November Learning: Expanding the Boundaries of Learning

Marc Prensky

About Marc Prensky
Author, Speaker and Consultant, New York, NY

Marc Prensky is an internationally acclaimed speaker, writer, educator, consultant, and game designer in the critical areas of education and learning. He is the author of Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2001), and Don’t Bother Me Mom – I’m Learning (Paragon House, 2006). Marc is the founder and CEO of Games2train, whose clients include IBM, Bank of America, Pfizer, the U.S. Department of Defense and the LA and Florida Virtual Schools. He is the creator of the sites www.gamesparentsteachers.com and www.socialimpactgames.com.

Marc has created over 50 software games for learning, including the world’s first fast-action videogame-based training tools. He has spoken to teachers, administrators, school boards and departments and ministries of education throughout the United States and around the world. Marc holds a Master’s in Teaching from Yale and an MBA from Harvard. He has taught at all levels, been featured in The NY Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, and appeared on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and the BBC. He was named as one of training’s top 10 “visionaries” by Training magazine and cited as a “guiding star of the new parenting movement” by Parental Intelligence Newsletter. His latest projects are games for learning financial literacy, chemistry, physics and algebra.

For Marc’s writings, see www.marcprensky.com/writing. For Marc’s games, see www.games2train.com.

Main Session Workshops

Partnering With Your Digital Native Students: Incorporating the Maximum Technology Available Into Your Teaching—without learning it all yourself!

Based on Prensky’s upcoming book (Corwin, January 2010) this talk unites three strands of current educational discussion which have not previously been considered together. First, that our students are changing—largely as a result of their outside-of-school experiences with technology. Second, that the pedagogy we have been using in our schools, basically “tell and test,” has become less and less effective with today’s students; a better pedagogy is both needed and available. Third, that the digital technology, now coming into our classrooms, if used properly, can make a difference.

Ironically, a generation raised on the expectation of interactivity is ripe for the “skill-based” and “doing-based” teaching methods that past experts have always suggested as the best for learning, but that were rejected by the education establishment as hard to implement.

The happy thread tying these together is that the same digital technology which caused the changes in our students provides the means to finally implement the most effective ways of learning. The talk contains lots of practical examples of how teachers can partner, at every level of available technology, and in every subject.

Digital Wisdom: Meshing Mind and Machine Into Something More Powerful Than Either

This talk is based on an article published in the online Journal Innovate in March. (See:
H. Sapiens Digital — From Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants to Digital Wisdom (in Innovate, Feb-Mar 2009) .

Moving beyond the Natives/Immigrants distinction to the time when everyone will have been born in the Digital Age, Prensky suggests that we are birthing a new type of person: H. Sapiens Digital, or the “Digitally Wise Person.” He suggests that with the growing number of technology enhancements available to our thinking, “traditional” wisdom is, and will be in the future, no longer enough. What we need is “Digital Wisdom” i.e. the ability to get the “wisest” answers to questions by combining things the brain does well, such as reflecting, and balancing reason and emotion, with what the machines and other technological enhancements do better, such as taking into account and analyzing huge quantities of data. In this view, digital tools and enhancements are not optional for students or professionals—they are required, in the same way books are, to achieve the kind of wisdom we want for ourselves and our students.

Shorter, Faster, Shallower? Better!: Why Short Forms Are Winning, and Why It’s Good!

Many people (e.g. Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic) are trying to make the argument that the new, shorter forms of communication—from Email, to texting, to Twitter, to YouTube, to Google, to USA Today—are causing communication to be “shallower.” Prensky disagrees, and thinks this is based on the mistaken conflating of length with “depth.” “Depth,” as often talked about by critics and teachers is an elusive concept, and, Prensky argues, it might even be enhanced by conciseness (think “Haiku”). Today the trend is toward shorter forms in pretty much everything—novels, non-fiction, online, video, news, music, etc. The reason, Prensky thinks is that length is an overrated artifact of when people had more time on their hands. He will argue that shorter—if done well—is almost always better, and, in many cases, deeper as well. The implications for education are profound, and will be discussed and debated with the audience.