Visioning New Schools with David Warlick

By Wesley Fryer On February 7, 2012 · · Add Comment

These are my notes from David Warlick‘s opening keynote at the February 7, 2012 Oklahoma Technology Association / Encycl-Media Conference. MY THOUGHTS AND COMMENTS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

Master learners today and master teachers must model lifelong learning
– that is one of the best ways to develop students who are lifelong learners

Handouts / backchannel archive from David’s presentations: (these are the same site, the first points to the second)
colearners.idave.us
http://davidwarlick.com/colearners

Links from today’s session: http://davidwarlick.com/colearners/?p=426

David is using his own Twitter site that also lets people share resources: http://knitterchat.com
– I will archive this conversation, and add comments/feedback
– this models how our conversations should extend beyond this F2F moment

20th century education was defined by its limits
21st century education must be defined by its lack of limits

Calculators were introduced when I started teaching, it was going to be ‘the gift to last a lifetime

I taught in an information scarce learning environment
– the pedagogues I learned college were based on that model
– over 2.5 million images uploaded PER DAY to Flickr alone

Interesting question: what are the pedagogies of information abundant learning environments
– when you have access to this world, what are the best learning strategies?

We have access to a billion people, almost 300 billion pieces of new information
– this access is part of the culture of young people

We could not have predicted this in the early 1970s when I started teaching as a history teacher

I’m going to jump ahead to my conclusion: I think we should stop integrating technology and start integrating literacy
– what should kids learn today is how to teach themselves

Literacy: reading what someone you trust hands to you?
– now we have WikiPedia

Stories about WikiPedia
– highlighting warnings on different WikiPedia about accuracy, bias, etc.

Basic literacy skills today are discerning

We must expand our notions of what it means to be literate today
– can you expose what is true in the information

My kids can Google, but can they find information with Google that is appropriate to the learning task
– being able to find it, decode it, evaluate it, conceptualize, and organize

Today online we’re not working with a few numbers, we can be working with thousands of numbers

Sources of raw data from David’s Landmark project website
– specifically looking at ANSS to get earthquakes since 2004 with magnitude over 4
– this renders a data set with time, lat, long, magnitude, etc
– copy all those numbers
– in this example there are about 10,000 numbers
– now I can copy these into a free spreadsheet from OpenOffice.org

Paste Data in
– pastes into first column
– select first column
– select TEXT TO COLUMNS
– choose fixed width
– now I can define each column, hid those I don’t need
– now I get a spreadsheet
– latitude needs to be on the right with open office
– make an XY scatterplot

What you are looking at here is history
– I used skills to make those numbers tell their story
– isn’t that what math is all about?

but now we have invisible numbers
– when I grew up we just learned about abstract numbers in math class
– now text, images, sound, video, animation, are all made out of numbers

Now we’ll go to Words of Humankind from the Landmark Project
– US Presidential Addresses
– use TagCrowd to make a tag cloud, this can empower that text to better tell its story

I used carry an Oxygen* keyboard, it’s not a musical instrument, it’s designed to generate numbers and my computer
– David sharing a song he made with Intuem software

We all have a story to tell, we all have something to teach

New record for information transfer: 186 gigabits per second (Dec 2011)
– what can you and your students do with that quantity of information?!

MY THOUGHT: WE’RE OVERWHELMED WITH TMI ALREADY, AS DAVID POINTS OUT THE KEY IS FILTERING AND USING

information competes for our attention, just like products on the school shelf competed for our attention historically in our classrooms
– our kids need to
– not just the ability to write a coherent paragraphs, our goal should be expressing ideas compellingly to a real audience

Shared a video from SFETT 2011 which has been seen in at least 23 different countries, and the girl who made the video has been contacted by the CEOs
– music communicates powerfully

Much of what I’m talking about today are things I believe
– Any school today that thinks it can teach children to be literacy

Now discussing SPAM: Spam cost the world $50 billion in 2005, cost doubled in 2007
– yet the Copenhagen group estimates we could solve HIV/AIDS worldwide for $27 billion

Learning and Literacy today is exposing what is true, employing information, expressing ideas compellingly, ethically, generously

Conclusion: Redefine literacy so it reflects today’s prevailing information environment
– digital tools are the paper and pencil of our time

How do we do this? It starts with us!
– it can be scary but you can do it

Now telling story about my senior English teacher from 1969

Today the world is the curriculum
– our information landscape has changed, and our kids are different

We will have obtained a transformation of education when we no longer have teachers who believe they can teach the same thing, the same way, each day / month / year
– anything less than that is just

It is having access to today’s prevailing information landscape
– become information artisans and master learners

Now sharing blog setup after London bombings: We’re Not Afraid.com

When in history have people like you and I been able to whisper to the world something as powerful as, “We are not afraid?”

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