San José: Day Three: Alan November

ecto is having some issues! I'm starting this post over again. Hmm, always save!

Alan spoke this morning before we started work in our project teams. (I've been assigned to the iPod/Podcasting team.) He started by recapping his main points from last night:

• Global Benchmarking
• Family Learning Portal
• Students as Producers
• Innovative Management

He asked what the single most important question was concerning the impact of technology on learning. Everyone made suggestions. Well, OK. He spoke of fearless learners, which appears to be his theme for this year. You can listen to more about that in his presentation on the Apple Site. It's an excellent presentation. I highly recommend it.

Based on survey results in the UK, he stated that the number one thing students want from their school is a personal relationship with their teacher. They obviously didn't survey 7th graders! And yet, this is my fourth year of substantive teacher allotment reductions! Right! He also mentioned that students need to present more to adults than just to their peers. We have certainly found this to be an effective learning strategy at my school.

He presented the following problem solving procedure:

• Come up with a good-enough-to-criticise problem
• Who is your global network for review? (board of directors)
• What evidence (not opinion) supports your efforts to solve this problem
• Retest the hypothesis: Is this a valide problem to solve?
• Who is the authentic audience for presentation
• What results do you want?
• What are your desired outcomes?

He did his typical presentation about searching for information on Teoma and Altavista. However, he added Technorati and Bloglines this time. He did a phone call through Skype.

When asked what he was reading, he replied with the following books:

"The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century" (Thomas L. Friedman)

"The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" (Malcolm Gladwell)

"As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Life, Work, Health & Wealth" (Juan Enriquez)

"Blink : The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" (Malcolm Gladwell)

I've shared some information about Blink before on this site. He also referenced this source:

"The Age of Unreason" (Charles Handy)

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