning are learning more, better, and for a longer period of time. Bit was does engaged learning look like, under what conditions does it happen, and — are our learners already experiencing engaged learning within the practices of their millennial culture?

I believe that they are and that it may serve us and them to pay attention to the experience for ideas about engaging them in our more formal learning lessons. My driving question for this presentation is,

Can we harness our students’ “millennial culture” without turning our classrooms, libraries, and school campuses into video arcades?

I believe that we can, by identifying and understanding some of the qualities of the experience — the ‘native’ information experience. The qualities will not surprise you and most of them have been studied by researched, showing instructional benefit. These may be considered the pedagogies of a post-Gutenberg classroom. There is a printable handout linked to the right that will describe these qualities in more detail.

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Aug 23

1:1 Bootcamp in New Brunswick

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New Literacy, published by Technology & Literacy Magazine 2004

An evolvoing document that describes some of the qualities of the ‘native’ information Experience

It’s a pleasure to be here with you, though not so pleasurable as if I were actually there with you in Fredericton — where it’s almost certainly cooler than it is here in hot and steamy North Carolina.

I am especially happy to be a part of this event, because I’ve spent time there in New Brunswick and made friends there. So I feel somewhat invested in your experiment — and honored to have this opportunity to share some perspective on the adventure, on which you are about to embark.

I will be sharing to concepts with you, both of which are designed to draw attention away from the technology rather than enhance it. The first is directly about the information, that what truly impacts us, as learners, is not the stuff, but it is the information. As a result of technological advancements, information has changed,

  • In what it looks like
  • What we look at to view it
  • How we find it
  • Where we go to find it
  • What we can do with it
  • How we communicate it

This is because information has become increasingly.

  • Networked
  • Digital
  • Abundant

..and each of these new qualities has a huge impact on what it means to be literate.

I enjoyed speaking with you’ll today. Thought I’d post a link to the software I was using (rather clumsily).

CamTwist — http://bit.ly/b4MdOx

The Windows equivolent seems to be:

ManyCam — http://bit.ly/9Jde09

The second concept has more to do with pedagogy, and I think that it is one of the most interesting questions, “What are the pedagogies of information-abundant learning environments?” Here we look at our students outside-the-classroom information experiences, or what I am increasingly calling “The ‘Native’ Information Experience.” By examining the qualities of how our students live, learn, and work in this virtual environment, we may find ways of producing new and powerful learning experiences for them.

To the right are links to two documents that you are take with you.

Aug 19

Big day at Page High School

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First of all it is very nice having an opportunity to work someplace I did not have to fly to. That HUGE. But it is going to be a big day and I’m going to share a lot of ideas with you. Your head is going to hurt.

One of the most attractive campuses I have visited

The foundation is what might be referred to as a perfect storm of conditions that are converging on us, forcing us to, for the first time in decades (or centuries), to rethink and even redefine some of our fundamental assumptions about teaching and learning today. These three conditions, which are a secret at this point, will break out into two breakout topics.

Here we will look at your students and what I call their ‘native’ information experience. We think it is a technology-based experience, but it is really based on information. One of the most interesting questions we are starting to ask is, “What are the pedagogies that relate to today’s learners and their information landscape.

Someone asked during one of the breaks about a way for students to text information to a common location for the teacher.  I posed the question to Twitter and here are some of the replies I received: http://bit.ly/9Zv6Zv

The other breakout topic focuses more specifically on the information and what it means to be literate in the info-landscape our learners call home. Essentially, I will respelled the three Rs, expanding our notions of reading, arithmetic, and writing so that it more fully address a networked, digital, and info-abundant world.

Finally, we will spend the final minutes of the day examining how professional educators around the world are utilizing these same literacies to cultivate person learning networks, connections that they carefully craft and maintain to generate the knowledge that they need to create new learning experiences for the or learners.

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Aug 17

Responsive Learning in Guthrie Texas

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It is an honor to be back in Texas — though I would have to confess that I’d rather it was October. Haven’t checked the weather forecast at this writing, but I suspect that it’s hot.

