Teach42

Chris Dede is the first keynote of the IL-TCE conference.  His focus seems to be on the evolution of education.  Technology is changing the ‘characteristics of learners’, quite simply, students are fundamentally different than they were several years ago.  Kids today have instant access to cell phones, portable game systems, instant gratification permeates their very existance.  Consequently, slowing them down to the speed of chalk really goes against their natural learning styles.

He mentioned that he does understand the idea of learning styles, but the reality is that he teachers to groups.  If he was tutoring, then he could really cater to a visual learner, or an auditory learner, or a physical learner.  But when you’re teaching to a large group of people, like most teachers do, he has difficulty gearing his content to specific learning styles.  However, he feels that some newer learning styles really hit an entire generation.  Media based learning styles. 

Great quote: ‘Millennial’ learning styles - The "web rewards comparing multiple sources of information, individually incomplete and collectively inconsistent."  "Digital media and interfaces encourage multitasking".  Something to chew on. 

Did you ever get midway through a presentation and realize that you’ve seen it before?  At first I thought it was just Deja Vue, but then specific comments that he was making were really connecting and resonating.  So I tried to figure out where I might have seen him.  Building Learning Communities?  Nope.  NECC?  Nope.  I couldn’t quite place it.  Then it occured to me that I do actually keep a running record of the vast majority of the conference presentations that I’ve attended before.  Perhaps you’ve seen it, I keep it at Teach42.com.  So I did a quick search of my blog for Dede and came up with a blog post from Tech Forum last year.  Incredible eh?

Think about that, the notes I made from a keynote almost a year ago are quite simply at my fingertips from the internet, anywhere, any time.  Wouldn’t it be nice if my lecture notes from that astronomy class were so easily accessible the other night when I tried to figure out if that reddish star I was looking at was really Mars?  And wouldn’t it have been handy to be able to just pull up that short story I wrote in middle school so I could use it as an example in a presentation I was doing the other day. 

When my child is born, they’re getting a permanent web server for their webased portfolio of their entire life.

This is a fantastic keynote, and it does look like he has updated it some since the last time I saw it, but I think I’m going to duck out and check out the conference schedule.  This conference I’m actually going to hang out and *gasp* attend a few presentations!

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