On Monday night I found myself sitting in our Elementary Learning Hub (our brand new 21st Century Literacy Center) at 7pm getting geeked! Looking around the room, I saw our 3 ISB geeks (Justin Medved, Kim Cofino and Dennis Harter) a literacy specialist and my administrative partner. Why were we there you ask? We were geeking out! We were listening to David Warlick’s keynote address to the K12 on-line learning conference.
Did I just say on-line learning conference? Yes- I sure did! In front of me was my laptop and I was “Twittering” (a form of chat) with the other 300+ people world-wide that were also trying to listen to David’s keynote. It was taking a long time to download. At one point it was decided through the Twitter that the bandwidth was too small for everyone to listen at the same time…. so through Twitter, people problem solved by posting the address to a “mirror” site.
So- in the end, with a little help of our geek friends around the world, we were able to tap into David Warlick’s keynote address here in Bangkok. Afterwards, we held an animated discussion amongst ourselves as to what it all meant to education….. but that’s another story.
What I think is so cool is that we problem solved a major issue through Twitter with people all around the world working collaboratively and nobody expected any payment or payback??
It was about PAYING IT FORWARD.
Remember that movie with Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt? The little boy has an idea about paying it forward- that if you do a good deed to someone, they will in turn do good deeds to others and so on and so on…..
We have perfect example of this going on in the world of geek. Our deep thinkers are constantly problem solving collaboratively in an effort to bring the best learning opportunities to each other’s schools. Whether it is asking each other to comment on student blogs, or pairing kids in different countries on flat classroom projects or sharing ideas for engaging kids in learning- this is happening daily through our geeks.
I guess my question is that if this is happening daily through the geeks in education and daily through the geeks in the world of on-line conferences….. how can we move our leaders to pay it forward and problem solve on a much higher level? What skills can we instill in our students that will make them share their thinking in order to problem solve at the highest level of world government, environmental issues and even business? How do we make sure the geeks are in these positions? (Clearly that is not a problem at Google!)
How do we make our kids want to be geeks? Or…. do kids already want to be geeks and we haven’t reinvented the word’s definition yet?
Bill Gerritz asks the question “What is origin of the word (GEEK)? For what I understand, it originated in the traveling carnivals that moved through the U.S. mid-west during the 1920s and 1930’s. The geek show was a big favorite. At the end of his show, the geek, who had been acting strangely to attract laughs and amazement, would bite the head off a live chicken. ”
Now I am not advocating that geeks bite the heads off chickens…. but I am advocating for a shift in how the word is used. I say embrace the geeks, teach us how to be geeks and support being a geek. Annelies Hoogland, my admin partner, has pioneered a new project: a GOD (Geek-On-Demand) for administrators. She has asked a colleague in the High School to assign her a geek for mini-lesson tutorials in technology. Cool eh?
Geeking Out and Paying it Forward…. embracing technology, understanding that we need rapid change in our approach to education and sharing our ideas about how to do this on a global scale…. I am starting to think that this is what the future looks like.
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October 15th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
[...] truly enjoyed a geek session with colleagues, listening to the Warlick keynote from the K12 Online Conference. We, like many, [...]