Click the link above and you can see the presentation I’ll be making (I’m sure there will be changes since I’m notorious for making alterations up until the last moment) during my time at the Palmetto Independent Association of Schools Tech Symposium at Converse College in Spartanburg, SC on Monday.

Here is basic setlist that I’ll be riffing on…

- Science is Collaboration
- Science is Voice
- Science is Multiple Verification

- SCIENCE IS A PROCESS.

The idea that we should not allow science to do it’s job b/c we’re afraid is really really frightening.
- mobile web = future
- learning = being connected and applying

Starts with insight or inspiration. Wonder is more impt than wisdom (Einstein)

Edu Platforms Must Be:
- Mobile
- Collaborative
- Verifiable

Hanging Birdhouses example

Dangers of believing anecdotes

We must teach causation and correlation from the earliest of ages.

Moral obligation to invent and cultivate technologies of self expression.

–

Friends all want to “go back in time” in a time machine. A time before Twitter or American Idol or the Double Down (have you seen this thing?…) or Wikipedia. There’s a pull towards nostalgia. Especially with my teacher friends. Strong hard pull towards nostalgia.

I’m not part of that crowd, I’m happy to say. I don’t want to go back in time. It’s not because I’m not nostalgic. I have a fantastic collection of vintage Willie Nelson tshirts and “Han Shot First!” paraphernalia that rivals any geek. I even prefer my original NES game system to the XBOX 360.

Possibilities tend to move forward. Well, at least time as we conceive it as the strange and often irrational organic beings that we happen to be. Things move from point A to point B. Folks have even made religions out of that fact.

Yet, this is the greatest point in human history to be a teacher by any measure that you wish to choose.

Where I grew up (small rural farming town of Mullins, SC), I was one of only about 8 students out of a graduating class of 150 to go to college. College, in Mullins, really wasn’t that big of a deal even in 1996. That has changed.

Not only that, but we have access to information far more vast that even I could have ever dreamed.

I grew up reading encyclopedias. I grew up wishing I could have access to information in a way that was delivered to me without a Mosaic intercessor. I wished to God I had a way to communicate with other dorky geeky nerdy kids like myself who cared about string theory in the 8th grade or who really wanted to debate whether the Death of Superman at the hands of Doomsday was a permanent thing or even who was going to start the first World Series game when the Cubs would eventually make it to the World Series in 1989 on the shoulders of Ryne Sandberg and Andre Dawson.

Of course, the Cubs didn’t make it. Neither did I.

Yet, in 1992 that all changed.

The web.

The web rides on the shoulders of not Ryne Sandberg but on the back of science…”

It turns into a Jimi Hendrix solo collaboration from that point on…