As little as we know about the future, for which we are preparing our children, it is clear that it will be a place that is governed by information. Accessing, processing, building with, and communicating that information will be a major part of our daily professional and personal work.

Being literate in this future will certainly involve the ability to read, write, and work with numbers. However, the concept of literacy in the 21st century will be far richer and more comprehensive than the 3 Rs of the one room school house. This enlightening and thought-provoking address will describe how our notions of literacy must expand to address a rapidly changing information landscape where information is networked, digital, and overwhelming.

Address questions like:
* What do you need to know, when most of recorded knowledge is a mouse-click away?
* How do you distinguish between good knowledge and bad knowledge?
* What does it do to the value of information, when everyone is a producer?
* How do we teach ethics, when we are empowering our students with such prevailing skills?

This session is usually delivered as a keynote address. I have also presented it as a three-hour workshop showing many examples and justifications for a new model for contemporary literacy

For decades, education has been an easy institution to define. It consisted of acknowledged literacy skills, definable bodies of knowledge, and pedagogies for teaching willing students within information-scarce learning environments. Today, for the first time in decades, we are questioning our notions about teaching and learning as we adapt to a world that is changing faster than our ability to react. We are struggling to rethink what it is to be educated, to reinvent where it happens, and redefine our roles as educators — as the line between teacher and student appears to blur.

This presentation, by 30+ year educator, author, and technologist, David Warlick, will explore some of these changes and challenges and arrange them as a set of converging conditions that might actually hold the clues for redefining and retooling 21st century education.

They are tech-savvy, adaptive, fast learners, always connected, and ultra-communicators. The children in our classrooms today are a species of learner who can see, hear, and speak through walls and around the planet. Information is what gives their experience meaning, and they do not merely consume the information. They play it, work it, and remix it into experiences that are personally enjoyable and valuable.

What kind of classrooms address the unique learning styles of Millennials and a future that we can not even describe? These and other questions are pivotal to retooling classrooms and reforming education. Learn from this 30 year educator, about this new species of learner, who demands to learn, not to be taught!

It is often said that “the future is not what it use to be.” In this information-driven, technology-rich world, where jobs are created and become obsolete in only a few years, preparing our children for a future that we can not even imagine has become one of our society’s greatest challenges.There are many barriers that prevent us from retooling our classrooms for 21st century teaching and learning. But at the core are the “stories” about education that we share. Most adults base their images of schooling on their education experiences from 20, 30, or 40 years ago. It is a story that is etched almost indelibly by years of being taught in isolated, assembly-line classrooms.

Our classrooms — what they look like, how the furniture is arranged, what teachers and students do, what is taught, how it is taught, and why — are all modeled after old and outdated stories that are still being told by our culture. We must change these stories and tell new ones, based on a new world, an unpredictable future, almost unlimited opportunities, a new kind of student, and compelling new learning experiences that have never been possible before.

This engaging presentation will inspire educators to craft and tell new stories. It will provoke visions of a new kind of classroom based on a new information environment, because only with visions of classrooms that are so irresistible that they will wipe out the old images, will we be able to reform education for the 21st century. [photo1]

Alternative Description
It is often said that “the future is not what it use to be.” In this information-driven, technology-rich world, where jobs appear and become obsolete in only a few years, it is certainly not your father’s future any more.

Retooling our classrooms into learning spaces that effectively prepare our children for a future of infinite opportunity will require a new story about teaching and learning. It must be a story that is so compelling that we forget about our childhood student experiences from decades ago and agree that a different kind of classroom, teaching, and learning experience is required and deserved by our children.

Join 30 year educator, David Warlick, as he maps out a story that addresses the market place (a global market) and resonates with deeply held values (our children and their future), and points to learning places and learning experiences that are preparing children to become inventive and resourceful life long learners, ready to harness their unpredictable future.

Titles:

* Understanding the Video Game Experience
* Video Games as Learning Engines

“Edutainment” is a term that has frequently been used to describe computer applications designed to make learning fun and the word has not always been used with the best intentions. In recent years, however, educators have begun to take a serious look at video games and the video game generation and to reconsider the roles of technology, fun, and serious video gaming within the context of formal education.

