These are my notes from the keynote presentation at Tech Forum 2005. It was a fantastic one day conference. Unfortunately I didn’t take nearly as many notes as I would have liked to.
Disclaimer: These are my notes. They tend to wander a bit, because my mind often wanders. It’s not necessarily a good thing nor a bad thing. It’s just the way I’m wired. Since these are notes, there are probably a slew of spelling mistakes, and grammar simply does not exist at all. Many of these issues that I talk about in these notes will probably be blogged about again later in a much more polished form. So if I haven’t scared you off yet, enjoy!
Conference time once again. This time, I’m in Itasca, Illinois at Tech Forum 2005, which is presented by Technology & Learning. I would love to be blogging this live, but unfortunately there is no free wireless at this conference L You could buy it for 9.99, but who’s going to do that? Certainly not someone who has no idea where they’re going to be working next year.
Chris Dede is the keynote speaker, and he’s talking about the future of education. Right now, he’s showing a video by Panasonic which is depicting what life and learning is like for students in the 21st century. It has a lot of high tempo music along with kids playing video games, talking on cell phones, typing, instant messaging and so on. Then it has some really slow boring music and a nice shot of a teacher writing slowly on a chalkboard as the students fall asleep.
Moving right along, he points out that he’s never found Learning Styles to be too useful to him personally. However, he recognizes that students have different dimensions, and kids may be sensory based, personality based, and aptitude based. Perhaps there is a new learning style that is media based.
This is interesting, he’s talking about how his different aged children work differently. The 17 year old daughter opens her backpack, takes out her textbook, turns on her mp3 player, fires up the laptop, opens up word, pops open 3 browser windows and 7 chat windows.
He calls this a Millennial learning style. “Web rewards comparing multiple sources of information, individually incomplete and collectively inconsistent.” Another characteristic is “Digital media and interfaces encourage multi-tasking”. I love that first quote. Multiple sources of incomplete information. That’s a perfect way to describe the process I go through when I’m doing research. Rarely will a site have all the information that I need, but I tend to get a piece here, a piece there. It’s why I like tabbed browsing so much. I do a google search and before I read ANY of the results, I open up about 15 tabs with sites that look like they might have potential.
More about Millennial Learning Styles, the content and services are often personalized for personal characteristics and behaviors. ‘“Napsterism”: recombining others’ designs to idiosyncratic configurations’.
Oh boy, I like this next slide quite a bit. The title is “Evolving toward Distributed Learning”. Think about that one for a second. Distributed learning. I’m having trouble listening to him right now because I want to mull this one over a bit. Students creating content, ‘distributing’ it to other students and people around the world, creating other sources of incomplete information for even more distant students to grab on to. I have to come back to this one later. It has the potential to be a podcast in itself.
Moving right along to MUVE’s, Multi-user virtual environments. Essentially, a completely virtual experience that you share with other people. I’ve been involved in these for years, since Ddials if you think about it. From Ddials, to muds, to Xbox Live. He’s talking about how even though it’s a virtual experience, it’s still real life to these students. He’s sort of joking about how people are paying real money for virtual items on Everquest. I made almost 3,500 dollars doing this on Diablo back in the day J
He just mentioned that students are using 21st century processes to engage in garbage content. Ouch. Garbage is a harsh term. Was me spending an hour trying to figure out a trick in Halo 2 ‘garbage’? I also used those same skills to figure out how to do computer imaging.
Back to MUVE’s for a second. I remember that back around 1997, there was a big push towards moving to a Virtual World Wide Web. You had an avatar and wandered every site was like a storefront. You walked around from site to site and could get your content. I wonder if it’s still around. I’d check but there’s no free wifi L I doubt it is. While it was an interesting project, it was very clunky, and despite being 3D, it couldn’t allow for network navigation the way people do nowadays. I don’t want to walk into one store. I want to walk into 12 stores at the same time and be able to have them all open and jump back and forth between them quickly and easily. I think my biggest problem with all of these virtual world projects is that they’re trying to recreate the world we already have, sort of like the matrix. However, virtual environments don’t have to be bound by gravity, walls or distance. So why bother trying to recreate the Earth? It’s like reinventing the wheel. We already have an earth, we don’t need a virtual one.
