CoLearners

A professional web site for David Warlick

Mar 09

Visioning 20 • 20 in Edmonton

Photo outside my Hotel Room

I’m up from the mid-eighties (30c) at home in Raleigh, to sub-arctic deep-freeze (-30c) in Edmonton, AB, Canada — just south of the Arctic Circle. I’ve come to this distant latitude to peer into the future. The Superintendent of the Edmonton Public Schools calls it Vision 20•20. I’ll be talking about Our Students • Our Worlds.

There are three true and fairly new conditions that are converging on our schools, districts, school administrators, teachers, and classrooms. They are that we are:

Preparing a new generation of learner, whose native cultural experience is tied to and together digital,
Within an information environment that would have seemed foreign and magical when many of us were in school,
For a future that we can not clearly describe.

I will be presenting these ideas to school staff and stakeholders, including students, who will be back-channeling the opening session. See below for links to the transcript of that subterranean conversation.

After continuing online and open conversations, I will spend some more time looking specifically at the new information environment condition, and suggesting ways that it changes our notions of what it is to be literate. Though reading, writing, and arithmetic continue to be at the core of skills involved in using information to accomplish gaols, there are additional related skills that must expand out of the 3Rs, that are as critical as the ability to decode text.

Resources: