The Milennials in our Classrooms (David Warlick)

7th February 2007

posted in edtech, schoolreform |

These are my notes from David Warlick’s TECSIG luncheon keynote at TCEA 2007 in Austin, Texas on Feb 7, 2007. David granted permission for me to record and share this session as a podcast, I’ll publish that here later this week.

http://handouts.davidwarlick.com

Wiki page: Retooling for the Millennial Child

“it’s about conversation”
“this is what learning in the 21st century is about”

People who tag blog posts “millenials” or “warlick” will be included in the presenation notes sidebar

hitchhikr.com website: virtual conference notes
- David demonstrated aggregation potential of Hitchhikr
- if you can’t attend a conference, with this tool you can hitchhike (for free) to the conference

Warning: David re-arranged his slides for this presentation this morning!
- today I want to tell you about
- Jennifer James’ structure, a social anthropologist who talks about leadership and storytelling as a leadership quality
– she contends the leader who can tell a compelling story will be a leader that will help people move into the 21st century
–Telling a story
— needs to fit the marketplace
— resonate to deeply held values
— we need to be able to model the story

IN what ways does this story fit its marketplace? (pictures of kids all sitting attentively in their desks)
- a workforce that can work in straight rows, performing repetitive tasks, under close supervision

Story of the marketplace today is being told well by Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat”
- story he tells of Dell laptop computer used to write the book
- he contacted Dell and found out the person who answered the support line was Mujteba Naqvi in India
- his computer was manufactured in Malaysia
- Innards were from China, Costa Rica, Singapore, Philippines, Japan, Korea, and more….

If Wal Mart was a country, it would be China’s 8th largest trading partner
- the number of UPS packages being shipped today

This is a story of globalization
We tend to focus on competition and competitiveness, but I beg to differ
- we need to become more cooperative

Question we hear is ” Why are we outsourcing all this manufacturing”
- the better question: “What do I need to know, to be able to facilitate this kind of supply chain?”
- what do I need to know to adapt to this global economy

DID YOU KNOW that…
- stats on aging NASA employees
- stats on Chinese students graduating with engineering degrees
- NASA employees over the age of 60 ou

Richard Florida’s books on the Creative Class
- “The Flight of the Creative Class” and the ”
- we are moving from an industrial age to a creative age
- growth is increasingly driven by creativity rather than industry
- we are going to lost another 500,000 manufacturing jobs
- we will gain 200,000 sciene and enginerring jobs
- also gain 400,000 creative arts jobs

Pictures of Mark (David’s son) at age 15 when he was in his “cockpit”
- connected to iPod, Xbox, playing cooperative/interactive games, text messaging to people playing XBox on dialup
- point of this picture: When Mark invests in his games, in that technology, he is not investing in the technology
- he is buying the story, the experience, he is investing in the images, the story, the plot he is becoming a part of
- he is investing in the creative arts

[NICE TECHNIQUE: IN THE RIGHT SIDEBAR OF ALL HIS SLIDES DAVID INCLUDED HIS HANDOUTS URL]

Slide: “Anatomy of the Long Tail”
- based on 1998 study, compared new media industries with old smokestack industries
- looked at Rhapsody, Amazon.com, and Netflix
- they counted the number of products they sell and actually sold
[I THINK THIS SLIDE IS FROM A WIRED MAGAZINE ARTICLE]
- shows the long tail of Rhapsody songs not available at WalMart
- Chris Anderssen in 2004 discovered this
- this provides a nice visual of our new information landscape
- the new digital bazaar that is the web is what makes the long tail possible

David has 2 books that were self-published
- first 3 editions of that book made enough money to send David’s daughter to college
- the last two books were published 1 hour after David finished writing them
- used website lulu.com, used Microsoft Word to write the book, uploaded a PDF version
- I said I wanted to make $3 on the sale of the book, Lulu said they could sell that book for $18, I said go for it!
- it has become so easy to project our voice and now even become part of the economy

There is an enormous economy in the creative arts now that we often underestimate or do not understand / see
- more slides of the long tail

That is a little about the marketplace
Now: what story do we need to tell about our kids
- these students are different in many ways
- “me decade” runs smack into “family values”
- no generation EVER has been taken so seriously
- Book “Millenials Rising” by Steve ____ (says that because of the world these kids are growing up in, could be the next greatest generation)

most kids today haev never played pac man or pong, listened to an 8 track, purchased a vinyl album, seen a TV with less than 100 channels, heard “where’s the beef” “I’d walk a mile for a camel” or “de plane, the plane”

These kids are smart and connected
- it is an insult to them that we are teaching our children with an education

Our kids have powers that would have been unimaginable to me when I was growing up
- they can see and talk through walls
- they almost have an invisible tentacle that can reach out and touch others, they are like aliens
- these tentacles are invisible, we cannot see these, but they are hands and feet that students use to devine themselves

Kids walk into our classrooms and we chop off these tentacles
- because we want students to be the children we want to teach (20th century students)

Video produced by David’s son at agae 17 when he was home sick and and bored
- his favorite DVD is “The Music Man”
- did a lip sync to a scene from that movie
- David did not teach him how to do that, and he knows his high school teachers didn’t teach him

How did he learn that?
- he is part of a network
- that network helps him learn what he wants to learn
- there is power in being in the community
- being alone is entirely different: powerless in many ways

This is a NATIONAL problem

showed

[I NEED TO GET THE LINK TO THE PROGRAM KAREN MONTGOMERY HAS FOR TRANSLATING WRITING INTO IM SPEAK]

We should be in awe of the new grammar these kids have invented that is perfect
- they did it in collaboration
- they did causally
- we would have tried to do this with a committee of standards
- we should be in awe of this

Our job is NOT to teach them that this is the way you write and this is the way you don’t
- our job is to HELP THEM MAKE THE DECISION of how to write in different contexts
- IM is a big

wombat: Waste of Money Brains and Time

We should pay more attention to video games
Books
- David Shaffer: “How Computer Games Help Chldren Learn” 2006
- Marc Prensky: “Don’t Bother Me Mom– I’m Learning” 2006
- John Beck: “Got Game” 2005
- James Paul Gee: “What Video Games Have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy” 2006
- Bill Gurley: “The Breakout Business of MMORPG” WEb 2.0 Conference, 5 Oct 2004.

