Mobi LED

Day 1

Keynote presentation by Marc Prensky

Marc Prensky has introduced himself as NOT an academic and had various Positives and Negatives about this position, including the ability to say exactly what you feel. Talking about gaming, he implies that adults are in the dark as they have no idea how to play them. Where is mobile going? We are living in a increasingly complex world. In 30 years if technology continues to increase exponentially it will be 1 billion times more powerful than what it is today.

Young people are more and more socializing and living through their mobile devices. Today tools are coming and changing really fast. He describes a switching of tools Yahoo Search --> Google Search; Email --> IM; iPod to vPod ect.. and gives various examples. Kids are born with the idea of change....

He says that we need to be helping our students to ask new questions, to design new tools; preparing students for a written world where most of the information will be in forms that are not in written forms. So as the tutor was replaced with the lecturer which will be replaced with a guide. In pedagogy he calls it PARTNERING... The technology that is available is tools to support new types of learning.

Age -appropriate has changed... Emotional development is out of sync with intelectual development. Engagement is changing. To engage students you have to do things WITH them... He advocates the invention of new ways to do things. Teachers must have the courage to keep up with live. We need to educate our kids for the rest of their lives. He recons that all technology will be mobile and networked ... Broadband and power will be ubiquitous. Mobile will be more complex, more game-like, more multi-sensory and involve more doing. Mobile software will adapt and change to suit the context. 

You Tube is become a new way to communicate, with more videos than the networks in America. It has become the new way to communicate with the Television generation.

The Gaps are between the Student/ Teacher gap ( What the students want to do and what the teachers are actually doing), Have/Have not gap (digital divide), a Present/Future gap (and Research/Practitioner Gap.

What makes a digital native is the Attitude and the Comfort level of our kids...