Thursday, May 18, 2006

Warlick and Literacy

David Warlick was the opening keynote today at the Minnesota e-Learning Summit at Augsburg College. I've been a fan of his blog for the past six months and was very much looking forward to hearing him speak. I was curious about whether his presentation style was as compelling as his writing style. I was absolutely not disappointed (which I guess is my own convoluted way of saying he was terrific).

His first presentation was about our need to redefine literacy for the 21st century. In particular, he says that reading needs to be expanded into exposing the truth or exposing knowledge, and that arithmetic is expanding into employing information, and writing is expanding into expressing ideas compellingly.

His second session was all about Web 2.0. Warlick does a great job because he doesn't just talk to (or at) his audience, he demonstrates the applications and he involves the audience in ways that they will remember long after the session ends. I was hoping to be blogging during his session but there is no wireless available in the Augsburg Chapel (when are these churches going to enter the 21st century? sheesh!) I guess you could say I am blogging during the session since I am writing this in the Firefox extension called Performancing, but I have to wait until I get to the hotel to post it.

I spoke briefly with David after the second session. Since I like to make similar presentations about Web 2.0 I was comparing what he does with what I do (and believe me, he is better). It is particularly troubling to me that the most important tool of all is the hardest to make look easy and yet still show the power that it has. I'm speaking of RSS. I'm going to take my best shot at putting together some presentation materials that demonstrate RSS without scaring away the non-geeks.

I thought the first day of the Summit was terrific, and I'm the most critical person I know.

Tags: Warlick redefine literacy blogging session

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Barry, Enjoying my trip around your blog. The e-Summit retrospect is a good read for me as I was to busy to attend.

Perhaps we can have a blog on trying to Skype, WebEx, and talk about Podcast and not having it work :-)

Take care and enjoy your trip.

Roger B. said...

Ah... the e-learning summit. I was first introduced to David Warlick there. I jumped at the chance to listen to him again at the Science Center in St. Paul. I too am trying to simplify the RSS blog thing for educators here in St Michael/Albertville. Unfortunately, I am trying to simplify it for myself first:) It is starting to sink into my thick skull! The only way I know how learn it is just get started.... therefore, this is the first post I have ever made to a blogger! yes, I am excited to see how this all works.

Question for you... have you found any tools that you would recommend for your staff on getting started in blogging? I have just started a blog for our department and would like to help teachers begin to use it, but I want to make sure I find some good (simple) tools to use. So far, I like blogger.com What aggregator do you like the best?

Thanks

Barry Dahl said...

I use Bloglines for my aggregator. It's very simple. You'll find some links here that may be useful.

http://www.zohowriter.com/public/
barrydahl/Agenda-08-23-06

No spaces, use the whole sequence.

Good luck with the bloggy thingy.