Saturday from 5:15 pm – 6:15 pm, Moscone Centre, Room 113
Bring Your Laptops!
In a few more than 24 hours, I will be presenting at the 2011 ASCD Annual Conference with my colleague, Susana Gerndt. The title of the session is “Written Conversations Develop Minds for the Future”, with reference to Howard Gardner‘s recent work. The session might have been called “How Social Media Can Develop 21st Century Skills”. The session description we submitted a year ago doesn’t do justice the importance of technology and social media in modern learning environments, but, the session will. Here is a taste of our introduction:
Looking specifically at the meaning of the word social and then the meaning of the word media allows us to come up with our own understanding of what social media is and can be in our classrooms. Social media can be cordial, gracious, informative, popular and neighborly. It is created by people for people. Individuals become active participants in a communal understanding that is not limited to their own thoughts, or the thoughts of a select few individual ‘experts’. Individuals are linked to the understandings of the world. Social media is therefore the information of the community. Would you rather leverage one person or dozens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of people? Social media engages students because it gives them a platform to leverage many individuals as opposed to just the teacher.
If all works out, we will run a backchannel using twitter hashtags #ascd11 and #1437 (session number). Tweets will be aggregated on todays meet, here: http://todaysmeet.com/1437. So, if you plan to come (and we hope you do), bring your mobile device!
