I'm not a conference-going person. In fact, I'd rather spend three days in solitary confinement at a high-risk prison (which I've never done...yet) than three days trapped in a conference with hundreds of people I don't know or necessarily want to know and listen to boring speeches.
The Big Ideas Fest (www.bigideasfest.org), an education-solutions-oriented conference organized by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (www.ISKME.org), held Dec. 4-7 at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, blew my mind. It was a conference I didn't want to end, and in fact, lots of the participants seemed to feel the same way because they lingered after the final session until the hotel staff almost had to pepper spray us to unOccupy the Ritz.
Only 180 people attended this third annual event, but what people! William Ayers, cofounder of the Weather Underground and a recently retired Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois who received Chicago's top award for urban education reform, gave a feisty talk about doing away with educational inequality. His most tweeted comment was the exhortation to "Open your eyes. Be astonished. And do something." Wearing a blue, woolen sailor's cap and scuffed bluejeans, Ayers looked as if he were still protesting, and indeed he mentioned he had participated in recent Occupy Wall Street actions.
From the frontlines of education reform was speaker Kaycee Eckhardt, who teaches high school students in a FEMA trailer in New Orleans. Sporting black tattoos on both or her bared arms, she described the sometimes useless methods she tried to get her students to learn to read so they could go to college. She would slip the cover for a Steinbeck novel onto a Harry Potter book, so that her students wouldn't be embarrassed for reading only at the fourth grade level.
Eckhart was on one of the four winning teams that received an award for its so-called Big Ideas in Beta. Nine teams worked for six hours over the course of three days to solve one of three major educational challenges, such as open access to learning resources, and universal literacy and math competence. For a video of Kaycee's talk on how to make learning resources as quickly accessible to a teacher as a snap of a finger, see www.bigideasfest.org or check out Half Moon Bay Patch, which featured her earlier, tear-inducing talk on post- Katrina trailer teaching.
All in all, nine teams presented their prototypes for solving major educational challenges. The presentations were anything but PowerPoint. The teams used cardboard models, funny hats, improv, thematic music, and humor to demonstrate their solutions; the process borrowed heavily from Maker Faire and also reflected the influence of Jonah Houston, a facilitator who works for the design firm IDEO. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded a $50,000 matching grant to ISKME to help the winners develop full working models of their ideas.
The conference ended with Danny Hillis, cofounder of Applied Minds and a supernerd co-creator of parallel computing systems, talk about his Gates Foundation-funded project to create a personalized learning search tool that would match an individual's skills and knowledge base to her or his passions. The tool (no name yet) would also suggest further areas of interest that might engage the student, much like a recommendation engine. Hillis is now identifying what he calls a "learning map," or a categorized map of everything that is to be learned. It's like a digital Diderot for the 21st century.
Looking around the ballroom at the ritzy Ritz, I realized we had a real- time learning map right in the room, with a mix of educators, students, policy makers, funders, and what the conference organizer Lisa Petrides calls "edupreneurs." Everyone was talking about plans for next year's conference and how they couldn't wait to import what they'd learned in these three days into their classrooms and workplaces.
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