Mar 02 2008
K-12 Online Keynote – Inventing the New Boundaries
This is the 3rd time I’ve watched David Warlick’s K-12 Online Pre-Conference Keynote as I struggle to compose a response. This time I took notes so maybe that will help.
An “Aha!” moment that I had during the talk was that the parents of the elementary age students I work with don’t seem to be thinking about the “future we cannot describe”. They see technology as a play item and possibly a threatening socializing option for their children, not the digital access to a future that may hold more free-lancers than workers going to corporate sites every day.
There are many bits from this talk that I will use in my work with students and teachers. The most important piece I want to remember for students is not to take away the “alien tentacles” they use to access information and their networks when they are not in school. How do we help them to incorporate the practices they find so energizing outside of school in a learning setting? When I work with teachers I like the model that David used near the end of the talk that introduces three converging conditions in today’s landscape of teaching and learning.
My comment on the K-12 conference site is:
I work with young students (ages 5-10) and I agree with David that we are educating them for a future we can’t begin to predict. I don’t think many of our parents have realized that yet and they are reluctant to embrace technology as a vital element in the learning setting of their children. It seems that parents think of technology as games that may or may not be healthy activities for their child and then they fear the access to the Internet and socializing because of the media hype about safety concerns. We need to keep educating parents about a future where skills of autonomy, creativity and collaboration are highly valued and need to be inculcated at an early age.
A question I am left with is what does it look like to revamp our assumptions in our schools so that all stakeholders understand one of David’s conclusions: “the best thing we can be teaching our students is how to teach themselves”?
