Conferences

I’m at the Internet Librarian 2011 conference, and here are some of my notes. Enjoy!

Monday’s keynote presentation was given by John Seely Brown – The topic – A new culture of learning for a world of constant change – the entrepreneurial learner in the Internet age

How do we cultivate constantly learning in today’s ever changing world?

Thinks the half life of skill sets has shrunk to about 5 years. Because technological change is moving so fast. It’s a huge shift.

The problem now is that we have to learn in a world of flows – change and new skills are constantly changing, and we need to learn stuff that’s not really standardized or codified. It’s not something you can go back to school to learn

Librarians are more important than ever these days – because we know how to operate in an ever-changing information, knowledge environment.

Ar we prepared? Ae we preparing our students?

It’s more than learning to learn. We have to learn how to cultivate. Our physical spaces are important now, to help this cultivation happen.

iPhone as amplifier – helps to amplify your curiosity

Dispositions of an entrepreneurial learner:
Curiosity, questing, connecting

Th social view of learning. Not I think, therefore I am.

But now it’s we participate therefore we are. Knowledge is socially constructed, making knowledge personal.

Study groups. The single best indicator of how well you will do in college. This doesn’t have to be face to face – it can happen digitally. SMS, facebook, chat rooms, etc. This is cool – it combines learning and fun.

these study groups stretch beyond traditional colleges because of how social networks work.

Different ways of learning and searching … For example, wikipedia articles. To really read something, you need to also open up the edit. Age to see the discussions and edits taking place. Wikipedia has essentially opened up the editing room of the britannica to show us how edits take place.

We need to cultivate that kind of inquisitiveness.

We used to focus on content, assuming context was relatively stable. Context is more fluid in the world of social media.

Jazz and blogging are personally improvisational, but also inherently collective.

David Weinberger has a book coming out in 2012 called Too Big to Know – it will be about this type of stuff…

Essence of remixing – changing the context of old forms of content

Learning as riddles and play – fail, fail, fail and fail again – and then to get it right. Poetry – you are playing with words, solving riddles with them.

Our jobs and learning can be the same way – learning or jobs or projects can be riddles and play too.

Knowing, making, playing – three different epistemologies – via tinkering, or embracing change – each of these have important shifts that affect learning

Is interesting to watch. Harry potter for example. Kids and teens read it … But they are close reading. They are filling in the blanks, filling in the back story. Creating content and context around it. Even creating wizard rock around it. Learning by creating, imagining, playing.

Back to the future – the one room schoolhouse. About to be replaced by the one room global schoolhouse.

Tagged as: entrepreneurial learner, il2011, learning, lifelong learning

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