The brand new Activity Center

This day is at least in part about special education, educating people who are special in some way, people who are not constrained by conventional thought patterns. There was an annual conference that use to be held in San Francisco called the Technology Reading & Learning Difficulties conference. In the last two years it was renamed to Technology Reading & Learning Diversity conference. What was interesting was that it became a place for people, like me, to “come out.” Our learning diversities were accepted and our stories received and celebrated. I will likely be sharing my story with you on this day, August 10, 2010.

What saved me, beyond caring, supportive, and accepting parents, was the discovery of a new kind of learning. It was a learning experience that was:

  • Responsive
  • Fueled by questions
  • Provokes conversation
  • Builds on identity
  • Measures accomplishment
  • Demands personal investment
  • Guided by safely-made mistakes

What is truly interesting about this time is that the information experiences that our students enjoy ‘natively’ are knowledge-based and content-intensive, and the learning done here is entirely responsive. We are going to take a tour of the ‘native’ information experience, not to revere the child learner as something that we can never be, but to understand and perhaps even hack the code their learning pedagogies.

This presentation will morph into an examination about how educators around the world are now using this same information environment and a gardener’s approach to learning that is empowering them to cultivate casual, daily, and self-directed professional development — Personal Learning Networks.

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Aug 05

Exploring Diversity in Pflugerville

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I have certainly been looking forward to this conference. It is important, and probably unsurprising, that when I was initially contacted about this conference, I expressed some reluctance to be a part of a diversity conference. It is an focus in education that I have not formally been a part of, I have no familiarity with the vocabulary, and it is an incredibly important issue.

This was a big production with a lot of tech going on…

However, in speaking with the organizers of this important conference, I came to realize that there is an interesting quality to diversity that I had never considered. Diversity is diverse. We should not wholly focus on diversities of race, language, gender, and achievement. There many other diversities, one of them being the obvious and well documented differences between today’s children and the children that most of us were — for me back in the 1950s and ’60s.

Often described as “Digital Natives,” today’s children have grown up with what we call, technology. It is worth noting that computer scientist, Alan Kay, once said that “Technology is anything that was invented after you were born.” We, on the other hand, are “Digital Immigrants.” Computers, the Internet, video games, social network, these are all entities that we easily lump under the term, technology.1

Today we are preparing a new generation of learner, within a new information environment, for a future that we can no longer clearly describe. The has diversity written all over it, yet we continue to want our children to be the students we want to teach.2

In my large group presentation, we will explore what has changed, a perfect storm of brand new and converging conditions that are forcing us, for the first time in decades, to completely rethink and reinvent education. They are, as already expressed here, that we are:

  • Preparing a new generation of learner
  • Within a new information environment
  • For an unpredictable future.

Each of these conditions has profound implications to what and how our children learn.

I will follow this presentation with a three-hour workshop for administrators, where we will explore how teaching and learning looks like when it not only addresses these diversities, but actually harnesses them. We try to answer the question, “What are the pedagogies that will lead to meaningful learning for today’s children?” ..and the answers come from a surprising but wholly logical place — from our children’s outside the classroom, ‘native’ information experiences. We will examine the fundamental qualities of that experience and perhaps even look at how teachers are using today’s information experience to shape their own learning experience, professional learning experiences.

  1. ?Prensky, Marc. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” On the Horizon October 2001. 04 Nov 2005 . [↩]
  2. ?Warlick, David. “Our Classrooms are Leaking.” 2¢ Worth. The Landmark Project, 27 Aug 2007. Web. 4 Aug 2010. . [↩]
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Aug 04

Harnessing the Perfect Storm in Iowa

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It is an honor and a pleasure to be back in Iowa and speaking with school administrators from across the state. I also have to admit to being more than a little humbled by the calibre of invited speakers I am sharing the stage with here in Des Moines.

Iowa SAI Conference

?My topic, Harnessing the Perfect Storm would have been an excellent opener for the conference, setting the context for “Getting to the Core.” But it also, I think, serves as an excellent closer for the conference. You have learned a great deal by listening to nationally and internationally renowned, respected, and listened-to speakers. Your heads are swimming with the new possibilities and and opportunities, and your bones shiver with the challenges of making them happen — and you are asking yourselves, “How can I bring the rest of my school or district along for this exciting revolution?”

Dr. Jennifer James, a cultural anthropologist who works in the Seattle area, says that the leader who can affect change in education is the leader who can tell a compelling new story. You have been presented with a new word of need for your students today. But to make that world real and immediate to your constituents, you must turn it into a plot, a story that inspires.

