Posts Tagged ‘Dennis Harper’

Exciting events at the ISTE conference

Thursday, June 10th, 2010

ISTE (formerly known as NECC) is the largest national educational technology conference in the U.S. This year it will be in Denver, Colorado June 27-30.

Generation YES will be there in full force with a booth (#855) and other events. If you will be in Denver, we hope you will come by and say hello!

Pre-conference event - The Constructivist Celebration, Sunday June 27
Held once again the day before ISTE starts, this is a day-long workshop focusing on creativity and computing. For a very reasonable $60, you will receive free creativity software worth hundreds of dollars from the world’s best school-tool companies, breakfast, snacks and lunch, and a full-day workshop led by Gary Stager and other members of the Constructivist Consortium. Added bonuses: a free just-released “ImagineIt2″ DVD and a TechYES mini-kit. It’s always a sell-out, but right now there are still a few spaces left to join in the fun, so register today - you won’t regret it!

Sessions

  • Dennis Harper - Establishing Student Technology Leaders Programs for Districts, States, and Nations Wednesday, 6/30/2010, 8:30am-9:30am, CCC 605. Discover how districts, states, and nations can establish effective student technology leaders organizations that meet integration, infrastructure support, and technology literacy goals.
  • Sylvia Martinez - Tinkering Toward Technology Literacy Wednesday, 6/30/2010, 10:30am-11:30am, CCC 605. Combine tinkering and technology and you have a time-honored tradition that allows imagination and creativity to lead the way to technology literacy.

Events in the Generation YES booth #855

  • Adora Svitak (12 year old author, blogger, and the youngest person to be invited to speak at TED) will be sharing her ideas for education from a youth’s point of view.
  • We will be sharing a new technology literacy study by a well-known researcher making the case for project-based technology literacy assessment. (more about this soon)
  • GenYES and TechYES teachers and students from nearby schools will be in the booth sharing their projects and tech integration tips.

Plus… we will be printing handy business cards for any teacher who forgot theirs at home!

Hope to see you there!

Sylvia

Share/Save/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Generation YES, conferences, fun/free stuff, professional development | Comments Off

Seymour Papert on Generation YES and Kid Power

Saturday, February 20th, 2010

This is a remarkable piece of video from 1998 unearthed by Gary Stager. In it, Ryan Powell, then a GenYES middle school student, interviews Seymour Papert and John Gage about the model of students learning technology in order to help teachers in their own schools. Both of these heavyweights of educational technology say some really interesting things about the model, including Dr. Papert saying that it’s the best thing the US Department of Education has ever funded! Pretty nice to hear that.

As further background, Dr. Papert is the father of educational technology, a student of Jean Piaget, and an internationally renowned educator famous for the theory of constructivism. His advocacy of student laptop programs extends around the world including the XO laptop for developing nations, and he invented the Logo programming language for children. John Gage, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, started the NetDay movement to wire schools and originated the phrase, “the network is the computer.”

About halfway through this clip, Dr. Papert talks a bit about why he believes that education reform can happen now, even though decades of reform efforts have not had much impact.

He says there are two things that are different now. One is that school was designed to fit the previous “knowledge technology” of chalk, blackboards, paper and pencil. These technologies match quite well with the prevailing pedagogy of the last century, which relied on instruction, teacher as the center of all knowledge, and delivery of content. So criticizing it was a bit idealistic and theoretical. But now we have new technology that directly enables construction, connection, and distributed expertise. These new knowledge technologies tip the balance and as a result, new pedagogy can become reality.

The second factor is what he calls “Kid Power.” The technology amplifies the voices of people who are traditionally without voice or representation in our society.

For more explanation of Papert’s view on why technology will power education reform, check out this speech: Chlld Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century.

In Gary’s post about this video, he also recalls some of the early days of Generation YES, when Dennis Harper had this “crazy idea” of kids being at the center of changing education with technology. Seymour Papert on Generation YES & Kid Power : Stager-to-Go

By the way, Ryan is now a college graduate serving in the Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa with his new wife Kimberly.

Sylvia

Share/Save/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in GenYES, Generation YES, constructivism, education reform, student voice | 1 Comment »

The Tech and Learning 100 at 30 - Vote for Dennis!

Friday, January 22nd, 2010

As part of the 30th anniversary celebrations of Tech&Learning Magazine, they are creating a compendium of important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education.

techlearning logo

The first set of honorees will be the pioneers— the founding fathers and mothers whose inventions, declarations, and theories set the table for where we are today.

And guess who is on the list of nominations - Generation YES founder Dr. Dennis Harper. For those of you who don’t know, Dr. Harper definitely belongs on this list.

Dennis wrote the first textbook for educators about computing and taught the first graduate level educational technology class in the world back in the 1980’s. He also he brought the first computers into K-12 schools in over 30 countries across Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean. He was one of the four founders of California Computer Using Educators (CUE) and ran the first computer camp for kids with David Thornburg (also on this list.) And all along the way, he has been a tireless advocate for student empowerment as the only path to true technology integration in schools.

Tech&Learning has created an online poll to vote for ten of of these leaders. There are some other names on the list that will surely catch your attention, for example, Seymour Papert, the undisputed father of educational technology.

You have 10 votes - it would be great if you used one of them to acknowledge Dennis Harper and his legacy of student empowerment and student ownership of their own learning through modern technology.

Sylvia

Share/Save/Bookmark

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in In the news, contests | Comments Off

Malaysian Student Technology Leaders

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

I just returned yesterday from Malaysia and the launch of the Malaysian Student Technology Leaders (MYSTL) Twenty five years ago I provided the first ed tech training to a group of Malaysian teachers while working at the National University of Malaysia. I have kept up with friends and developments in this progressive nation of 30 million people. For the past few months Generation YES has worked with Ministry of Education officials to launch MYSTL. MYSTL is based on both the GenYES and TechYES models where a group of students are provided the training and resources to ensure their teachers integrate technology and their peers are technology literate.

Last week’s formal launch and training teachers and students in three pilot secondary schools was a precursor for an additional 96 schools starting next January and another 300 schools scheduled to follow in January of 2011. Malaysia realizes that to succeed in the future and survive these tough economic times, students must be able to truly use today’s and tomorrow’s technology to think, create, and change.

Working with these Malaysian high school students again confirmed to me that students throughout the world have the same capacity to use their energy and proclivity with technology to redefine our future for the better. Three U.S. based Generation YES schools will act as sister schools to the three Malaysian pilots.

There are some signs that the U.S will begin taking educational technology seriously with new allocations in the federal EETT program (Title IID). However, the U.S. has a long way to go to match the commitment I see in many other nations.

Dennis Harper

Share/Save/Bookmark

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Generation YES, In the news, Liberia, global | 4 Comments »

Dennis Harper named to the 2008 Daring Dozen!

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Dennis Harper pic We are just as proud as can be here at Generation YES! Edutopia has chosen it’s annual Daring Dozen, twelve people “reshaping the future of education” - and Dennis Harper is on the 2008 list.

From Edutopia - Even as the most optimistic activists in education begin to feel alone and unheard in the wilderness, we find evidence that the ranks of reformers are growing and their pleas for technology integration, project learning, integrated curriculum, collaborative learning, new methods of assessment are having more impact.

The GenYES vision, Harper says, is one of collaboration between students and teachers. The educators, he emphasizes, provide the content and the pedagogy, while the kids are deeply involved in helping instructors employ the classroom technology as a learning tool. When this approach fails, he says, it’s “because we expect teachers to do everything. It always gets me that you have to argue the case that kids should be doing things in schools.”

Read more here…

Congratulations to all the amazing educators of the Daring Dozen and the Global Six 2008!

Daring Dozen 2008 Map

Daring Dozen 2008

Global Six 2008

Share/Save/Bookmark

Tags:
Posted in Generation YES, In the news, Liberia, education reform | 1 Comment »