Beck game book includes likelihood based on age that

Tip from Don Hindsley during the preso:
- sloodle.com - combination of SL and Moodle (uses Moodle but you must have an SL account)
- only about 1000 members
- IBM is already using SL for worldwide conferences
- one of Don’s high school students makes $200-$300 per character building characters and selling them on ebay

Gaming teaches us that students learn in environments that are:
- competitive
- involve risk taking
- are sociable

Our kids believe in luck in a different way, they are the hero of their video games, this helps kids be self-confident in new ways
- kids become the hero by FAILING
- they try, they study, they try again, and they keep going

video clip game
- best thing instructionally about this game example is THERE IS NO RULE BOOK
- kids have to figure out what the rules are, and how to operate within the limitations of the game

Now kids are turning World of Warcraft and Halo2 and making them into films
- the cameraman is capturing the video through a video editing program
- capture it and put
- called “machinama” [I AM NOT SURE THAT IS SPELLED RIGHT]
- we think of information as end product, kids don’t think of information that way: they think of information as a raw material that you can remix and put together in new and interesting ways

We need to be able to talk about
- Google now processes 1 billion searches a day
- does it surprise you that we are asking that many questions each day?
- in the 1950s we weren’t asking that many questions!
- we are now getting very dependent on wanting that information at a distance

Vinod Khosla
- founding CEO of Sun Microsystems
- on a podcast on IT Conversations, from 5 Oct 2005, Audio Archive, 25 Nov 2005
- interviewer was a wired magazine editor
- www.itconversations.com/shows/detail796.html

said today’s kids think everything is clickable, even their parents
- what does a clickable teacher look like?
- what does a clickable classroom look like?
- that type of responsiveness to

Information is increasingly
- networked
- digital
- overwhelming
- without containers (there is no boundary to WikiPedia, unlike a traditional 30 volume encylopedia)

This impacts DIRECTLY on what our definitions of what it means to be literate in the 21st century

We increasingly need to know how
- to expose information
- employ information

If info is a raw material: we need to not just teach kids how to calculate
- how many feel overwhelmed by content? that is not our biggest challenge
- my biggest challenge is: how do I get my message through that storm of information?

So we need to teach kids how to express ideas in COMPELLING ways

we have to stop being the gatekeeper, and teach our students to be the gatekeepers
- that is an ethical issue
- we need to embed the ethical use of information into every conversation we have with kids

Podcast interview with John Beck, games author
- on levels of games: at end you always face a master monster called the “boss”
- what does a corporate person think of a person acting as a boss: an obstacle
- suggests instead of being the boss, we should be the strategy guy
- like a book of cheats on a video game
- maybe our job as educators is to create that second level

Technorati: is to the blogosphere what Google is to the web
- they have access to all the conversations
- Dave Sifry’s period graphs on blog conversations, provides photographs of what bloggers are caring about and talking
- size of the blogosophere is doubling every 6 months
- that rate of expansion has been consistent for the last 3 years
- our conversations!
- most of it is junk/trash
- but there are a lot of very serious, smart people who are reflecting on their experiences, sharing it, engaging

We live in a time of rapid change, and in that time we are going to ask brand new questions and seek brand new answers
- often those answers aren’t going to come from a book published 5 years ago
- or someone who got their PhD 5 years go
- the answer may come from someone in the 11th grade

http://innocentive.com - come and describe your problem, and anyone can come in and solve your problem
- companies promise to pay for a solution to these problems
- researcher at MIT is analyzing backend data
- odds of a solver’s expertise increases in fields in which they had no formal expertise
– Karim Lakhani

It’s my information
“Never understimate the power of 100 million amateurs with keys to the factory”
- Chris Anderessen

Remember classrooms where the teacher’s desk was up on riser, and the content was up on a hill and was transmitted DOWN

How many of our children’s teachers are published authors, published artists
- classrooms are flat
- from the perspective of literacy, in some ways our students are more literate than we are

Where do we get the energy to drive teaching and learning if we can’t rely on gravity?

What does school 2.0 look like?

[JAKE 2.0?]

Vinod Khosla
- the company that owns the media is going to drive the future
- it is not just the company that can grow and maintain AUDIENCES (not content)

so we need to make our classrooms into a learning engine
- pay attention to the kids: their myspace activities, their games

Be responsive
- games are responsive to everything kids do

How do we make our classrooms more responsive?
- shareable rewards
- it was a reward system the kids wanted to talk about
- personal investment: when people have to invest in a game, you are personaly invested, you keep coming back because of what you’ve already learned and invested

Identity building is key for video games
Collaboration
Value adding

All these are lessons from video games, we need to pay attention and learn from the kids, their behavior and what they value

Friedman sayd 4 types of peopl
- special (Michael Jordan)
- specialized (can do things no one else can, make themselves and expert)
- highly adaptable (can relearn and unlearn)
- anchored (make a living by touching you or something you own)

Bottom line
- the future is not secure
- I was prepared for a future that was secure, like my Dad who would work the same job for 30 years
- we need to prepare students for a future of opportunity, rather than a world of security
- that is done differently

Technorati Tags: millennials, tcea, tcea07, tcea2007, warlick

On this day..

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 1:39 pm and is filed under edtech, schoolreform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.