National eXtension Initiative

We are pleased to introduce you to David Warlick, one of the keynote speakers at eXtension’s 2010 Communities of Practice Workshop, held June 6-8. If you have not signed up to attend, you can do so now here.

Since 1995, Mr. Warlick has been the owner and principal consultant of The Landmark Project, a professional development and innovations firm in Raleigh North Carolina. During this time David has spoken at conferences and delivered workshops for educators throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, The Middle East, and South America. He has been an innovator and leader in the field of educational technology and a prolific programmer. His Citation Machine, receives more than a half-million page views a day.

We asked David a few questions about his experience as an educator and the role that technology plays. You can see the interview below:

Can you tell us about your background in education?
I graduated from Western Carolina University and started teaching in 1976, before there were desktop computers.  I taught math, science, and social studies, but mostly social studies to 7th and 8th graders in a rural school in South Carolina.  I witnessed my first desktop computer, a Radio Shack Model I, in 1981, and my school received 11 Radio Shake Model III computers later that year.  With no software included in the deal, I started teaching myself how to program so that my students would be able to learn on with the machines.  They included a game called Stock Baron, designed to help students infer meaning from historic events, and Trucker Geography, designed to help them learn the relative locations, economic importance, and how to spell the states of the United States.

In 1983, I became a computer resource teacher and then director of instructional technology for a rural school district in in North Carolina, and then moved to Raleigh, to work for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction in 1990, assisting in the proliferation and integration of the information and communication technologies (ICT) throughout the state.

Leaving NCDPI in 1995, I have since worked as an independent consultant providing training, public speaking, and software development services.  I’ve been published in numerous education-related journals, and have written three books on educational technology and contemporary literacy.  My forth book should become available very soon, A Gardener’s Approach to Learning, about cultivating personal learning networks.

How is technology changing the way we learn?
I’m not sure that I can say that technology has changed the way that we learn.  However, it has changed the environment of learning or the experiences and contexts of learning.  I grew up in a small town, with limited access to content and ideas, yet a rich array of physical manipulatives (scrap lumber, boxes of junk, used nails, bolts, screws, etc.).  Today, children are learning within a networked, digital, and info-abundant learning environment and an astounding array of virtual manipulatives that can often be created on-the-fly.

Because of these shifts in the information environment and the rapidly changing circumstances of our play, work, and learning, it has become necessary not only to redefine or expand what it means to be literate, but also to change its context.  As the 3Rs expand, I think that it has become important that we treat literacy not only as the skill to read, but the skills involved in learning — that we might start talking about “learning literacy” rather than just “literacy.”

I’ll add one more thing about learning today, and that information and learning are at the heart of our children’s native experiences.  Information and learning are their culture.  One of our challenges today is to crack the code of that experience, to be able to describe and apply not their out-side-the-classroom information experiences, but the qualities of those experiences.

As educators, what are some things we need to think about to optimally reach our audience?
Four things come to mind.  First, we need to understand and to become fluent in today’s prevailing information landscape, which is networked, digital, abundant, and remarkably participatory.  This does not mean that we should be 100% expert or even 50%.  It means that we are learning literate within a contemporary information environment.

Second, I think that we need to be engaged in our students’ conversations.  There is much in their ‘native’ information experience that is compelling and will almost certainly be a part of their future.  We need to be able to reflect on those experiences, and to integrate them into the conversations of formal learning.

For number three, I believe that we need to understand the qualities of our students outside-the-classroom experiences.  As we try to make formal learning more relevant to our students, we need to start not with video games or social networks as a whole, but to deconstruct those experiences into smaller qualities, that are at the core of the experience.

Finally, I think that it is critical that educators start to include, as an absolutely essential and explicit part of the job, the practice of learning, that we should start to refer to ourselves as expert or master learners.

You talk about a new generation with ‘native’ information experience. What exactly does that mean? What does this mean for educators?
I’m not a neurologist, so I can’t speak to how their brains are wired, and I’m not an anthropologist, so I can’t map out the regions of their culture.  However, I am almost sixty years old with 34 years in education, and I know that the world that our students interact in and with has changed, and that the information landscape that they call home, has undergone dramatic shifts — magical transformations.

As a result, the experiences that define them, individually and as groups, are dramatically different from the experiences that prepared me for my future.  It’s the qualities of those experiences that I think can help us to craft learning experiences more relevant to their world and self views and also to their future.

What challenges do you see for “non-digital natives” who are trying to serve audiences in todays learning environments? What are the most common pitfalls that will create barriers to their success?
Marc Prensky’s 2001 article, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, served to help us understand that there are distinct differences between our students and the students that we were.  However, like many analogies that become part of the vocabulary of our professional conversations, there are many fallacies.  For instance, the land that our students call home is not a destination.  It is a constant journey.  My son started out banging on the keyboard of an Apple IIe computer.  Now he make videos with a computer that slides into his book case and with a camera he can carry in his shirt pocket.  They have seen and adapted to amazing change, and our challenge is their challenge.  We’re all living in times of rapid change, which is why I think that it has become so important that teachers become “master learners” rather than merely  ”learned masters.”

