Serendipity35

21st Century Learning at the Crossroads is the title of the conference coming up this December 1 & 2 at Kean University in Union, NJ.

The event is co-Sponsored by the Center for Innovative Education (CIE) at Kean and the New Jersey Consortium for Middle Schools.

CIE seeks to strike a balance between the demands of formal educational accountability and meeting the challenges of the 21st century global environment. Toward that end we will offer rich professional development activities, ranging from short workshops to national conferences, on topics ranging from classroom instruction in specific content areas to deep explorations of cutting-edge technologies.

There are 4 keynote speakers.

Governor Angus King who I have written about earlier here and the statewide 1 to 1 computing project he began. in Maine.

Chris Moersch who currently serves as the Director of the National Business Education Alliance and the National LoTi Project whose collective mission is to elevate technology use and student achievement in the classroom.

Alan November who was selected as one of the first Christa McAuliffe Educators for pioneering the role of children as important community problem solvers. As an author, designer, and practitioner, Alan guides schools in using technology to improve student learning.

Cheryl Lemke is President and CEO of the Metiri Group, a consulting firm dedicated to advancing effective uses of technology in schools, and serves as the Practice Leader for Metiri Group Policy Consulting. She specializes in public policy for K-12 learning technology, working at many levels with governors, legislators, superintendents, business leaders, and teachers.

Of course, one of the most valuable aspects of conferences for me is being able to network, in this case with PreK-12 and Higher Ed colleagues.

Some of the scheduled sessions will be Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Digital Storytelling, iStory Tours: Global Technology and Education, Assistive Technology: Reaching All learners, Using iPods to Enhance Language Acquisition, Establishing Communities of Learners and One to One Learning Initiatives.

I'll be doing two sessions. "The Reading & Writing Homework You Don't Need to Assign" will take a look at the current research into what the Net Generation (which I prefer to "millennials" since the key seems to be their native netness rather than just the decade of birth) is using to learn without much help, guidance, or collaboration with their teachers and schools. I'm starting to believe that all students are distance learning students. They are reading and writing outside school without teachers having to make any assignments. Digital natives are using blogs, discussion tools, social networking, wikis, metatagging, image sharing and sophisticated search tools at sites like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube. As we heard throughout the 1960's about television, they spend more hours online than they spend with you in a classroom. (They are actually spending less time watching TV than earlier generations.)

The follow-up session is "Taking Advantage of Learning 2.0." So many of the Web 2.0 applications that students are willingly using outside school have educators and parents concerned. Sites like MySpace and Facebook offer frightening personal information. Flickr and YouTube offer images that can shock us. And students turn to Wikipedia and paper mills for cut and paste research. As with earlier technologies, teachers need to familiarize themselves with these tools in order to guide students in their uses for educational purposes. I'll address some positive applications of these often negatively-portrayed online tools.