What we do need is a new model for virtual experiences. Something interactive, flexible, something that can be destroyed and recreated as needed. Something that isn’t bound by the things we are bound to in real life. What would it look like? I have no clue. But I wouldn’t waste my time trying to figure out how to make a virtual person look like their really walking up a flight of stairs. I don’t want to walk, I don’t want to fly. If I want to be somewhere, then just put me there.
Wow, major tangent, back to the keynote. He talked quite about River City, a 3D multiuser game that was supposed to be educational. It probably is, but I’d like to take a look at it for myself. Ok, we’re on distributed learning communities. Sometimes they are face to face, but they are bound together from a distance the rest of the time. Sounds a little like the Strength of Weak Ties (go read David Jakes’ blog). Bah, slide when too fast. Did I mention that this conference provides ALL the slides from ALL the workshops in the conference guide? Love
that. Great idea.
Ubiquitous computer, one to one student to tool ratio. Often a laptop or PDA or high end cell phone. He doesn’t see laptops truly going 1:1 on a mass scale any time soon. Howeve,r handhelds have a huge amount of potential. He’s a fan of the PSP appearantly (I wonder if my free one got approved yet). A lot of power for around 10% of the price. “Wireless Mobile Devices”, WMD. Horrible acronym considering the war. Later it looks like he’s changing it to MWD’s. Much better.
Just asked an interesting question: How many motors do you have in your home? Most people have no idea because they’re essentially invisible. In the Victorian area, that would have been an applicable question. About 15 years ago, the same could be said of Microprocessors. But now, they’re essentially invisble in nthe home. Think microwave, thermostat, alarm clock, etc… They’re invisible.
Ooooo, getting into the idea of Smart Mobs. Strangers with common interests online connecting together through proximity recognition. I like that idea. Think about this. I’m stuck at the airport, waiting for a flight for a few hours. Being able to tell that the person a few seats over from me grew up in Glencoe and happens to be a huge Beatles fan as well. Voluntary information only of course, but could be cool.
Augmented reality. Computer simulation on handheld triggered by real world location. He just mentioned that you can no longer buy a cell phone that doesn’t have GPS built in and enabled. Not quite true. Just because it’s easy to recognize what tower you’re connected to, doesn’t mean that they know where you are. Although I suppose they could measure the strength of your signal to three different towers and triangulate that to get a pretty darn good idea. Hmmm… So much for privacy indeed.
Durnit, I just realized that I could probably use my phone’s GPRS to get internet, but I haven’t set it up to do so. Bah. Gotta remember to do that.
Children now see multimedia as a toolbox. There is little difference between flash, powerpoint, dreamweaver and iMovie. One is a screwdriver, one is a hammer.
We think of kids who are struggling as people who need simplfication, but at times they actually become more engaged and successful when put into more complicated situations that mirror what they’re doing outside the school setting. Interesting idea. Goes right along with the idea that there is no such thing as a fast learner or slow learner. It’s just different learning styles. Deal with it.
Here’s a great point. Teachers today didn’t start teaching and learning in this fashion. We now have a generation of learners who want co-design, co–instruction, situated learning and assessment beyond tests and papers. This is a huge idea that teachers need to wrap their minds around. It’s too big a world to confine learning to one classroom.
There are four levels of learning technologies, device level, applications level, medium level (web, interactive tv, muve’s), and infrastructure.
Unfortunately for you people who will read this, after this he started summarizing and looking forward, which required my full attention. So no more notes after this point L I really should have recorded this keynote. I don’t know why I didn’t record any of those workshops, I should have.