Daily Archives: September 5, 2008

The Next 5000 days

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From the twitterverse, courtesy of @JoMcLeay, comes this offering from Kevin Kelly. In another offering from the TED Talks series, Kevin Kelly notes that the web is only 5000 days old, and ponders what the next 5000 days might bring. His ideas are challenging, but offer great opportunities for the global community

He postulates that the web will change dramatically – with transparency being the price of development. We might even begin to think about this as a large organism that we will begin to interact with – a difficult concept – where there is only the one machine (us) and it is the web.

What might this mean for education and learning? How will this impact on how we learn as individuals and as a community? Where might this take us as educators?  Can teachers simply continue to yearn for the “goold old days”, resisting the demands of the information revolution, lamenting the way their students have “lost their interpersonal skills” – while failing to realize that this generation is more connected, more “personal”, than any generation in history.

Stay tuned for the next 5000 days.

tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, kevin kelly

Speaking of Learning

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The last couple of weeks have been very busy, catching up on lots of work and stepping into the new school year. Now I am just trying to catch up on my reader, and a number of things keep popping out.

Wordle is one of them. This new tag cloud generator allows individuals to generate images that capture the essence of a piece of text, a website or a del.icio.us account. While it may seem rather silly, I believe that these new types of tools will become more important as a new information model defines the global community of the 21st century.

As a test, I sent my blog through the Wordle engine, and this popped out (click for a larger view). While a large smattering of terms fill the image, two primary words capture the center. The first is “learning”, reflecting my passion to shift education to reflect our young people.

The second, “teachers”, should also not be surprising. I want to point out the difference between “teachers” and “teaching”. I was happy to note that teaching didn’t even rate on the radar. This reflects a conscious effort to focus on moving the conversation from teaching to learning – to the point where I rarely discuss “teaching” strategies – or “teaching” anything else for that matter.

Now the questions becomes – could Wordle be an effective tool for learners in the education enterprise?

tags: technology, education, whipple, learning, wordle