Keynote: Bruce Dixon: Are you ready for this? Re-imagining the possibilities

The Presenter: Bruce Dixon

http://www.aalf.org/    Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation:  1:1 information

http://ideaslab.vic.edu.au/

The Gist:

• Lots of people think that when you get a laptop "we can get on with what we were doing" or "it will transform things" without knowing how that is going to come about
• When and where and what and how we teach must change
• Look up Levy and Murnane "How the demand for skills has changed"

• Talked about the idea generation required to come up with new solutions.
• What does transformation look like? What is your role in making it happen? Fundamental change or incremental improvement; the question isn't which is right, but rather why has there been so little discussion about the question?
• Despite our technological advances he doesn't see that we have progressed much at all.
• Students have ubiquitous computer use at home. School catching up.
• In to many schools the technology emperor has had no clothes. Technology driven ideals, ill-defined expectations; trivialising teacher competence
• 59% of kids spend less than 59 minutes in front of a computer at school (Australian stats from a couple of years ago) the model wasn't working.
• Computers as a 'shared' resource gets in the way of learning
• OLPC transforming education in developing world. Movement towards equity. 
• Need personalised learning, computers should be able to provide if we can expand our pedagogical opportunities.
• Text book publishers will be trying to dominate the space. Just a book on a screen with a few links thrown in. Need to rethink text books. What should they be?
• Portugal giving laptops to every child and free broadband wireless access to every child!!!.
• The only way to give students access to personalised learning is through 1:1. It doesn't matter if they have a computer at home if they don't have constant access at school
• Laptops: 'an instrument whose music is ideas' 'an imagination machine'
• Embrace accountability make it transparent; people will listen to teachers; not journalists and politicians
• Technology is pedagogically inert. Whether it sustains, supplements or subverts is up to us.

My Thoughts:

Lots of work to do pedagogically. Really excited about the possibilities.

What is it we can do to allow students to create more cognitively complex work?