SXSWedu

Greetings from South by Southwest Edu!

Last week in Austin Texas, educators, entrepreneurs, school leaders, policy makers and investors got together to talk about, get inspired about, and try to remake education.

Last year 2000 participants descended on Austin, this year the conference grew to 5000.

SXSWedu, an outgrowth of the SXSW festival which draws over 24,000 to the city in its infancy, this is the third year of the conference. The edtech industry is booming, as Bill Gates, the keynote speaker shared with us, expenditure will exceed $9 billion dollars this year! Wow!

There were so many interesting discussions, meet-ups, and panels. I will share a few of my favorites with you.

The Big 3 IDEAs

The three big trends that emerged from SXSWedu were:

1. Digital Literacy

Chris Dede, one of my personal heroes, and the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard Graduate School of Education. His seminal work Leadership without Followers is a must read!

Here is an overview of his ideas that he presented:

We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift--from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.

Students must develop fluency in using emerging interactive media

We are witnessing the transformation of formal learning.

Part of the visions for higher education will be augmented reality and immersive environments.

He showed some of the work that Harvard is doing in immersive environments to teach students science. He believes that the future of MOOCs will merge with augmented reality, so online classes will take place in the actual/virtual environments that students are learning about.

He stressed that students are living in a era of multiple jobs. The industrial model has changed to life-wide education.

2. MOOCs

Not exactly new, but clearly here to stay and grow. Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng and edX president Anant Agarwal conversing about the future of their businesses. Coursera now has 2.8 million students and 62 universities signed up. Andrew spoke of the intersection of technology and education being at a moment of "the perfect storm".

They see the future of MOOCs expanded, and discussed San Jose State's pilot of introducing remedial math courses through MOOCs-low cost ($150.00) and credit-bearing.

They also talked about SPOCs-small private online courses that are branded specifically for the university. 

3. Maker

Dale Dougherty, editor of Make Magazine discussed the importance of experiential learning. He has co-founded the Maker Education Initiative. "Its about instilling a lifetime love of learning and giving people the passion to tinker". There was a Makerspace set up at SXSWedu and attendees had the opportunity to see and use makerbot 3-D printers, laser cutters and engravers and build robots.

Dougherty stressed the importance of informal learning, and that learning will be more improvisational in the future. The future of education is "iffy". Not all learning can or will ever happen in the classroom.

Some other highlights---

Girls reign: Sehreen NoorAli of Noodle organized a dinner for over 100 women marking the debut of EdTechWomen. I was there, and sat next to Jessie Woolley-Wilson CEO of DreamBox. At the closing keynote, she was introduced by  Bill Gates in his keynote, and shared the stage with him to discuss  the future of education.

Alan November--

Distinguished Speaker

"Every teacher needs to be able to search and find the information in their field digitally. The real revolution is not technology but information. Every teacher should have a global network".

John Maeda, President of RISD

Creativity is the #1 skill in business

It is not just an information era but a design era.

The arts are becoming the new vocabulary

It is STEAM not STEM.

Overall there was so much to see, hear and do at SXSWedu! It was awesome.

Visit to the Fab Lab

     On January 23,2013 Professor Marianne Klimchuk, Professor Kurt Vega and I (Sandra Markus) visited the Fab Lab at the Marymount School on the Upper East Side of New York City.

     For those of you who are new to the "Fab Lab" concept--The Fab Lab program was started at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the Center for Bits and Atoms in 1998.In short, it is a digital fabrication lab. The concept was popularized by Neil Gershenfeld who taught a class called "How to make (almost) anything" at MIT, which offered students the opportunity to use the tools in the lab to build and create. When he first launched the class, he anticipated 10 students, yet over 100 showed up. Students were motivated by the desire to make things that they wanted, but did not yet exist. Their products ranged from alarm clocks that needs to be wrestled into turning off to a portable space for screaming.(my personal favorite).

     From its first incarnation, Fab labs has spread from inner-city Boston (South End Technology Center)to rural India to South Africa to northern Norway.These labs share a common mission to provide access to modern tools for invention.Fab labs have been credited with solving local problems, such as affordable cable access in rural India to developing instruments to locate water.

All fab lab share core machinery, so that the labs can collaborate and share projects. Some of the machinery that we saw were:

Replicator 3-D Printer

3-D Printers Maker-Bot

Laser-Cutter 

ShopBot

Vinyl Cutter

Marymount's Fab Lab's Director, Jaymes Dec faciliates the experiential hands-on learning process. In addition to learning fabrication skills, the students learn programming skills to integrate into their prototypes. This idea of "learning by doing" stretches back to Dewey, the father of progressive education.

The art of tinkering and learning how to prototype is considered one of the fundamental skills in 21st century learning.

     The Fab Lab reflects a growing movement in education to integrate hands-on learning projects into the curriculum.This is an environment that supports peer-to-peer learning  DIYers, makers and tinkerers are all part of this growing passion for conceptualizing,creating and building. The interdisciplinary nature of the fabrication technologies integrates design skills, basic science, engineering and technology education. 

To learn more about Fab Labs watch:
http://www.ted.com/talks/neil_gershenfeld_on_fab_labs.html

3-D Printing is currently being used in fashion--as we can see from the images above that were taken at the Voltage Fashion Collection being presented at Paris Fashion week