This presentation will provide an overview of various video game genres, some of the latest writings on video games in education, and some spin-off activities that will literally amaze you. The presenter will also attempt to break down some of the characteristics of video gaming that seem to make the practice such a compelling learning experience for youngsters and suggest ways of integrating those characteristic into the classroom.

We are surrounded by new technologies. They are emerging in almost every shape and color, and with a dizzying array of functions and capabilities, many of which have almost no practicality at all. One mark of good educators and educated people is the quality of skepticism — to always ask, “Why!”

Largely due to technology, one shift has occurred over the past decade and a half that we, as educators, simply can not ignore. It is the degree and character to which the very nature of information has changed. Information has become increasingly networked, digital, and overwhelming — and each of these qualities impacts directly on what it means to be literate in the 21st century.

During recent months, shifts in the quality of content have continued and even accelerated. Blogs, wikis, and social media are redefining how information flows through the networks, connects and reconnects, and brings people together, based not on their geography, but on their ideas — and they are reshaping commerce and scholarship. The new shape of information is redefining basic skills.

Learn about the new Web from blogger, podcaster, Web 2.0 programmer, and 30+ year educator David Warlick. See how information now travels on many different levels, and how educators are seeking out new connections, shaping new and valuable learning products, and creating customized roadmaps on the Information highway. This session is guaranteed to have teachers on the edges of their seats.

Alternative Description:

The nature of information has changed dramatically since the advent of the World Wide Web. However, that change has accelerated during the past few years, thanks to a family of web tools that are so changing the way that we think about information that it is increasingly called, Web 2.0. This enlightening presentation will help educators to understand how the Web is emerging as a platform for collaboration, knowledge building, and problem solving that is affecting our world, and it is guaranteed to have teachers on the edges of their seats.Topics include: weblogs, podcasting, RSS, wikis, social bookmarks, photo and other content environments, and more.

Advanced Version:

What is Web 2.0? Why is it different from Web version 1? What are the foundational concepts that allow people to connect through the content, to create dynamic and adaptive networks for learning. This presentation, designed for tech-savvy educators, will introduce the basics of Web 2.0 technologies, a sampling of its tools, and its relevance to learning environments. Participants will explore together some potent opportunities for implementing these new tools for teacher staff development, digital resource production, and school management. This session is often podcasted for later reference.

MUVEs, or MultiUser Virtual Environments, have been around for many years, evolving from the text-based MUDs of the early 1990, to the rich graphical environments of popular video games like Halo and World of Warcrarft, and other virtual social worlds of work and play. Second Life, the most popular of these worlds, now hosts more than 13 million residents who play, socialize, work, do business, and even teacher and learn online.

A growing community of educators are staking claim to portions of Second Life, even inviting their students in to the Teen Grid to use this 3D virtual space as a canvas for exploration and expression.
This presentation will uncover some of the most intriguing aspects of Second Life, teaching and learning potentials, and some other emerging environments that are holding even more promise for teachers.

I am often asked to deliver shorter presentations to audiences for banquets or conference closings.

It is not enough time to talk about contemporary literacy, retooling education culture, or decoding our children’s information experience. However, it is just enough time to tell some stories.

This short presentation features three stories, each dramatizing a point of extreme revelation in my career as an educator. The stories are true, they are funny, the will take the audience back in time — and forward in our understanding the impact of contemporary technology on twenty-first century learning.

