Yesterday I was lucky enough to get to facilitate a fascinating discussion during ASTE 2010. I’d prepared an hour worth of presentation, but halfway through the questions from participants were so interesting we spent most of the time discussing the issues rather than listening to the presenter (me).

We talked about a number of elements including the paradigm shift we’re currently in the middle of, how the fundamental way that knowledge is managed is changing, and how businesses are using social media to maintain customer relationships. And chiefly, we discussed the hurdles our schools are facing when integrating social media into the classroom in an attempt to better prepare students for the “real” world they’re about to enter.

The slides below provide visual support for the discussion. This talk also borrows heavily from Larry’s Lessig’s TED talk “How Creativity is Being Strangled by the Law” (embedded below).

And here’s the TED talk by Larry Lessig:

I’m here in Anchorage, AK, at the Alaska Society for Technology in Education conference. Times like these I’m reminded just how small our state is, even though physically it’s 3X larger than Texas.

With 54 school districts, about 150,000 students, and just under 9000 teachers we’re one of the smallest in the country. In attendance this week will be hundreds of admins, technologists, and teachers from across Alaska. Most of whom know each other.

Below is a Flickr photostream from ASTE. If you’re at the conference and want to contribute your pictures, email them to this address: cam67loaf+public@photos.flickr.com. Make sure to include the text “tags: aste” in the subject or body of the email somewhere.

The cool toys of my childhood aren’t necessarily relevant to children of the up and coming WWW generation: Whatever, Wherever, Whenever.

Many toys and games are of course timeless: dolls, legos (in my daughter’s case a large empty cardboard box provides hours of enjoyment). But today’s world requires brains used to making quick, accurate choices, and modern toys reflect that. Once children have the fundamentals down (IE: gravity) it’s time to get them multitasking, point-clicking, and making decisions on their own.

The same is true for television shows. The “classic” cartoons are all story-based, and often the stories are secondary to characters just goofing around demonstrating their traits. More and more of today’s shows include decision making. Often they actually stop the action to ask the viewer to express their opinion (for examples check out modern versions of Mickey Mouse, Pooh “Super Sleuths”, and of course Dora and all her spinoffs).

In his blog post “The Case Against Candyland“, Steven Johnson notes how the games of his childhood, in contrast with modern ones, are generally “moronic” and based on random chance rather than critical decision making.