PD Development Meeting — Stretching Online Learning in Austin Texas

Notes:»

I guess that the bottom line of my talks today is that for a number of reasons, teaching, learning and education have changed. We are preparing a new generation of learners, within a new information environment, for a future we can now longer describe. Each of these new characteristics of our experience changes some aspect of how we teach, what we teach, and why.

There are three basic questions that are posed in this workshop. Im going to list them here, and then, after my day with the Math people, I will insert some of the best answers that I heard.

  1. What do children need to be learning to be ready for an unpredictable future?
  2. The best thing we can be teaching our children (and adult learners) is how to teach themselves. One way of lifting the ceiling on learning is to say, “Go out and learn this and then come back and share!”
  3. What are the pedagogies of this new species of learner?
  4. Millennials respond to the pedagogies of their native information experience, one that is

    • Responsive
    • provokes conversation
    • is fueled by questions
    • refines identity
    • inspires personal investment
    • and is guided by safely-made mistakes
  5. How do we turn this new information landscape from a distraction into a tool?
  6. Use it to turn the learning environment inside-out. Make sure that what learners do with what they are learning is shared with an authentic and appreciative audience. Also, make sure that learners (and teachers) are practices contemporary literacies (learning-literacies) within the context of networked, digital, and abundant information.

There are three basic topics that we will be exploring today. Here are links to the online handouts for each.

The backchannel trasnscript will be available here.

Its a pleasure to be here on this foggy Texas day. Didnt expect that. I am most pleased to be seeing old friends here, with whom Ive worked before.

One of the thoughts that kept coming to mind yesterday was how it felt to me, in the earliest days of my involvement with ed tech, when if you wanted the computer (Radio Shack TRS-80) to do something for you, you had to figure out a way to program it to do that. I felt that this was, in a sense, where you are, in a brand new application of computer and the Internet, and you want it to do something for you, to produce some engaging learning experience. You have to figure out how to make that happen. Its not so simply as to go out and select a piece of software. Its extremely exciting.

More notes to come.

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