The Who

In London with normal cold wet weather. Of course it must be as Wimbledon is on.

Trying not to think about education much for a few days but finished Richard Florida's book called The Flight of the Creative Class. Says alot about twenty first century ideas regarding the sort of people needed. New Zealand comes out ok but still alot of change needed particularly about educated people.

Went to see that great 60s band The Who last night. Well the half that are still alive that is. Amazing performance. For folk who are past 60 they sure know how to perform. 2hours of hard out rock. I hope I am still performing that well at 62.

Also reading The Search by John Batelle. Mainly about google but links in with my thinking about education and schooling is falling further behind where technology is moving.

Tomorrow off to Big Ben and other interesting places. Love London but it kills the bank balance.

Conference

The conference coninued with some great stuff. Howard Gardner with a wonderful new study on good work and also listening to Edward de Bono was great. David Perkins still the highlight.

I ended poorly. A panel discussion on IT in education. The first person said "IT is just a tool". Educationalists must realise it is "the tool!" It has the capacity to transform education (and thinking) and to treat it as just a tool means we in education will be left behind. IT has transformed medicine and commerce and is now changing the way buildings are designed and built.

It is important that is is not just another tool. If world leaders in the field of education see IT as this then the task to change our perceptions is hugely challenging.

Spending a few days in Stockholm before off to London. Stockholm is a wonderful place. Everyone needs to visit here. Don't come in mid-summer as half the place is closed.

Conferences

I am in Sweden at the moment at a conference on Thinking. not just in education but across sectors. I feel that thinking is the solution to the problem of where our education goes. It necessarily to me involves the whole area of digital collaboration and the developments in literacy around that.
There has been considerable discussion at the conference about what education needs to do to develop further around where we need to go on thinking and some of this (although not enough in my opinion) is about linking digitally.
But the slowness of pickup by educators is huge and this concerns me. There is so little change in what people are actually doing that I still see the issue is that education trails the 'real' world in how it operates.

The recent conference on 21st Century Learning Environements in New Zealand had only 3 out of 100 people who used RSS feeds, had their own blog and web page. That is quite scary when these people are supposed to be the leaders of where we are going.

At this conference the same ideas are dominant. We need to change to embrace new learning but how when the dominant paradigm of testing, assessing, and transmitting knowledge is so entrenched. Learning of thinking in a digital environment does seem the way forward. We need adaptable, creative, resourceful citizens of the 21st Century. This is what Richard Florida talks about in his creative class.

Highlights so far in the conference have been Guy Claxton again and David Perkins. As well there was a very interesting presentation on the thinking of being chess master by Jonathon Rowson.

More interesting stuff today.

21st Century Learning Environments

My presentation went well. Except it was on 21st Century learning Environments and cookies weren't enabled there was a very old version of flash so some of my links did not work.

Says a lot that a conference on 21st Century learning environments could not run 21st Century software. How the heck do we build 21st Century schools?

Presentation

My presentation on 21st Century Learners is on today. Should be interesting. Some notes on this presentation are on my Wiki. Feel free to add some more as we are all keen to learn.

Also heard that my funding looks likely now for stage 2 which is very exciting.

21st Learning

Today I was at a Ministry of Education sponsored on 21st Century Learning Environments.

I really liked Jane Gilbert's presentation on knowledge and what that means. It sits very close to mine. The idea that knowledge is not universal seems so obvious but so alien to what happens in schools. It still is all about knowledge acquisition and so little about meaning.

Until we reconsider the meaning of knowledge and its transmission schools appear to be stuck in the constraints of the modernist thought.

There is a lot of talk about IT but little about what that means. The here and the now. But still the drivers are against this.