CoLearners

Resources: Our Students • Our Worlds Wiki Handouts Session Bibliography Presentation Visuals Post Session Narrative Personal Learning Networks Wiki Handouts Presentation Visuals Planning Concept Map A Gardener’s Approach to Learning

What I Just Learned: Google China Tracker Blog Entry China Report

Online Handouts by David Warlick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://davidwarlick.com/.

It is a huge honor to be a part of this forward reaching conference. I am especially impressed with the planning and the courageous implementation of several seemingly disruptive applications — and their comfort with the fact that not all of them have worked. It is exactly this willingness to give ourselves permission to take risks, that will move education to a place this is more relevant to the unique qualities of today’s students, the dynamic information environment that we are teaching in, and the future for which we are preparing our children.

I have two tasks planned for this day.  The first, a keynote address, will tell a story. Dr. Jennifer James, a cultural anthropologist in Seattle, Washington, writes about leaders and the three avenues of influence that they use.

1. Performance (the best)
2. Inventiveness (the creative)
3. The Compelling New Story (the story teller)

She says that education needs a compelling new story in order to retool education for today’s needs.  She says that the story must,

• Fit the market place
• Resonate with deeply held values
• be something that we can point to

My story, of three parts, will address each of these qualities.

After the keynote, I will spend some time presenting a model that addresses today’s prevailing information environment, the new literacies that it requires, and professional development.  Often called Personal Learning Networks, I will describe techniques that teachers around the world are using to help themselves learn what they need to know to do what they need to do.

Resources: Literacy & Learning in the 21st Century Wiki Handouts A Post Presentation Narrative Session Bibliography Presentation Visuals Planning Concept Map Cultivating Your Personal Learning Network Wiki Handouts Presentation Visuals Planning Concept Map A Gardener’s Approach to Learning, a blog entry

What I Just Learned: Inviting Investment in your Schools’ StakeHoders Blog Entry

Online Handouts by David Warlick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://davidwarlick.com/.

It’s an honor to be back in upstate New York, along Lake Erie.  My work here is two-parts.  It will begin with the evening of March 18 and a dinner presentation to school board members from a number of area school districts.  The topic is literacy, and my connection here comes from a keynote address that I delivered at a recent NSBA T+L conference in Seattle.  It’s about the 3Rs, but I will be examining what reading, arithmetic, and writing expand into when information is increasingly networked, digital, and abundant.

This topic will continue the next day with teachers from a wide range of schools and districts, looking at exactly how the nature of information has changed and what it means.

What other basic essential schools are necessary for literacy when,

• Information is networked — coming directly from the author, rather than being filtered by publishers, editors, and librarians
• Information is digital — where all information is digital, defined not by marks scratched or stamped onto paper, but defined by ones and zeros
• Information is abundant — where there is so much information available that it must compete for the attention of its readers.

For teachers, I will also be presenting an extended session about the new information landscape and what that means for the learning literacies of teachers.  How can teachers utilize these new avenues for communication to cultivate their own personal learning networks — to engage in in-time, ongoing, casual, and self-directed professional development.  How can we understand and engage in a gardeners approach to learning.

A Working Classroom

Resources: Rebooting Literacy Wiki Handouts Harnessing the Perfect Storm Wiki Handouts Cracking the ‘Native’ Information Experience Wiki Handouts Session Bibliography Planning Concept Map

What I Just Learned: Semantic Bookmarking Faviki Blog Entry IMAGE-HERE

Online Handouts by David Warlick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://davidwarlick.com/.

OK, it’s a pretty odd title — but I’ve spent the past two days in your middle school, and I feel a bit odd.  Middle Schools cause that effect, especially when I spent almost ten years teaching in a middle school (more than 10 years ago.)  I can tell you that it has been an exhilerating and exhausting experience, because I have not seen so much progress nor so much potential to truly start to redefine schools and schooling than in the implimentation of IMPACT at Kannapolis Middle School.

I will be throwing a lot of ideas and perspectives at you during this 45 minutes.  I’ll talk a bit about literacy, about the perfect storm of converging conditions that are forcing use to rethink teaching and learning, and what I’m coming to call the qualities of the ‘native’ information experience.  These, I’m coming to thing, may be the clues that we need to reinvent pedagogy in an information abundant information environment.

In brief, they describe an information experience that:

• Is Fueled by Questions
• Provokes Conversation
• Demands Personal Investment
• Is Guided by Safely Made Mistakes
• Is Responsive.

You can read more about these qualities in “Technology-Transformed Learning Environments” from my 2¢ Worth Blog.

International Convention Center

Resources: Our Students • Our Worlds Wiki Handouts Bibliography Presentation Visuals (InfoGraphic) Post-Presentation Narrative Personal Learning Networks Wiki Handouts Presentation Visuals Planning Diagram A Gardener’s Approach to Learning, blog entry Constructivism, by George Siemens

What I Just Learned: Ice On the Moon cNET Article NASA Report

Online Handouts by David Warlick is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://davidwarlick.com/.

It is an honor to be speaking at this international conference in Singapore. This is especially true considering that Singapore is often the scale next to which we (in the U.S.) measure the effectiveness of our own education system — and we do not measure up.

Of course conditions are changing, and the measure — how we go about measuring — is changing. I will suggest in my keynote address, three converging conditions that are forcing us to rethink education and to rethink what it means to be educated in a time of rapid change.

This perfect storm of change is simple, numbers only three, and it is intended to make a clear and compelling story that we can tell to describe the need for retooling the education institution. The conditions are:

• We are preparing a new generation of learners,
• Within a new information environment,
• For a future that we can not clearly describe.

I will also be conducting a breakout sessions about a concept that is frequently referred to as Personal Learning Networks — what I often describe as a gardeners approach to learning. This presentation will describe and demonstrate a variety of techniques that teachers around the world are using to cultivate their own networks for learning.

• Connecting techniques
• Techniques for mining the network
• Techniques for mapping the learning network

I hope that this is a valuable event for you.