Last night’s keynote address was from Mark Milliron, who you might remember from our fall inservice when he addressed faculty and staff in the PAC a few years ago. His talk (conversations, as he put it) centered on the changes that are all through the education environment..both in the students and in the teachers. A few of his comments really hit chords with me (my thoughts are in parentheses after the summary bullet)
- We have three generations (Boomers, Gen X and Net Gen) in the classrooms – as BOTH students and teachers (I guess I would have known that fact if I had thought about it but having it put so simply was a light bulb for me)
- Mobile technology and gaming will change the way we teach and learn (even though, to the amazement of any of you all who know me, I am not enamored with the cell phone I do recognize that it is pervasive, getting more powerful everyday and a force to be utilized in our teaching approach in the not too distant future, gaming teaches important skills that our students will need in the workforce – teamwork, analyzing information from multiple sources simultaneously, communication, goal setting and more)
- The human touch is always going to be needed in education (the fear of losing to a computer/robot instructor should not be realized as it is too important to have the human element as part of the equation)
The biggest notion I got from Milliron was to focus on being open – to change and to opportunities
Today’s keynote was from Chris Dede, who is a professor of learning technologies at Harvard University. His talk covered a wide range of ideas and notions. Change was also his theme at the first. He identifies three major changes:
- shifts in the knowledge and skills that society values
- development of new methods of teaching/learning
- changes in the characteristics of learners
That sounded pretty familiar after Milliron’s talk. He did go into some interesting ideas after that. Two that I liked:
Distributed thinking: We are sharing thinking with others, both other people (think wikis, discussion boards or our good old conversation cafes) as well as with computers (he used the example of a tax preparation software – it does the thinking it does best which is numerical computations and he did the thinking humans do best which was finding excuses to deduct things – the results was a completed tax return with, hopefully, a satisfactory outcome)
Interfaces: He grouped the interaction humans and computers into three interfaces.
- World to Desktop: which is what we are familiar with…sit a a computer, start the browser and hit the web. What I am doing right now
- Alice in Wonderland: entering a virtual world via the computer and “leaving” the real world behind. This is what you see with multi-user virtual environments like Second Life
- Mobile/Ubiquitous Computing: Not using a laptop or desktop to access information but a mobile device like a smart phone or PDA
All of these have limitations, strengths, expectations and more to understand. The biggest idea I got from Dede was his call for a change in thinking about how we approach learning/teaching. He drew out a spectrum from simple to complex and mapped three human activities on it.
Simple = Sleeping (we can all do this – across the world – it is generally pretty easy)
Complex = Bonding (how we connect with others like friends, family and pets as well as with entities like sports teams, personal property is a very complex action that is still not understood)
His point was that we need to stop treating teaching as if it is as easy as sleeping since what we know about learning shows us it is as complicated as bonding.
To close his remarks, he used the term UNLearning. We have to un-learn a few things in order to learn new approaches. Sounded a lot like being open to change and opportunities just as last night’s speaker said as well.
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, President, Rio Salado College in Arizona. Her college is pretty unique. They have over 40,000 students and only 31 full-time faculty. There are over 1,000 adjunct faculty at the school. It is a model that, according to Dr. Thor, works very well for her college.