ECOO 2012 Conference

Educational Computing Organization of Ontario 

hosted a Conference on:

 Thursday, October 25th, 2012-Friday, October 26th, 2012

As a Literacy at School Demonstration Classroom, I was given the opportunity to attend the above conference last week.  There were many interesting concepts, ideas, and strategies shared to help me improve my 21st Century teaching practices.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was John Seely Brown.  I really wanted to share his new book on my blog entitled "A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change" photographed below:

Seely Brown asserted that "the digital world is expanding exponentially."  

The above image was referenced online as being part of the new resource.  I have not purchased it yet, so I am trusting that this reference is accurate!  It made me think about how many more social media tools there are available for us to utilize in our lives and classrooms.  Some of them I have never even seen before!

Here are a few quotes for John Seely Brown's keynote address:

We need to "prepare our students for creating new knowledge...and be willing to invent learning..."

The "key to this is curiosity."

"Find something that children are passionate about and want to learn."

He defined "connected learning" as existing between three spheres: academic, peer based culture, and interests.

I loved the shift from "making content to making context" (learning environment) and the importance of "crafting our learning space."

"The game is not creativity.  It is imagination.  If you can't imagine, you can't be creative.  The real game is how to imagine something different.  Imagination is making the strange familiar.  How do we captures students' imagination?"

"You can bring it all together by tinkering.  You don't know how to do everything, so you can tinker to learn about it.  If you are against tinkering, you will never embrace change...freedom to think that tinkering is okay and it's okay to experiment...things are not expected to work all the time..."

There needs to more equal weighting between "knowing (content), making (context), and playing (sense making of the world)."

"Education needs to be reconciled for this culture of change.  It is essential to allow kids to play, which allows them to make a frame of how to make sense of the world.  Play is the deepest cognitive work.  Play as permission to fail and then get it right, play of imagination, play as epiphany.  That epiphany will be with the child for life!"

Finally he encouraged us to "be innovative for the twenty first century!"

I am really interested in purchasing his new book so that I can learn more about the "Golden Triangle of the 21st Century: Imagination, Intuition, and Inspirations," as well engage more deeply in what he began to describe during his keynote address.  Conferences are a wonderful way to continue learning and asking questions about education.