Keynote - Marc Prensky

Marc Prensky is a good guy for an eight a.m. keynote, as he gets you going. His topic was the rate of change in education and what we have to do about it. We see this as a thing which has happened, but our students see it as how it has always been. They are used to new technologies every day, and rather bored by our attempts to teach them without keeping up. Rather than being the place where ignorant students are led out of the dark, today schools take the students raised in the light of networked learning, and plunge them into darkness while we try to teach them in old ways. Marc correctly notes that we can't add all the new things without deleting some of the old, if only because of time constraints. Marc quoted Charles Handy, "Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture which may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can." Marc says the most important learning is taking place after school, and programming is the new literacy. Feels right to me.