ISTE 2010: Emerging Themes

Two themes are emerg­ing in what I’m learn­ing here at ISTE 2010. These aren’t new ideas by any stretch, even to me. It’s just that they are being dri­ven home in very pow­er­ful and deep ways.

The world is small and flat. Not pre­cisely in the sense that Thomas Fried­man meant in his book, but in the sense of con­nec­tions and rela­tion­ships. As I said yes­ter­day, I can hardly turn around any­where with­out see­ing some­one I know, or meet­ing some­one I’ve con­versed with on Twit­ter. Today I met Jeff Aga­menoni and Sue Waters, from Mon­tana and Aus­tralia respec­tively, and with whom I have chat­ted many times over the last cou­ple of years. (Sue, of course, reminded me almost imme­di­ately that I for­got to bring her the choco­late I promised her. And then I took her seat in the Blogger’s Cafe. Great way to treat some­one I’ve just met.)

When our stu­dents leave our schools, they are going to land in a world where they need to relate not just with peo­ple who live and work near them, but with peo­ple around the world. It’s not optional any more. Every­one is your neigh­bor. Dis­tance is now mea­sured not in miles but by your abil­ity to con­nect with dif­fer­ent chan­nels. The more com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools you know, the closer you are. Kids are going to have to be able to find peo­ple and be found, to build their own dig­i­tal homes and tell their own dig­i­tal stories.

Which is the sec­ond theme I’m see­ing over and over:

Design is an essen­tial skill. Garr Reynolds in his book and blog, Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen, talks about how often peo­ple treat design as an after­thought, as though it’s dec­o­ra­tion to be painted on after mak­ing the con­tent. But design is much deeper. It is ulti­mately about effec­tive com­mu­ni­ca­tion and facil­i­tat­ing con­nec­tion. If a valu­able mes­sage is obscured by poor design, the mes­sage will lose power, or the recip­i­ent will give up before it gets through.

Just as kids have to learn how to con­nect with the world and man­age those con­nec­tions, they have to learn how to effec­tively use the prin­ci­ples and tools of design to enhance their com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The only way we will ever be able to teach those skills is to use them ourselves.

So my first take­away from the day is that all edu­ca­tors, not just the ones who like that “tech­nol­ogy stuff,” have to become con­nected and become design­ers. It’s not optional any­more, because we will be putting our kids at a dis­ad­van­tage if we don’t get there.