David Thornburg

David Thornburg: Program Outlines

This presentation explores the promise of modern educational computer use. We have moved to the point where ubiquitous access to technology is an expectation, not an option – where mryiad coupled services can be used in support of rich educational practice, and where each learner can experience true anywhere/anytime learning. We'll show some of the interesting things that young people take for granted today that were virtually impossible to image even a decade ago.

Anyone who wants to see where our educational technology is headed is strongly encouraged to attend this dynamic session.

Education on The Holodeck
Holodeck (fiction): An empty room that can become anything through the use of a specialized computer system.

Educational Holodeck (real): An almost empty room that can become almost anything through the use of a specialized computer system.

For too many children, school is disliked. This has nothing to do with today's generation – school has always been a problem for too many learners. Even paintings of school from the Middle Ages show students sleeping in class as the teacher drones on. Part of the problem comes from the physical structure of classrooms with the teachers facing the front of the room with the teacher being the performer on stage. This is especially true in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

This presentation describes a project that breaks this mold, engages students, advances their curricular knowledge, and does all this in a new environment called the Educational Holodeck.

The “Holodeck” of science fiction fame has now been made real. With special computer installations, this “empty white room” can be transformed into a space ship – or a time machine – or a microscopic vessel taking students through the human body – or become just about anything else you can imagine. During the student-controlled voyage, they encounter challenges that have to be addressed – challenges that reflect those that might present themselves during a real voyage!

The Holodeck becomes a theater without audiences – a fully immersive and interactive space where learning is supported in new ways. It is an example of an "epistemic game," in that participants are engaged in the content, skills, identity, values and thinking styles of people working in the topic area of the mission.

This presentation shows the problems with normal classrooms, describes the Educational Holodeck, places it in the context of modern educational theory, and illustrates all of this with information about the first one in the world built in Recife, Brazil. We also demonstrate part of a voyage students might take, and connect the mission to existing curricular areas.

Learning on The Holodeck: Theatres Without Audiences
Lecture-based instruction provides tremendous challenges to students and teachers alike. Material that is engaging for some learners is either too complex, or too simple, for others. As a result, many educators “teach to the middle,” and hope the rest get the help (or challenge) they need to be successful. Much current technology use in many classrooms is used in support of this failed model of education, and yet, these same technologies can be used to create new learning environments – places where students can explore topics fully engaged with their learning.

This session explores a simulation-based technology environment that achieves the same engagement that goes beyond that of most video games, but has a strong curricular focus on STEM, based on the pedagogy of inquiry and project-based learning.

A flexible virtual environment, the holodeck, was first proposed in the science fiction series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. While a “true” holodeck exceeds current technological capacity, a very functional model that meets our goals can be constructed within normal school budgets.

We explore the challenges facing instructors today, and show how a contemporary version of the fictional “holodeck” can fully engage all learners, each at his or her own level. By exploring (through demonstration) some aspects of a holodeck for STEM education, attendees will find ideas they can use in their own classrooms, and will leave with some essential insights that can point to new ways to reach every learner.

Technology directors will see how their expertise plays a central role in the construction and operation of these new learning spaces, and (for a full-day workshop) participants will experience a holodeck mission along with plenty of time to explore various technologies that can be incorporated as you build your own holodecks in your schools or districts. The workshop will be conducted in near-Earth orbit and include a trip to Mars and back.

What The Future Really Holds: Holodecks on the Horizon
Most visions of technology enhanced education maintain the concept of classrooms dating to the Middle Ages. This presentation explores the path from Cyberspace to Augmented Reality and shows why science fiction authors may have a better grasp of learning technologies than many educational leaders. Through demonstrations of bleeding edge prototypes and products predicted by Philip K Dick, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, and Gene Roddenberry, you will never look at your classroom the same way again. Forget the mouse, the interactive whiteboard, and prepare yourself for immersive technologies where reality and virtual meet in support of all learners.

Topics:

• How science fiction sets the stage for new technologies
• The rise of the Web
• The rise of Virtual Worlds
• The emergence of Augmented Reality
• Why 3D displays and haptic technology will make the holodeck possible
• What education can look like in a few years time

Space Exploration as a STEM Curriculum
The development of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills is a national priority. The need for people pursuing careers in these fields has never been higher.

This presentations shows how these four topics are highly interconnected, and makes a strong case that they should be explored together. Space exploration is a topic that lends itself particularly well to this approach. Furthermore, through the use of inquiry-driven project-based learning, students not only acquire skills in these four areas, they come to understand and appreciate why people choose these fields as lifelong career paths. This dynamic and content-rich presentation outlines an approach to address these skills as an elective or after-school program for middle and high school students.

