This year’s Advancing Learning Conference’s Theme is “Connecting The Dots” to Learning .
The ETC committee welcomes you to its 18th annual conference.
As David Weinberger discusses in his book “Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room” – we used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts.
We used to be the experts, who knew all the facts and our role was to transmit them to students, and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks, available to everyone, all the time. As we grapple with issues of information overload and ponder a new culture of learning Howard Gardner challenges us to actively develop and cultivate disciplined, synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical minds – through time, thought and effort.
“The synthesizing mind takes information from disparate sources, understands and evaluates that information objectively, and puts it together in ways that make sense to the synthesizer and also to other persons. Valuable in the past, the capacity to synthesize becomes ever more crucial as information continues to mount at dizzying rates.” – Howard Gardner
In addition we are faced with a myriad of options – educational technology tools abound, clouds are everywhere, our smartphones have become an appendage, and social media has given us different ways to communicate, collaborate and connect.
We are all being challenged to find *new* ways to engage our students in the virtual and physical spaces of our schools and campuses; challenged to connect the dots to learning. We are called to teach in ways we never learned how to learn. Every aspect of the traditional notion of teaching and learning is under a microscope, telescope and periscope – all at the same time.
Join us at Seneca College in Toronto as we share ideas and build a community of practice focused on connecting the dots to advance learning. Let’s reframe our thinking to consider a range of ideas, contexts and influences as we work to advance learning.