If you think Change is difficult, try Irrelevance

This past Thursday and Friday I attended the MassCUE Spring conference Leading Future Learning in Worcester.  Great conference, lots of positive energy, lots of great ideas.  There were about 200 to 250 people attending, mostly New England but I did run into a few folks from Upstate NY, PA, and NJ.  And a very broad spectrum of roles were represented - classroom teachers, principals, asst. principals, asst. superintendents, and superintendents.  There were rural school districts and urban; private, charter and public.  So workshop discussions entailed a variety of perspectives.

Although it was nominally defined as a technology conference, I'd describe the major themes of the conference to be effective adaptation to the social/technological change underway.  The blog post title is taken from a quote used by one of our keynote speakers, and it captures one nuance of that theme.

[Here's a humorous clip from Onion New Network that underscores the point]

"The change we are in the middle of isn't minor

and it isn't optional"

- Clay Shirky                    

This quote, used by one of our keynote speakers George Couros, truly did capsulize his key point.  Importantly, the change he's talking about is not simply the technology, but rather how the technology is changing relationships - people to people, people to knowledge, people to organizations.  The world is mobile and kids know how to use these devices, but they don;'t know how to connect them to learning.  He also talked about how the technology is transforming the opportunity for learning - learning through collaboration, learning through participation, learning through interaction.  If  you think of the internet as a service to look stuff up, you're missing the point.  It's about sharing, it's about connecting, it's about a collective knowledge base.

"The model of learning we've known, even just 5 years ago,

 has changed"

Another one of our keynote speakers, Carl Hooker, focused on important was in which our society and relationships have changed, in large part as a consequence of technology, and schools have not adapted.

 Being able to self publishing to a mass audience, crowd-sourcing, the 'on demand' nature to the access and control of information are all recent (last 5 to 10 years) changes in our social landscape.  When, where, and how we teach needs to needs to adapt, including re-imagining learning spaces.Traditional education has been 'mind your own business' learning - sit quietly by yourself and do the worksheet/read the book.  Plopping a computer down into that environment is simply giving the student a $1,000 pencil.  You haven't really changed anything.
[Think Substitution in the SAMR model of educational technology evolution]

Next post...highlights from workshops

The next couple of posts this week will summarize the workshops I attended and include links to relevant resources.