How the game works

My first inkling about what was to come at the BLC08 conference was introduced to me when I heard Ewan McIntosh of Scotland present " Not all Native Wit: From Creativity to Ingenuity." It is easiest to learn by doing things that are intuitive to you. for me, it was reading, writing and talking. For the 90% of today's 15-25 year olds who have visited a social network , it is something else. If My space were a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world! Our job is to get to students at their level and present the opportunity to learn and create in a system that is easiest for them.


I particularly related to the 3 steps of learning that McIntosh referred to:

• Saturation - immerse yourself in everything


• Incubation - let it settle with no deadlines or stress ( and I have a LOT to do after this conference)


• Illumination - the "a-ha!" that you can then share with a larger audience

These steps relate to both teacher and student. The idea is this - tech is the tool and creativity is the pinball. We need to focus on the pinball . We don't need to teach technology as much as teach subject matter and learning USING it. Today's youth culture is a culture of participation. Our students have lots of identities online: secret spaces, group spaces, publishing, performing, participating, watching,etc. We need to create a new awareness and allow them to create new groups. ( A random fact to support the social nature of our world? 426,000 cell phones thrown away every day!)

This session was introduced using Promethean clickers in response to the question " How would students today describe school?" The most popular answer among the audience of teachers and administrators? BORING!! McIntosh suggests that our challenge is to make learning REMARKABLE!!!

His closing quote came from one of the founding fathers of our country, Ben Franklin:

"There are three types of people, those who are immovable, those who are movable and those who move."

THAT is how the game should be played.