David Warlick – Our Students, Our Worlds
· Goal is to take the ideas of the conference and summarize them into three bullet points
· These are three disruptive, converging conditions
· Online handouts http://handouts.davidwarlick.com
· Include flat, classrooms, and Warlick and then a blog post becomes part of the handouts
· Going to his main website has some links to this presentation. It is in a blue box on the left-hand side. I didn’t pick up that exact address, but I believe it points to his Landmark Project site.
· Figured out the address http://landmark-project.com
· Also available through Second Life – David Warlick keeps an online office at this site/service
· We’ve prepared a work force that could work in straight rows, performing repetitive tasks, under close supervision
· It is important for us as educators to understand that things change so fast that we can no longer predict the future for which we are preparing our students.
· As teachers, when we started, we had no reason to expect education to change, and change rapidly, during our careers. We know that this is not true today.
· We are preparing students for an unpredictable future
· Thomas Friedman does a great job of telling stories in The World is Flat.
o Did you know that UPS ships 13 million packages a day, and that at any one given time 2% of the world GDP is in a UPS truck
o Wal-Mart itself would be the 8th largest trading country with China if it were a company
o 46% of students in China graduated with engineering degrees. Only 5% did in the US
· Richard Florida and Daniel Pink – books have resonated with education
· Richard Florida:
o We are moving from an industrial age to a creative age – wealth is created by people coming up with more interesting, efficient, and creative ways of doing things.
o Makes a case that we are losing industrial jobs but gaining engineering and arts jobs
· Kids don’t invest in technology. They invest in a new story, often found in games or other types of digital media
· We should be putting more emphasis in science and math, but also in art and music
· The students are 21st century students who are learning in 19th century classrooms
· Text messaging – college freshman never need to say goodbye to their high school friends. They are in constant communication. Then they walk into our classrooms and we want them to be the students that we were.
· Our students are close to having every reason to expect to have learning experiences built for their aptitudes.
· We have networked students
· We do not fully understand the breadth of the digital divide that is generational
· The greatest element of that divide is the community. Students have learned how to harness that community.
· It is in our national interest that everyone has access to broadband Internet and digital content. We are VERY far behind compared to other countries. Macedonia is superior to us in that way. The whole country is wireless.
· Our students learn through their social networks such as Facebook, something which we don’t fully understand. We need to discussing with our kids about what the value of something like Facebook truly is.
· Text messaging – kids have invented a new language on the fly, and they have done it collaboratively. Warlick is amazed. We would put together a committee to do that.
· Wombat in texting – means “waste of money, brains, and time”
· Gaming – learning engines. You can’t play the game until you learn something. We are just starting to learn how to harness this power.
· Students have a new information landscape
· Students use information as a raw material
· Our generation thinks about information differently. We consume information. It is a product. For children, information is raw material. Content is meant to be mixed with other content. Remixing – powerful!
· There are times when we both need authority based information and there are other times when we need the wisdom of the masses (like with Digg)
· Why do we ask whether Wikipedia is reliable when we never ask that question about Encyclopedia Brittanica? Shouldn’t we be teaching students how to decide what is relevant and accurate from all these sites?
· Our students need to be good, responsible creators of content.
· 64% of American teenagers have published content on the Internet
· Many of our students are more literate than their teachers – literate in personal publishing