EduCon 2.5

Where are we going with public education? Are we opening the doors to new annexes of inspired teaching and learning? Are we walking down dark hallways to musty rooms left in squalid disrepair? Are we headed for the exits as quickly as we can, or are we being pushed there? Participants in this two-session digital storytelling workshop will have the chance to ask their own questions about the future of public education in the United States, to formulate tentative answers about where we’re going as a society that schools, and to pitch and compose digital stories that share out their questions and answers. One participant might compose a blog from the future while another goes into SLA’s hallways to recruit attendees and students as improv actors in a parody of wholly standardized or democratic education. Another participant might leave pages torn from a future teacher’s journal hidden around the school as a geocaching game for other EduCon attendees. Yet another might start the Twitter account of an stakeholder navigating entirely P2P-based schooling fifty years from now. The idea behind the session to confront and imagine responses to the dark aspects of schooling, while uncovering and holding up bright examples of what our public education system could become. Participants should bring their own technology and be prepared either to iterate, pitch, and develop an idea rapidly, or to join up and work with another participant whose pitch sounds fantastic. We’ll develop a web resource to share our stories.