* The Problem
1. Computers have been present in classrooms since the early 1980s, with a few fortunate schools delving even earlier.
2. The question that continues to haunt and fascinate us… “How should these technologies be used in classrooms.” “Should they be used to automate teaching? …Or do they suggest something different and wonderful?”
* Story 1 – 1981 & 1982
1. My first experience with a personal computer (TRaSh-80).
2. “Egads!” A machine that you operate by communicating with it.
3. Pierson Duvall and the magic dust from being a programmer.
* Story 2 – 1990
1. Surfing the Internet & the mysterious incantations of the digital ethers.
2. First time ever – I’m chatting on the Internet & patting myself on the back.
3. Rain checks & …what happened to geography?
* Story 3 – 1997
1. ThinkQuest – Kids teach us to learn on the Web.
2. Aiming to impress a fifteen year old.
3. The fifteen year old is a graduate assistant?
4. The fifteen year old is learning something he’ll carry the rest of his life.
* Closing
1. For the first time in history, we are preparing our children for a future we can not clearly describe.
2. Perhaps the most important question in education that we face today is, “What do our children need to be learning, to be ready for an unpredictable future?”
3. Finally — We are not afraid…

Change is constant!

..And today, change is happening in schools. Governance boards, administrators, librarians and classroom teachers are combining efforts to resist the conservative status-quo-sustaining nature of our institution and seeking to define and implement a new style of learning – learning 2.0.

For many of our students, change is status-quo. They’ve witnessed an emerging new information environment and have had a hand in shaping its landscape, seamlessly utilizing technologies that define their culture. The outside-the-classroom information experiences of our students are deep, diverse, rich, and compelling — and understanding these information experiences may be a key to achieving more effective and relevant formal learning.

Spend some time with David Warlick, exploring the qualities of the native information experience and observe how they might be — and are being harnessed in classrooms around the world.

MUVEs, or MultiUser Virtual Environments, have been around for many years, evolving from the text-based MUDs of the early 1990, to the rich graphical environments of popular video games like Halo and World of Warcrarft, and other virtual social worlds of work and play. Second Life, the most popular of these worlds, now hosts more than 13 million residents who play, socialize, work, do business, and even teacher and learn online.

A growing community of educators are staking claim to portions of Second Life, even inviting their students in to the Teen Grid to use this 3D virtual space as a canvas for exploration and expression. This presentation will uncover some of the most intriguing aspects of Second Life, teaching and learning potentials, and some other emerging environments that are holding even more promise for teachers.

Alternate Title: A Gardener’s Approach to Learning

We teach in a time of rapid change, when, for the first time in history, we are preparing our students for a future that we can not clearly describe. To accomplish this, education must become more adaptive to change — and for this to happen, “learning” must become a fundamental part of what it is to teach.

Educators around the world are engaging in daily and self-directed professional development, utilizing an emerging family of interactive and collaborative web applications. With these tools, we are able to cultivate personal learning networks of people and information sources that help us do or jobs.

Learn how to grow your own learning network and knowledge garden by connecting with other professionals, mining the greater global conversation, and mapping out libraries of ideas and content. Topics may include blogs and micro-blogging, social networks, social media networks, RSS, and publishing and data visualization techniques.

This is an important topic that may be refined into a new keynote address. It is also a very rich topic that can easily be extended into a a half- or full-day BYOL workshop.

Shorter Workshop Description:

We teach in a time of rapid change, when, for the first time in history, we can not clearly describe the future for which we are preparing our children. This is one reason why learning has become a critical part of what it is to teach.

In this workshop, participants will explore a variety of emerging tools and techniques that educators are using to form and cultivate their Personal Learning Networks — connecting themselves to people and resources that help them do their jobs.

Learn how to grow your own connections to information and experiences that help you strengthen your expertise and remain an engaged member of your profession. Topics will include blogging as a professional development endeavor, opportunities for professional jams, virtual staff development events, and harnessing the magic of RSS to literally train valuable content to find you — to be a 21st Century Educator.

Alternative Description for School Leaders and Media Specialists

We teach in a time of rapid change, when, for the first time in history, we can not clearly describe the future for which we are preparing our children. This is why “learning” has become a critical part of being an educator, and why education leaders need to encourage and provoke learning as a part of the professional culture of their schools.

This engaging presentation will assist leaders by first, mapping out the emerging technologies and techniques that educator-learners are beginning to utilize in order to form Personal Learning Networks (PLN) — cultivated connections with people and dynamic content that help them do their jobs.

