The Savvy Technologist

Alan November challenges the ADEs

The keynote for Tuesday’s session at the Summer Institute was Alan November. This was my first opportunity to hear him, and I was especially interested since so many others had found him thought provoking and inspiring.

After talking a bit about Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs, RSS, and Creative Commons, he turned to the meat of his talk and gave us four challenges under the topic “Fearless learners and courageous leaders.”

• How do you know if your students are globally competitive? November painted a pretty bleak picture of the current state of our students’ readiness in a world where jobs can be moved to where the people are much more easily than people can be moved to where the jobs are.
• How can we build the learning capacity of every family? He suggested that all students, teachers, and families should have blogs that are connected via RSS.
• Children should be producing learning objects. All of the work that our kids are doing should be sharable with the rest of the world.
• Innovation management: the capacity to take an idea and innovate. November suggested that this was a leadership challenge and that American schools are ill-prepared to handle it.

Alan really challenged the ADEs in the room to push the envelope. I overheard more than a couple attendees talking about whether they were inspired or mad following the session. My sense is that Alan likes to push buttons, and I enjoy that kind of talk. I wish I had more time right now to reflect a bit and post more about the talk, but it’s the middle of one of our sessions and I need to start paying attention now.

Tags: flickr, wiki, wikipedia