Organic Learning

At our Teach the Teachers Collaborative in Ojai, CA, I found out that Ian Jukes won’t be coming live tonight for our keynote address. He was delayed somewhere, so he will be coming to us virtually through Eluminate. I wanted to do a chat cast, but was asked not to because they want to make sure they had enough bandwidth for the Eluminate connection. Best laid plans sometimes need to wait. Someday, I will do the back channel chat. I think that is a good way to process information.

The title of Ian Juke’s conversation is called: Windows on the Future – Living on the Future Edge: Live a Twitch Speed

He is talking about how we aren’t changing fast enough.

He says there are 3 Exponential Trends – That no one can choose to ignore – He mentions the first, but I don’t think he ever got to mention all three trends.

1. Photonics -The 10 mbps that you can get late at night on cable is equivalent to filling a cd rom for 60 seconds. Photonics is laser light that downloads to 10 trilliom mbps. In the book, Telecosm, futurist George Gilder states that since 1977, since the first fiber was installed, bandwidth has tripled every year. This will continue for another 20 years. Bandwidth will be a trillion times faster in years to come. We can’t get comfortable with the status quo. Even wireless is getting better.

Of course he mentions the World is Flat. He says students need to compete on a global level instead of across town like 50 years ago, with not only people but machines as well. He has had to revise his book twice since the first publication. He also entions A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, explaining that left brain thinking is being outsourced and automated. I now think that every speaker needs to mention The World is Flat and a Whole New Mind to make what they are talking about relevant. What is amazing that there were many people in the audience that hadn’t heard of the books.

Ian then asked several questions: What do we teach kids, and what will they be able to do with what they know for the future? What are we doing to prepare our students?

He then opened this question up to the audience: What steps can you take to ensure that all of your students develop the essential skills including creativity training to succeed in this radically emerging exponential environment.
The answers from the audience:

• Global communication, opportunity to make a positive contribution to the society.
• We need to engage students in authentic learning where learning has purpose and meaning.
• We need to teach them how to learn.

Ian says there is a lack of value in education. People want to criticize kids for using technology and that they lack communication skills. but rather – the social skills that students have are different and are transparent for students. These tools complement the communication tools. Talks about the neurological differences between digital natives and digital immigrants. Trying to teach all of the standards is impossible. Students need to have a fundamentally different set of skills. Students need access to communications skills. Give them the habits of mind to learn for themselves. What gets measured gets done. What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done. We have a culture of dependency that gets reinforced with NCLB.

It seems that Ian only talked for a short 3o minutes with lots of comments from the audience. I always enjoy his talk. It seemed so short tonight.
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