Second, participants will explore steps and strategies for encouraging and supporting faculty in forming and maintaining their own PLNs, striving for the tipping point where they strengthen and grow under the momentum of ubiquitous learning.

Long Description:

Never before have the barriers between our classrooms and the world our children are learning about been so transparent. Overwhelming digital content, personal digital cameras, audio recorders, new information tools, and an emerging global conversation have combined to redefine the classroom — no longer the information-scarce environments of the last century.

People record their experiences, share these images, sounds, and video with each other and the world, and become archivers, explorers, and curators of their own lives. Digital Exploration...This engaging and interactive presentation demonstrates many techniques for using these amazing technologies to capture the world of data, images, sound, motion and bring it into your classroom for exploration and interpretation.

Learn how students can harness text, data , digital images and digital cameras, captured and archived audio and video to learn vocabulary words, explore math concepts, enhance reading comprehension, motivate better writing, experiment and express their learning in social studies and science, and learn to use information as a raw material — not merely as an end product.

Description:
Education has always been defined by limits — what could be accomplished within the confines of the information that could literally be carried in by hand. Today, the information flows, and there is no more exciting, dynamic, rapidly growing, and media-rich resource today than Flickr. An online photo album site, Flickr is now receiving more than 2.5 million new photos a day from photographers from all over the world.

This hands-on workshop will assist beginners in setting up a free Flickr account, learn to upload photos, tag them for organizing and distribution, and also how to use the service as a spring board for activities, even if the site is blocked in your school or district. In addition, participants will be exposed to a dizzying array of associated tools that have emerged around this landmark social service.

There are no magic buttons on the Internet. Conducting deep and revealing research over the global network involves strategy, uncovering clues, and investigating a digital landscap. This entertaining and practical presentation will demonstrate a number of obscure tips for searching the Internet including an approach called S.E.A.R.C.H.

This presentation has expanded into the use of Web 2.0 technologies to find answers within ongoing conversations and to find people who can answer our questions. From these conversations, both casual and formal, new technologies enable us to literally train valuable information to find us.

It is a sign of our times that such an awkward term as “blogging” should integrate itself so quickly and so powerfully into our culture.This session will acquaint educators with the concept of weblogs (blogs), ways that they are affecting many aspects of our culture, and strategies for using weblogs to promote better teaching and learning. Participants will also learn how to provide a safe and secure blogging experience for students.

We are surrounded by new technologies. They are emerging in almost every shape and color, and with a dizzying array of functions and capabilities, many of which have almost no practicality at all. One mark of good educators and educated people is the quality of skepticism — to always ask, “Why!”

Largely due to technology, one shift has occurred over the past decade and a half that we, as educators, simply can not ignore. It is the degree and character to which the very nature of information has changed. Information has become increasingly networked, digital, and overwhelming — and each of these qualities impacts directly on what it means to be literate in the 21st century.

During recent months, shifts in the quality of content have continued and even accelerated. Blogs, wikis, and social media are redefining how information flows through the networks, connects and reconnects, and brings people together, based not on their geography, but on their ideas — and they are reshaping commerce and scholarship. The new shape of information is redefining basic skills.

Learn about the new Web from blogger, podcaster, Web 2.0 programmer, and 30+ year educator David Warlick. See how information now travels on many different levels, and how educators are seeking out new connections, shaping new and valuable learning products, and creating customized roadmaps on the Information highway. This session is guaranteed to have teachers on the edges of their seats.

Alternative Description:

The nature of information has changed dramatically since the advent of the World Wide Web. However, that change has accelerated during the past few years, thanks to a family of web tools that are so changing the way that we think about information that it is increasingly called, Web 2.0. This enlightening presentation will help educators to understand how the Web is emerging as a platform for collaboration, knowledge building, and problem solving that is affecting our world, and it is guaranteed to have teachers on the edges of their seats.Topics include: weblogs, podcasting, RSS, wikis, social bookmarks, photo and other content environments, and more.

