ProfessorTOSA Blog

To reference all of the conference notes from our group, please refer to our SBSD conference Wiki,

It’s been a busy few days at the Digital Natives, Digital Immigrant conference in Monterey. Sifting through hours of tech tools and finding motivation through rhetorical lectures exhausted me, but to the credit of a tech-reborn administrator, a supportive district, and a phenomenal group of educators I find that the end of this journey comes with a synthesized closure. Because of my team here in Monterey, I didn’t endure seminars, I found an understanding that was only possible with the collaboration I was privy to.

Of all the sessions of the conference, Mark Prensky and Will Richardson were certainly the two best speakers. Both educators have had significant influence on the state of the technology in education and as well as creating this Web 2.0 we’re all trying to understand and navigate. For no other reason than these two gentlemen, the conference was a wild success.

“Our kids were born to the idea of rapid change”

Mark Prensky was the first keynote speaker of the conference and he was the primary reason for my visit to Monterey. He is known for his expertise designing video games and especially popular because of his theory of the “Digital Native, Digital Immigrant.” Mark’s presentation was phenomenal and offered insight into our tech condition in and out of the classroom. I appreciated his global clarity on how technology fills our lives and how our technological future is on a remarkable path to quickly reach unimaginable heights. From my perspective, this idea of technology becoming exponentially more complex in the very near future to be realistic and inevitable and I would imagine that few would argue this idea. However, this would mean that educators need to admit that the future, as it is being described here, requires a new educational perspective and consideration that maybe looking to the past (how we have taught) to guide our childrens’ future isn’t the best manner of instruction. This would mean that maybe, we, as an educational system, need to reconstruct our means of measuring success and stop trying to teach like we have since the 1800s.

Now, this sort of thinking is not generally popular. Educators have done wonderful things with their classes, their students have grown to accomplish significant futures and because of this teachers are a hesitant bunch to change what works for what is new. But while Mark and Will acknowledge this, they argue that if we respect the technological strengths of our students, we would increase our “student scores” as well as offer them a more meaningful and significant position in their future.

I find all of this fascinating, and it hasn’t taken much to convert me into a disciple of this school of thought. However, with my experience with the immigrants of my district (and I consider myself one), I am sensitive that promoting change of this magnitude is tough and not a wise effort overnight. Moving from “how things have been done” to a model where the “process” is hard to measure is a slow transition and one that will not likely occur until the Natives themselves earn their teaching credential and promote change through their own careers.

“Teachers see technology as a tool rather than the foundation that is integrated into everything we do!” -Student

Will Richardson spoke to this topic when he began his presentation. Not surprisingly, Will, who is the guru of Web 2.0 – wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc… – feels that the school system his kids are enrolled, does not respect the needs of his kids. He agrees with Mark and motivates in a similar manner, but with Will, he does well to keep his possible shifts for our system manageable and not so incredibly unlike our current pedagogy. For Will, the future is in collaboration and the construction of knowledge through blogs, wikis, and the read and write web. As I described in a previous blog, this type of learning and teaching is shared and although Will suggests a good hard look at what we teach, his tools are not so impossible to integrate, and I like that. Like Mark, Will does see our future progressing to unconceivable levels, but I thought Will did a better job motivating educators while referring to the tools and resources of our current world and not the unimaginable world of 20/20.

And so, while I have many other elements of the conference to share, I find the above as an ample entry for now. Certainly my group has a fantastic grouping of resources and sites that do nearly everything you might hope to make your life easier, but for me, it’s the vision that is most important at first and tools come later. Although I can’t wait to create a wiki with kids, without a global understanding of the purpose and the need, the wiki is less than it can be, and doesn’t fully prepare our students for their futures.