If you have ever been captured by the mystery of Space, the role educational computing and other hands-on tools can play in exploring this topic, and how to engage students in subjects that may shape their future careers as members of a highly-skilled workforce, this session will describe an approach that should be of great interest and value to you.

Constructionism, Duct Tape, and Preparing Children for Their Future
Anyone who has seen the movie, Apollo 13 knows the critical role duct tape played in the successful completion of this mission. Creative problem solving in critical situations is an important skill in education as we craft environments to prepare our youth for a world of constant change. Seymour Papert's views on the importance of student projects fit well with the inquiry-driven, project-based model of education known to be of benefit to students. This dynamic presentation explores the role of technologies – including those created by students themselves – as they advance their skills in academic fields. Critical to this success is the kind of dramatic problem-solving that we all engage in when one of our projects doesn't come out exactly as planned. Duct tape is employed as a metaphor for the dynamic learning that comes when a project is “debugged.” The depth of learning that comes from refining a solution is amazing.

Topics include:

• Why constructionism is an important concept
• How constructionism fits in with other pedagogical models
• Personal computers as constructionist tools
• When things go wrong - the role of creativity in problem solving
• Thinking with duct tape
• "Duct tape" in practice

While the emphasis in this presentation is on technologies used by students, examples of problem solving using duct tape in space (since Apollo 13!) will be used to illustrate the core ideas of this dynamic presentation.

Carpe Ductum: Seize the Tape!

When The Best is Free:
An educator's perspective on open source software
As schools work to increase the number of computers in student hands in the face of declining technology budgets, it is important to explore how to save scarce money without reducing the quality of software being used by students and teachers alike. This dynamic presentation, based on the presenter's most recent book, looks at a hand-picked collection of open source and other free software that not only helps reduce software budgets, but provides very high quality tools for everything from word processing to galactic exploration.

Furthermore, every title explored in this presentation runs on all three major educational computing platforms, Linux, Windows and Macintosh, insuring that you'll be able to start saving money immediately no matter which computing platform you now own.

Presenter requirements: Broadband Internet access

Forget About The Future: It's The Present That Concerns Me Preparing Students For Today's World
For many years the presenter has shared visions of the future with educators around the world in the hope that this would influence educational practice. This was a mistake. We don't need to prepare students just for some unseen and basically unknowable future, we need to prepare them for the world as it exists today.

This dynamic presentation eschews the future in favor of a pragmatic view of today's world. A world where a new class of migrant workers spans the globe working on stimulating high-tech projects on a global scale. A world where cross-disciplinary understanding is needed for success; where 87% of teens have access to primary source materials relating to their studies; where vulcanologists study volcanic eruptions on a moon of Jupiter; where national borders are transparent; where biological species from other planets are put under the microscope; where new microscopic machines are grown, not manufactured. This is not fiction, not a dream, not the future, just reality – as it exists today.

By looking at the skills needed to thrive in today's very real world, ideas relating to curriculum and pedagogy naturally emerge. Forget pie-in-the sky predictions. This presentation explores the world in a way that has implications for every educator, educational leader, and student.

Education, Technology and The Retribalization of Culture
This presentation, based on Dr. Thornburg's latest book, explores the rapid growth of technology in student's lives, and the emergence of a "retribalization" of culture as communities of interest gather around the global campfire lit by broadband fiber optics connecting kindred spirits in amazing new ways. Whether it is students using Skype from their local McDonalds' wireless broadband system to converse with friends in other countries for free, or teachers gaining access to vast video libraries on demand with which they can craft powerful narratives for instruction, no aspect of children's lives will be untouched by this new trend.

Come learn why certain weeds can be more powerful than trees, why the book took so long to be adopted by schools, and how the very technologies we take for granted are changing the nature of our interactions with others in amazingly powerful and positive ways.

Technology and The Art of Helping Students Ask Good Questions
Picasso once said, "Computers are useless, they give answers (never questions)." This challenging observation suggests that the process of inquiry is uniquely human, and amazingly powerful .In fact, this is true. Inquiry drives our quest for learning, at almost every age, and in every subject. However, computers are not useless in this task. They can play a useful (if subservient) role, supporting both the formulation and the answering of interesting questions. This presentation explores the inquiry process as a vehicle for developing understanding in any subject through inquiry and a demonstration of modern technologies used in support of finding good questions whose answers will help students gain mastery of any subject being taught.

Topics covered include:

• Why questions are powerful motivators for learning
• What distinguishes inquiry from other kinds of questions
• Characteristics of interesting questions
• The role of content in formulating questions
• Using technology in an inquiry-driven environment