I just raced from one end of the convention center and raced over to see David Warlick’s spotlight session. I got here late, so I missed the beginning. I’m also sitting so far back that I won’t be able to record it. I really hope that Dave is, but since it does make a living from doing this sort of thing so he may not want to broadcast it.

This year we will generate five exobytes of new information. Only .01% of that information will be printed. Pretty staggering numbrs. He’s predicting that books may only be ‘around’ for one more generation. I’ve had this conversation with some colleagues recently and made the same argument. A generation of students that have no fond memories of reading a physical, paper book. Would they miss books? Probably not.

He has a picture of a classic office setting. He’s going through pieces of the office and explaining why we won’t need them in the workplace of the future. It’s a fun, yet powerful way to make the point. You won’t need the desk phone because you already have the cell phone. Won’t need chairs in that office for other people because you have video conferencing. Won’t need the computer on the desk because you’ll have a wearable computer. You won’t have to leave it on the desk at work.

When you take everything away that you won’t need, you’re left with almost nothing. “And that’s exactly what we know about the workplace of the future, almost nothing”. We are preparing our students for a future that we can not clearly describe. What do students need to know in order to be prepared for a future that is a mystery to us.

Side note: Dave really is a master presenter. His PowerPoints really are incredible. If you’ve never seen him present before, you should. Even if his content was garbage (which it isn’t), he’d be worth seeing because of the his presenation style. He walks around, he gestures appropriately (but not nervously). He is eloquent and his visuals accent his presentation without dominating it. They don’t repeat what he’s saying, nor do they serve as his notes. I’d love to see him do a workshop about how to be a presenter at some point.

Literacy as we know it, Reading Riting and Rithmetic. Literacy is about so much more than simply reading something and comprehending it. You have to question the validity of what you’re reading, the motivation of the author and so on. He’s using the same example that Alan November is so fond of as well, the Martin Luther King site that’s actually been created by a white supremacy organization. It’s a powerful example.

What does it mean to be a reader in the 21st century? Can you expose the truth in the information that you are consuming? You have to be able to find the information, decode it, critically evaluate it, and organize it into personal digital libraries.

Dave is embarrassing me again. Just had me stand up and say hello to the crowd once again. He’s showing my site and using my del.icio.us account as an example again. Some day, I will get my revenge on him for making me blush in front of a large number of people.

He’s getting into RSS and del.icio.us and aggregators and more. I’m following along and digging what he’s saying (preaching to the choir), but I do wonder if he’s losing people who don’t have experience with this topic. I wonder if the ordinary average Joe can relate to this portion of the workshop.

Wow, that entire piece just might have been a tangent. He’s just getting back to what it means to be proficient in ‘rithmetic in the 21st century. So that entire section that he just did was off the PowerPoint and ‘improvised’ in a sense. I’d be curious to hear what people thought of it. Don’t get me wrong, very cool and I’m totally on board with what he was talking about, but I do wonder whether he lost people along the way. It’s a pretty in depth and somewhat geeky topic. We really need a way to subscribe to blogs with one click (besides bookmarklets).

Wow. He just showed us an example where he searched for some earthquake data, brought it into excel, created a graph and it magically turned into a map of the world, identifying areas where earthquakes have occurred. I say magically, and I really do mean it. It was something amazing to say.

Back to the primary presentation and he’s talking pretty fast. I wonder if he just realized that he’s a little behind due to the tangents. The tangents were fantastic, but I do wonder how the general public felt about them.

We’ve moved on to the “Long Tail” theory. I feel a little foolish because I’ve only heard the theory applied to the blogosphere! I had no idea that it originated from a study of consumer behaviors.

Heh, I’m hearing some beeping in the background that I have a suspicious feeling is coming from iChat. I wonder if Dave remembered to shut down iChat before he began?

Showing a very powerful presentation that a student created to explain the problems with a global economny. I find it fascinating that the teacher gave her the option to create the video instead of writing an essay. Dave is right, you use just as much critical thinking and writing skills to create a video like this, it’s just a different medium. In some ways it’s way more powerful. Hmm, I wonder if the teacher did ask permission or if the student just chose to do it anyway. I remember in college, instead of doing a paper portfolio I created an portfolio as a web page. That students video has been seen in 23 countries.

Heh, I just heard the line that Tom Hoffman criticized on his blog a few weeks ago, about making sure that we don’t drop music and art from our schools. It got a spontaneous round of applause here. Actually, I don’t think it was exactly the same, but regardless I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being inspirational.

In conclusion, we need to stop integrating technology. Instead we need to redefine literacy and integrate that. Hmm. Haven’t heard that one before. I’ve heard everything leading up to it, but I need to mull that one over a bit.

Dave handed out slips of paper with interesting quotes for people to think about as they leave the session. Being the geek that I am, I collected one of each to post here!

They’re all from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.

* UPS’s fleet of 270 aircraft makes it the 11th largest airline in the world.
* In China last year, BScs in engineering represented 46% of all university degrees; in America it was 5%
* eBay now has 105 million registered users from 190 countries, trading more than $64 billion of goods annually.
* When multinationals ‘outsource’ work to developing countries, they typically not only save 75% on wages, but also gain a 100% increase in productivity.
* Google now processes approximately 1 billion searches a day.

Things that make you go hmmm…..

• Redefining Conference Handouts
• BLC06: Literacy remixed
• The Educated Blogger
• The expert’s toolbox
• S.M.A.R.T.: Learning Styles

Tom Hoffman
7/1/2005

Lest there be any confusion, I’m strongly in favor of maintaining and expanding the role of music and the arts in our schools, I would just make the argument from a humanist/liberal arts point of view. I think stressing our traditions in this area is stronger than the novelty and/or economic arguments.

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