Mcleod+Keynote

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Scott Mcleod, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Kentucky. You might recognize a video he co-created, //Did You Know? (Shift Happens) // . McLeod's blog, Dangerously Irrelevant , discusses many facets of educational reform today. At this conference he talked about how our students today expect technology to be, what I call, mashable. Just viewing resources is okay, but our students enjoy being able to contribute, alter, mix, and re-publish content on the web. For example, if my students were taking a trip to chicago, just looking at a photo of their hotel on the web would not be enough. They would want to first find the hotel via Priceline, Expedia, or Trip Advisor because they could negotiate a price, read reviews, and see numerous photos and virtual tours. Then the student would want to look up the address on Google Earth (street view) so they could see their exact route if they were to walk to the Shedd Aquarium. From their Facebook page they would ask the Shedd Aquarium some questions and from there they can then post their itinerary to their own Facebook page to share with friends and family to get feedback on their potential trip. Oh yeah, and they'd do this all from their cell phone too. Honestly, I think that students today would manipulate the internet even more than that. It's not really just students. It's people in general. We expect to take information, manipulate it to suit our needs, and send it off to something else. At some point we will have kids that have never known another world and have interacted with digital information in a non-linear fashion.

He also focused on how this explosion in information access and manipulation has changed the way people work. Many face to face jobs can be eliminated and given to people that can do the work virtually. Of course, there are many arguable points to such decisions. McLeod points out that our students to be skilled enough to adapt to these changes. They need to be exposed to these skills so they have the ground work to evolve with time.