Our students, our world – David Warlick
Greetings from NECC 2008! DS & I arrived in San Antonio last night for ISTE’s (International Society of Technology Education) National Educational Computer Conference 2008. This is the largest ed tech conference in the country with over 18,000 attendees. It is HUGE!
This morning we visited the exhibits, and are now in our first session. (We tried to go to the Coolcat Teacher’s session on wikis earlier today, but couldn’t get in. Maybe she has something online that we can take a look at later.)
The presenter is David Warlick and he is talking about three converging conditions that we need to pay attention to in order to work successfully with today’s students, who are 21st century citizens learning in 19th century classrooms. Some of the content is a repeat of the information that he shared at Region 10 back in May, but it is worth repeating.
These are the three conditions:
1. Unpredicatable future
-Authors like Daniel Pink and Richard Florida say that we are moving into an age of creativity, where workers will need to be able to solve problems in creative ways.
2. Networked students
-Students have invisible tentacles/personal learning networks that connect them to the people and information that they want.
-They think of information as a raw material that can be mixed with other content to make it better.
3. New information landscape
-Wikipedia is an example of this new information landscape where information content is created by the community. Sharing of and access to information is more important than protecting the authority of the source.
In the past, curriculum, content and teachers were at the top of the hill providing information to the learners below. Today’s students are already published content creators, and are ahead of their teachers. The classroom has become “flat.” We have to be willing to let them teach us and each other. It’s no longer necessary for teachers to be the all-knowing sage.
He closed by encouraging us not to be afraid to change the way we are doing things to meet our learners’ needs.
Click here for handouts from this session.
