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 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/. |
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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.
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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.
That will be followed by a session that I am calling Climbing Bloom’s Ladder. Here, participants will use an online tool to plot a group conversation about retooling old classroom lessons toward higher order thinking experiences utilizing qualities of our students’ “native” information experiences.
Today, however, the nature of information has changed and its impact on us, especially as educators is probably more profound than that of all of the technologies that have emerged in the past 34 years of my career. Information has become increasingly networked, digital and abundant (or overwhelming). Each of these brand new qualities of our information landscape affects what it means to be a reader, processor of information and communicator — and forces us to re-spell the 3Rs. The second part of my presentation will have less to do with the “what” of 21st century skills, and more to do with the “how.”
Its implications schools schools and schooling are actually quite simple. When so much is changing, what our students learn has decreased in importance. Skills and context are still critical. But increasing in importance, what has become crucial to our future is how our students learn. Are they developing strong learner habit? Are they becoming learner literate? Are they adopting a learning lifestyle.