Hintonblogger

I have been in my current position (Instructional Technologist) for a year now, and am very grateful to my school district (Gilbert Public Schools in Arizona) for the opportunity to attend NECC. The whole conference opened my eyes to a different paradigm of learning and to consider that the student perspective, with the advent of technology, might really have shifted effective educational techniques more than I had been willing to admit. The sessions I attended not only helped expose my to that paradigm, but also provided some potential short-term actions I could do to help begin meeting the challenge of educating today's students, who are truly digital natives.

The part of NECC I want to highlight today are the Wednesday morning keynote, The Natives are Restless, given by Deneen Frazier Brown and the Thursday afternoon keynote by Mark Prensky entitled Engage Me or Enrage Me: Educating Today's Digital Native Learners. Deneen's presentation was absolutely terrific and, in an engaging way, helps open up educators to the possibility that are Digital Natives are capable of much more than we are requiring of them. Both presentations make the point that technology has the potential to help us make learning more meaningful, not just more exciting. Many educators, including myself, fall into the thought that technology is enrichment or enhancement of a lesson, rather than the framework around which learning can occur. A previous keynote, the opening keynote on Monday night by David Weinburger, made the point that the learning process is rapidly evolving to a conversational process rather than one of assimilating facts. Rather than memorizing information, which is easily accessible in fractions of a second via numerous digital sources, student engagement of the material should now take greater precedent. Is content still important, absolutely, but now the context the content is placed in is of much greater importance. Gone are the days when we could get away with teaching content devoid of context or relevance.

Students have access to more information and activities than ever before and they are able to communicate and act on a greater scale and in more ways than previously possible. Each of the three keynotes, which were by far the most engaging and relevant keynotes of any education conference I've ever attended, made the case for these issues, just in their own, unique way. The fact that each of the presenters were sharing was that technology has truly revolutionized education and learning, but education has largely been left behind. This is a generalization of education as an industry, there are certainly pockets of teachers, maybe even schools, who "get" this concept and are "educating" their students. For the vast majority of us, however, we are faced with the daunting task of rexamining the basis upon which we carry forward the learning process. While it sounds daunting (and rightly so), it also exciting. We are at an educational crossroads: the tools for individualized instruction, enriched, contextual learning, and meaningful application of content are here, we just have to find them and then develop a plan to deploy them.

Okay, perhaps I'm getting a little too grandiose, my only defense is that I've been listening to others with that same vision, and its contagious. If you want to get an enriching, engaging learning experience watch the webcast of the keynotes (each is about 1 hour and 15 minutes). I know it sounds like a long time to dedicate to "watching" a keynote, but it will be worth it, if it isn't come back and add a comment so other's will know. My wife, who isn't a professional educator - but does a great job teaching our two children - started watching Deneen's presentation and couldn't help but finish it. I would recommend watching it in the following order to maximize your engagment - Deneen's >The Natives are Restless, Mark's Engage Me or Enrage Me, and finally David Weinburger's A New Shape or Knowledge. It's an exciting time and there are some great ideas out there. One of my goals in this blog is to help point out some terrific educational technology resources that help share the vision for what is possible. I welcome other opinions or suggestions for resources because the kind of change required will not necessarily be easy, especially for teachers who "fear" the technology. I believe we need to do what we can to help present a convincing and engaging plan, with plenty of "helps" along the way.