On Thursday, October 15, 2009, members of the TCEA TEC-SIG organization had the opportunity to listen to David Warlick. Below are my notes, and I hope to have more reflections and audio soon.

David began with sharing that he always begins his presentation with something he didn’t know yesterday. That was DoodleBuzz.com (updated thanks to comment by Lydia!), which allows you to graphically keep track of news.

“Begin your preso with something you didn’t know yesterday.” We have to rethink what it is to be educated, redefine the 21st Century–>Be a master learner as a teacher. If it’s our job to help children be lifelong learners, then that’s what we need to do.

You can find David’s handouts online at http://davidwarlick.com/handouts. If you blog the preso, make sure to use these tags: native, information, experience, warlick.

Access to insights other educators are sharing.

Backchannel Tool: Knitterchat.com and Mindmeister.com – Prepared preso in this. [Transparency/disclosure]

He shared that Anshut Sammar, 13 year old student…then he asked, What’s different?

What’s different is that this student doesn’t have ceilings. Ceilings were imposed by a non-networked world. Abundant access to information…it’s also difficult to contain If You want learners to excel, free their information…”containerless.”

He shared Assassin’s Creed 2 as an example of what games can do. What are the rules of the games? What are the goals? How do you use the rules to achieve the goals? It all begins with questions. About games, what is it about the experience that makes it an effective learning experience?

Fueled by questions…learn by asking questions. He introduced WeFeelFine.org as a vision of what is possible. David asked, “Imagine growing up in a world that is connected…profound implications on how students learn.” Some other web sites he shared–such as to demonstrate the visualization of Good Mornings (blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/goodmorning)–and Scratch. David discussed gold farming–preparing a character for online virtual world, then selling those virtual assets via eBay. This has been prohibited.

He mentioned Ian Fogarty from New Brunswick, Canada – creating labs manuals that are interactive. He also mentioned Amy McLeod, who asked her students to create movie trailers to motivate next year’s students to read books/plays like Shakespeare’s Othello.

Darren Kuropatwa was also mentioned positively for his work encouraging students to scribe math classes.

One of the memorable quotes David shared was that a student said:

My grammar is not good enough for my ideas…

David made the point that grammar is a tool that had value for communication. Some questions:

• How does the assignment talk back?
• Demands personal investment?
• How is work valuable and to whom?
• How am I assessing valuable mistakes?
• It’s what you know that’s different that brings value to organizations.
• Help kids build things of value.

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