James says that that story must include three elements. It must:

  • Fit the Market Place
  • Resonate with Deeply Held Values
  • Be something that You can Point to

The perfect storm of converging conditions that are forcing us, for the first time in decades, to completely re-think education and what it means to be educated, are three elements of a story, one that fits the market place, one that resonates with deeply held values, and one that is already happening in front of everybody’s eyes.

I have been looking forward to this event for a long time, and hope that I leave you with a story that you can spread to the teachers, boards, and communities that you represent.

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Jul 27

Literacy & Learning in the 21st Century

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It is a pleasure to be here and to be a part of a revolution — and have no doubt that it is a revolution that you are waging. Never before has humankind advanced such dramatic changes in it’s culture and so quickly. Bit it is essential that as you/we move forward, that we identify knowledge and values that we know are core to what we do and adapt them to a future that will be technology-rich, information-driven, and rapidly changing.

High school teachers who are giving up their summer to learn. This is “inspiring!”

Last year you listened to my friend Ian Jukes. Jukes probably told you about how today’s learners are different, probably showing you scans of their brains, indicating how they are literally wired differently. There is no doubt that because of the information experience that they have grown up with, the understand and use information in a way that we must come to understand.

My job will be to apply the breaks a bit, to say, “Let’s slow down and forget about the technology for a while and go back to the basic. Are our children still learning the basic literacy skills that will be critical to their future?”

But, at the same time that we excuse ourselves from the tech, we have to understand that because of the tech, our information environment has changed dramatically, and that change affects what it means to be literate. We must respelled the 3Rs so that they reflect today’s information landscape, and if we can learn to integrate that, then the technology comes along. But it comes along not because we are convinced that laying our children’s hands on the machines will make them smarter. It comes along because it’s the pencil and paper of our time.

I will also be delivering two concurrent presentations. The first is also warning about technology. Those of us who were born before the personal computer, see our children playing their video games and engaging In heir social networks, and we think that to engage our children in learning, they need to be gaming and Facebook’ing. We have to understand that it isn’t the tech that engages them. It’s a uniquely compelling experience that is centered around information.

We need to be asking ourselves, “What are the qualities of experience that make it so compelling, and might we learn to integrate those qualities without turning our classrooms, librariesm and schools into video arcades.

Finally, carrying through with the literacy theme of the keynote, we will look at how educators are using these very same literacy skills to establish and cultivate personal learning networks. We will overview a few of the online (Web 2.0) tools that educators are using, and some deeper functions of professional learning, including the concept of mining the conversation and mapping the conversation.

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Jul 25

Wisconsin Education Innovations — Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience

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This is my second time speaking at this event, formerly known as the Sally Ride Academy. The academies are fairly small, but rich in learning opportunities, and they are geared toward meow learning — learning 2.0.

A beautiful venue

Participating educators will learn about learning literacies, and how they can utilize the literacies to engage in ongoing, casual professional development. They will also be exposed to a variety of contemporary information tools, including, but not limited to Interactive white boards (IWB) and other “emerging technology tools,” and what they mean to 21st century skills.

But the lion’s share of the professional development opportunities are about the learning qand the teaching. Differentiated instruction, assessment, project- problem- and inquiry-based learning, distance learning, and and thinking in mathematics.

I would have all of the participating educators focus in on the learning experience. It is tot easy for use to invent and share wonderful ideas and then fall into the trap of using them to do better schooling rather than empower better learning.

During the 21st century skills conference that I was recently a part of in up state New York a conversation erupted trying to determine the most important 21st century skill. I’m not sure that there really is a most important skill. But it’s a worth and useful conversation.

The conclusion was that the mist important skill is learning, that learning is a skill, and since our times seem characterized more by change than anything else, learning will most certainly be something that our children will be continuing to do a lot of. When thinking about the strategies that apply and the initiatives that we implement, we must think hard about the learning experience. Is it a sustainable experience.

My keynote will be about this, the sustainable learning experience, and I’m looking to our students for these. They have grown up in a world of networked, digital and abundant (overwhelming) information, and the it ‘native’ information experience demands constant learning. What are the qualities of that experience. What makes them so powerful and so compelling? These are some of the questions I will be answering in my presentation.

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