Acknowledgments

My thanks go to the organisers of the Third Reform Symposium conference,
held in the last three days of July.

My thanks also go to the participants of my first session, “The Textbook, the Classroom and the Internet”. Without their hard work I would have been at a loss for words both then and now.

Structure of the Session

The session started with a lot of input from the participants:

• What did they want from the session?
• How did they define the Information Revolution?
• A poll about how common text books are in comparison to 20 years ago.
• What Internet-capable devices have they seen learners use?

The participants’ responses ranged from ideas about digital textbooks, helping students to be better learners, impact on delivery methods, and ways of using the Internet more effectively in the classroom. The response to the next slide caught me slightly off guard: the participants defined the Information Revolution in terms of its impact on people (including the wonderful “[Or is it an] information prison?”) rather than defining in terms of the facts of the explosion of information and its ready availability. The question about the commonality of textbooks drew a mixed response, with almost half of the responses saying that it was about the same, some saying that they are less common, and a minority saying that they are more common. The question the range of Internet-capable devices seen resulted in the whiteboard being almost covered with different devices.

I then asked, rhetorically, what Internet-devices would be around in five
years’ time, and followed that immediately with the assertion that any answers
would be irrelevant.

There was general agreement that being able to find, interpret and use
information will be much more important in 10 years’ time than it is today.

I then asked for a poll on the question of “Is the Internet making us stupid?”. Predictably, most people said no. I then sprang a surprise on them, saying that there was at least one serious author (Nicholas Carr) who argued otherwise, and that perhaps there was something in what he was saying, and perhaps we should be aware of it in today’s learners.

I then posed the question “How might today’s learners seek and use
information in 10 years’ time?”. This drew a wealth of responses, two of which
carried the message underlying what everybody else was saying, amounting to
“give them what they are looking for by using guided curation tools”. This was my own “Aha!” moment, as I had until that point only ideas in outline as to how to answer that question. The next slide invited participants to say how they would help today’s students learn to do that, which again drew two gems: “digital literacy”, and “teach students to develop and ask the right questions”.

The last two slides can be summed up in the bottom contribution of the
last slide: “We are the pioneers!”.

The Presenter as Learner

I find that I learn something very useful whenever I present a session like
this, and this session was no different: it was the importance of utilising the
curation of information as part finding answers to questions.

The Recording of the Session

The recording of the session can be found at
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2011-07-29.1625.M.65CDEE7EEA17F17551775D34E5D9A7.vcr&sid=2008350 .