ATS team at Will Richardson workshop: Educating Modern Learners

On Friday, November 1st, the BB&N academic technology team attended an AISNE workshop at Walnut Hill School for the Arts facilitated by Will Richardson, an early educational blogger and thought-leader on how digital technology affects teaching and learning. Will's presentation encourages teachers and administrators to lean into the confusion of technology integration. He says it is natural to feel confused by the disruptive changes that technology is bringing to education. He says that our current time is the most disruptive period in the history of education--even more disruptive than the advent of the printing press. Whereas the printing press took almost a century to have an impact on education, digital technologies have infiltrated our lives in a plethora of ways in merely a decade. Will also says we're still at the advent of this change, He says it is a change from institutionally organized education to self-organized education

Our ATS team used a google doc to take collaborative notes during the session. Click here to view it. During the workshop Will mentioned a ton of resources, (e.g. Super Awesome Sylvia's Maker Show) which we linked to in the google doc. About half way through the day, someone asked Will if there was a bibliography of his resources and he said maybe we should share our notes, so we opened up the google doc to all the participants and posted a link in the back channel of the workshop.

One of the funniest moments of the day was when Will played this YouTube video of a child's own creation.... This boy filmed and posted himself using a piece of ancient technology--a bow drill fire starting stick. It is a neat contrast to see this ancient technology within our current technology of YouTube, and the best part is that the boy is using it as a way to solicit comments on his technique in order to improve upon it. He directs the audience of the video to "leave a comment below" [in the YouTube commenting interface] in order to help him solve his problem. What a great use of modern technology!

-Demetri