Advanced Version:

What is Web 2.0? Why is it different from Web version 1? What are the foundational concepts that allow people to connect through the content, to create dynamic and adaptive networks for learning. This presentation, designed for tech-savvy educators, will introduce the basics of Web 2.0 technologies, a sampling of its tools, and its relevance to learning environments. Participants will explore together some potent opportunities for implementing these new tools for teacher staff development, digital resource production, and school management. This session is often podcasted for later reference.

Podcasting is a rapidly growing practices where individuals, using free and inexpensive hardware and software, produce audio (and video) programs that are broadcast (podcast) to a global audience through the world wide web. Learn how teachers and administrators are using podcasting to promote learning and community involvement and how students are producing their own podcasts to share their knowledge.This presentation is highly interactive, and part of its process will be the production of a podcast program, with involvement from the audience. Great fun!

One of the pivot points of the new read/write Web is wikis. Originally invented in 1995, wikis have recently emerged as the poster-child of the Web 2.0 movement. This session will provide a general overview of the wiki style, ranging from small group collaborations to global collaborations to global encyclopedias. Participants will learn about the characteristics of wikis, how to operate and manage them, and a variety of classroom applications. Come learn how to create a wiki site – for free.

Preparing children for an information-driven, technology-rich future requires us to redefine literacy in a way that reflects the changing nature of information. You and I were taught to read what some body handed to us. Our students will read from a global digital library that anyone can publish to, just about anything they want, and for just about any reason. What does this mean to the value of information, its reliability, and our responsibilities as citizens who are not mere consumers of information but participants in a global information community?

Essentially, there are three problems with using digital information. First of all, it is crucial to be able to provide that the information you are using is accurate, in terms of what you are trying to accomplish. In the 20th century, we assumed that printed information was accurate. Today, we must be able to prove that it is accurate.

The second problem concerns the ownership of information. When we all become producers of information and owners of information property, we will begin to think of the respect of information ownership in a different way. It will become more critical and likely that we cite information sources.

Finally, respect for information infrastructure must be addressed in our classrooms. It is projected that viruses, worms, hacking, and other attacks on information infrustructure cost as much as 145 billion dollars in 2003. Information is the infrastructure that we depend on, to no less degree than we depend on our roads.

Never in history have we had access to so much information from so many different places. The very technologies that we are teaching our students to use seem to be specifically made to cheat with. How do we teach students to respect the information property of others when copying and pasting are core to the writing tools that we now take for granted?The answer is for teachers to be savvy in the ethical and technical use of these new writing tools and the growing sources of information, the Internet. Also core to the problem and the solution is developing a global vision of the ethical use of information and teach that vision to our children.

A Definition of Plagiarism

* Plagiarism is using another person’s words or ideas without giving credit to the other person.
* When you use someone else’s words, you must put quotation marks around them and give the writer or speaker credit by revealing the source in a citation.
* Even if you revise or paraphrase the words of someone else or just use their ideas, you still must give the author credit in a note.
* Not giving due credit to the creator of an idea or writing is very much like lying.” (Harris)

Long Description:
The nature of information has changed dramatically since the advent of the World Wide Web. However, that change has accelerated during the past 12 to 18 months, thanks to a family of web tools that are so changing the way that we think about information that it is increasingly called, Web 2.0. These tools include blogging, podcasting, social networks, and wikis, to mention only a few.” However, the real magic of the New Web, the glue that holds it all together, is a simple, yet fundamentally revolutionary concept usually called RSS.” Learn about this concept and how it can be used to manage instructional materials in brand new ways.” Prepare to be on the edges of your seats. [photo1 ]

Short Description:
The Web has matured, and it’s largely because of a simple yet essential concept called RSS. This overview of RSS, its functions, and how we use it, will have you on the edge of your seat — guaranteed. If today’s web is Small Pieces Loosely Joined,2 then RSS is the mortar.

1. Tan, Jin. "RSS." Jintan's Photostream. 20 Jan 2007. 1 Jun 2008 .
2. Weinberger, David. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web. New York: Basic Books, 2003.