TechForum San Diego

It's Thursday and I'm in San Diego, getting ready to present at the initial TechForum San Diego conference, as the 2005-06 Out of Options Tour makes its westward swing before returning to cold and cloudy Illinois. I'll be presenting with Hall Davidson tomorrow morning-the session is entitled The New Literacies: Essential or Enrichment-and in the afternoon I go solo with Cutting Edge Tools for Schools-my take on the tools of Web 2.0-where I will talk of these tools in regard to personal and professional learning, as well as their ability to create dynamic classroom learning environments.

Tomorrow morning should be interesting-I'm prepared to talk on online learning, blogs and wikis, and digital storytelling. In fact, I have a slide that lists those, but the next slide is the one that is important. Online learning becomes inquiry and information literacy, blogs and wikis becomes writing and collaboration, and digital storytelling becomes writing, communication, and visual literacy. So, its not about the tools but about the fundamental learning that they support. Basic. So, you can guess that I will make a case for these being essential.

My Thursday post over at Techlearning addresses essential vs. enrichment in more detail.