ITEC 2009: David Warlick Keynote

David Warlick rocked the house during his ITEC 2009 keynote presentation: Rebooting the Basics – Literacy and Learning in the 21st Century

He had me at the title, and then out of his amazing brain came this:

"Stop integrating technology and start redefining literacy instead!"

He continued that brilliance for the next hour sharing many words of wisdom and experience. I tried to capture the big ideas in my Tweets:

• The "BASICS" of being literate have changed! The text, the context,the mediums, the modes require sophisticated literacies!
• What do our children need to be learning today that will prepare them for an unpredictable future?
• The world is the curriculum and it is changing everyday.
• We are wasting too much precious time getting kids to work with print only resources- they must be able to manage digital content
• Any school thinks it prepares its school for the future without the "CORE" content of art, music, drama is a FACTORY
  
• Writing that moves readers uses visual, text, music, image…it is about POWERFUL communication!
• Students need to become empowered PRODUCERS not only consumers of content! Students can do that now.
• Digital Communicators must be "multilingual"- speaking visual, iconic, mathematical, music, languages Requires new literacy skillset.
• MUST teach students the "LANGUAGE" of blogs, Twitter,etc…they R social communities thatR mediated by language and culture- NOT TOOLS

David certainly made the case that "Rules of the Literacy Club" have sooo changed!

The entire presentation is available here and was covered live on Dangerously Irrelevant. We were fortunate to be able to continue the conversation with David at the ITEC Tweet Up. Big thanks to Russ Goerend for posting these snippets

for us to enjoy.

Photo on Flickr by carlenewalter