We’re now over a week past EduCon 2.7, and I’m still thinking a lot about what we saw this year.
What struck me was that this was the year that it really didn’t feel like an edu-tech conference at all – not because there wasn’t tech everywhere (Raghava KK said that it was the most tweeted conference he’d ever seen), but because it really wasn’t the thing we talked about much at all.
That’s what Ubiquitous, Necessary and Invisible can — and maybe even must — mean.
There’s no question in my mind that the schools we need must be technology rich. We have to make schools leverage the best of what we are and what we know. In the world we live in today, that means that we have to use the tools of the day – be they laptops, Chromebooks, smart phones, social media, Google Apps or anything else. But owning that the tools must be used is really only the very first baby step we have to take.
And once we’ve taken that baby step, we can ask the bigger and better questions that so very much need asking.
Those were the conversations I saw at EduCon – what will our classrooms and schools value? How can we make them more equitable places – especially in regard to issues of race, gender, class and sexuality? How can we ask hard questions about the world we live in and the world we hope our children will create? How can the work we do in schools help students become deeply thoughtful about the world around them? How can we empower them to believe in — and work toward — a vision of the world that is better than we have today? How do schools need to evolve to more authentically ask these questions?
And yes, how do we leverage the tools we have to do all of this better?
For eight years, we’ve tried to create a space where teachers can come together to talk about progressive pedagogy in a technology-rich environment. The eight years have seen incredible change in the world our schools inhabit – from Common Core to the rise of social media to a growing social justice movement to thousands of schools going 1:1 to unprecedented budget crisis in many districts across the country. With all of these changes, the conversations at EduCon have grown richer — and harder. Part of that is because there remains a critical mass of people who come every year, and who keep blogging and tweeting and talking, but also because there are more and more educators who have never been to EduCon before but who are looking for the difficult conversations, who are not settling for easy answers, and who know that it’s not enough just to look for edu-tech solutions, but rather are looking for the places and spaces where educators want to ask the harder questions.
The fact that we can create technology-rich spaces that aren’t about the tech but are about the next questions we have to ask is exciting to me. The fact that EduCon can be one of those spaces is tremendously humbling. The fact that these conversations will continue to happen far beyond the three days of the conference gives me hope.
See you all next year.
cross-posted at practicaltheory.org/blog.
Chris Lehmann is the founding principal of the Science Leadership Academy, a progressive science and technology high school in Philadelphia, PA. that was recognized by Ladies Home Journal as one of the Ten Most Amazing Schools in the US and was recognized as an Apple Distinguished School in 2009 and 2010. Chris was a 2014 winner of the Harold W. McGraw Jr. Prize in Education and has been honored by the White House as a Champion of Change for his work in education reform. In June 2010, Chris was named as one of the “30 Most Influential People in EdTech” by Technology & Learning Magazine. Read more at his blog, http://practicaltheory.org/blog.