On a more practical note, there are challenges to our everyday endeavors to teach today’s students, within a new information environment, for an unpredictable future.  We often lack the technology.  We lack the time to study and reflect on the implications and practice.  We are hampered by inflexible and sometimes less than relevant curricula.  These are big problems that need some outside-the-box solutions.

Can you tell us more about the Landmark Project?
Just before I left the NC State Department of Public Instruction, I had built their web site, the first state department of education web site in the nation.  In a time when the Internet was a wilderness to most educators, I saw it as a set of landmarks that would help them navigate this wilderness.  This idea carried through and continues to be my goal, to help educators learn to navigate no only the Internet, but what has become a rapidly changing landscape of our work, learning, and play.

We are pleased to introduce you to Melissa Rach, one of the keynote speakers at eXtension’s 2010 Communities of Practice Workshop, held June 6-8. If you have not signed up to attend, you can do so now here.

Melissa is director of content strategy at Brain Traffic, an agency focused on helping clients tackle messy content problems. Melissa worked on her first online project in 1993. Since then, she has become a respected authority on how organizations incorporate interactive content into their overall communications strategies. Her methodologies have been taught at universities nationwide and recognized in books for nearly a decade, from Webmastering for Dummies (2000) to Content Strategy for the Web (2009).

We asked Melissa a few questions about her role as a content strategist and what exactly that means. You can see the interview below:

What is Brain Traffic all about?
Brain Traffic is one of the only consultancies in the world dedicated exclusively to solving content problems. Our work focuses on content strategy and implementation. Content strategy helps organizations effectively plan, create, share, and govern content. Implementation is about putting those strategies into action—everything from web writing to leading corporate governance committees.

In the last few months we’ve worked on projects for Microsoft, RIM (Blackberry), Merck, University of Minnesota, Union of Concerned Scientists, Southern California Presbyterian Homes, Best Buy, and several other organizations.

Content strategy is a new field, but every Brain Traffic employee is a career content expert. Our backgrounds are in areas such as corporate communications, marketing, technical writing, information architecture, journalism, and library and information science.

Why do companies need a content strategy?
Today, more than half of the workforce in industrialized countries is paid to create or share content.  Think about a typical company. There are marketing people creating brochures, product people creating instruction manuals, lawyers creating policies, etc. A content strategy ensures all of the time, effort, and money invested on content is well spent.

Additionally, the web has intensified the need for content strategy—because now all of that corporate content is easily accessible to the world. Online, disparate content is (literally) linked together in ways nobody expected. The press releases are right next to the investor information, which is right next to the customer information. Everything from a web site’s privacy policy to the latest tweet needs to be cohesive, coordinated, and effective. It’s a lot to manage, and contents strategy makes it managing things realistic.

What is a content audit?
A content audit is similar to an accounting audit–only without the IRS involved. Like an accountant, a person doing a content audit takes a thorough look at all of the content and draws conclusions from what he or she finds.  It answers questions like:

Monthly audio calls with all of the core leadership of the 8 pioneer communities of practice are established starting May 15th. The calls will be an hour in length and will be on the third Monday of every month beginning on May 15th. Time will be 2 PM (Eastern), 1 PM (Central), 12 PM (Mountain), and 11 AM (Pacific).
The number for every audio call is 402.472.6290.

It is not imperative that each member of the core leadership team be on every call, but at least one leadership team member should be present. The calls are to facilitate conversations among the leadership, keep you abreast of activities happening with eXtension, share successes, problems or concerns, keep CoPs moving forward, and other items you feel need to be discussed.

The National Equine Resource Team, known as HorseQuest, joined together last week in Lexington, Kentucky to focus on developing content. This hands on meeting facilitated member involvement in the eXtension Communities of Practice Wiki where they further developed material for four educational learning modules. The team was excited to accept new members who hit the ground running and quickly found their place in this ongoing content development.

Discussion also focused on what characteristics should exist to engage in partnerships with groups both in and outside the Cooperative Extension System. Team members brought some really exciting opportunities to HorseQuest and eXtension that can soon be shared with other CoPs.

Despite the fast approaching deadline for launching their equine resources, they still found time and enthusiasm in discussing next steps and began dialogue on how a more robust youth component should be included and the specific audience to targeted.

Additional topics of discussion included peer review guidelines, protocol for adding and recruiting new members to the team, evaluation tactics, graduate and undergraduate student funding for specific tasks, migration of HorseQuest’s existing FAQs to the eXtension FAQ system and identified key members to participate in system testing.

A regular conference call schedule has been established to keep HorseQuest Team members in touch and engaged to take advantage of momentum stimulated during this meeting.

The next Call for Engagement (CFE) was recently announced and in conjunction with that announcement eXtension hosted two workshops about the on developing a proposal for the CFE. There were over 100 participants in the both of the workshops. If you want to view the recordings of these workshop, you can click on either of the links below. The PowerPoint slides used in the workshop are also available below. More information on the Call for Engagement can be found on the Community of Practice wiki.

CFE Workshop PowerPoint Presentation
CFE Workshop recorded February 13, 2006
CFE Workshop recorded Febraury 16, 2006