I just finished watching David Warlick’s pre-conference keynote for the K12 Online conference which is officially starting next week. Wow. For starters, I think it’s so amazing to see and hear someone make a keynote presentation in North Carolina, USA from the comfort of my own home in faraway Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Especially someone that I have been reading, but whom I have never heard speak. As David says at the beginning of his keynote: he’s there and then, I’m here and now, yet we are still communicating and learning from each other.
It may be obvious, but I truly enjoyed the way David “presented” from so many different places. Not only was the actual content of the presentation powerful, but the visual of teaching and learning taking place anywhere, anytime, really sent the message home (and of course, I enjoyed the many views of North Carolina, never having been there myself). I appreciate that sometimes it’s not enough to just say you can do something with technology, but to show the possibilities of the technology is what is truly powerful. Even though I am familiar with all of the technology that David used during his video, it was motivating to see it all put together into one presentation, and to see that appropriate use of technology for an educational setting. And then there’s the most amazing part – this video keynote is just the beginning. Now we get the opportunity to explore with all of the other tools used to support the content keynote. We have the blogging, the “co-learning” wiki, the conference-specific social networking, etc, etc. It’s amazing to me to have this experience, while learning myself, because this is how our students should be communicating to us. This is the future of communication.
Personally, I have grown up with technology. My parents both spent their entire careers working for IBM. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have 3 or 4 computers around the house. Even so, I still could not have imagined where we would be today. I turned 29 this year, and I never would have pictured myself a technology teacher when I was growing up. I guess along the way of becoming a full-time human rights activist, I took a side journey and I ended up finding a true passion, a passion I would never have known existed within me, if I hadn’t been, to use David’s term, “derailed.” But now I couldn’t be happier about the fact. I am living in a period of time when unique and exciting changes are taking place every single day, and on each one of those days I get the opportunity to enthuse and excite a child about those developments. Imagine where our students will be in 5, 10, 20 years…What we are beginning here, with this keynote, and this conference, will shape the future, a future that can only be radically different from our lives today. Wow.
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