ASCD Conference - Day 2 - Don Tapscott

I started tweeting Saturday afternoon during the one-to-one session. There were many tweeters at the conference and if you checked you got a great sense of what was going on.

Here is the Tweeter screen with some sample posts:




I walked the vendor floor the first thing of the day which was a great way to gather information for my school. After the curriculum mapping session yesterday I was particularly looking for software solutions.




At 10 am the General session met with a talk by Don Tapscott on the "Net generation"

He started out by quoting Dylan "There's something going on here and we don't know what it is."

I too have quoted Dylan (see my earlier blog post) to show how technology is changing education in a major way, just like his lyrics talked about the changing society in the late 1960.

Here are some of my notes from his lecture:

He felt the critical periods for brain development are 0-3 and 8 -18 years old.

But because of our kids exposure to multitasking their brains are better at switching than ours are. He says there is emerging evidence that exposure to new technologies may push the brain beyond conventional "capacity"

He feels that our current kids are the smartest Generation.

Don't blame the internet for problems in the school. the Internet isn't the problem it is part of the solution.

He notes that back in the day the family structure was that - Mom reported to Dad and the kids reported to Mom

Today the kids are the center of the family - The family organization chart is a circle with the kids in the center and all family activities revolving around them. They are:Coddled kids, trophy kids.

He feels that facebook and social media is how kids communicate. Kids don't understand the concept of Privacy. So we should go through the privacy controls on facebook so that kids don't give away all their personal information.

Today's kids want to make a difference. They are in a culture of collaboration and cooperation. If you embrace that culture you get better results.

Banning facebook is demoralizing. We don't understand your tools, we don't trust you.

We fear what we don't understand

When we graduated, we were set for life, just get a job and keep up. Now the degree has a time stamp like a milk carton, it will go sour. Lifelong learning is the goal.

The old school ways of teaching: Drill and kill, Sage on the Stage, Broadcast model of learning - one way, teacher focused. In this style the student is isolated.

Student focused is the way the new generation learns. Collaborative classrooms is very uneven in today's implementation.

Children have a right to the tools of learning for their time and their century. Change the model of pedagology into a collaborative model.

But after he said all this he said that you can't just throw technology in. You need to change to a more collaborative learning style. Cut back on lecturing, empower students to self-organize and work together.

If you want to follow tapscott on twitter, he is: @dtapscott


More later - Kim