The Notes from Mark Milliron's Keynote

The title of the session that was given by Mark Milliron was "Education in a Connected World: Key Issues in the Balance." Many of these notes may seem random, and in many instances they are just random things that he said that I found interesting and/or provocative, or thought it may be useful at some point in the future.

• e-mail is doubling
• 31 to 60 billion by 2006
• most will be customized by Internet habits

• mass use
• Internet in 4 years -> fastest adoption of a disruptive technology
• cell phones in 12 years

• studies show -> workplace habits
• sound goes off, people stop and check e-mail
• we don't know how to use e-mail
• many report that they go to work to answer e-mail all day (as opposed to actually going to do work all day)

• customer response management -> today we expect web, telephone and in person
• $10 billion -> online learning
• loyality index has gone up with the Internet
• pre-Internet is costs seven times more to get a new customer compared to keeping an existing one
• with the Internet, that has gone up to ten times
• loyality = trust

• "web learning has the potential to make inadequate classroom instruction available to a greater audience"

• learning how to learning online is a new skill
• students will continue to learning online in post-secondary and/or in the work place

• increase productivity -> give employees laptops or let them work at home
• increases the number of hours people are working compared to the hours actually spent at the office

• "persistent partial attention" -> blend of multi-tasking with mindfulness
• we can be talking to a spouse on the telephone which checking our e-mail and looking at our daytimer (we never focus upon one thing than another, but on many things at the same time)

• studies
• counsellors in Florida found that when they would turn off their computer monitor or close their laptops when students came into the office it increased visits to the counsellors by three times
• a telephone call in the first week from the instructor to the student in an online learning situation increased retention by 35%
• personal touch in a digital world

• students, even those who have grow up with technology are "users of toaster, not fixers of toasters"
• means that students know how to use technology, but not necessarily use it well

• technocromagnum theory
• basically goes "technology good..." -> used to justify much of the spending on technology in K-12 classroom
• Greenspan -> age of irrational exhurberance

• University of Illinois faculty sued a site which was a pre-cursor to a ratemyprofessor.com
• site was actually up for two years before the faculty even discovered

• most money spent on the Internet
• gambling #1
• porn #2
• those two individually are more than the next seven on the list combined

• rays of hope / seeds of darkness
• experience of online learning and how to do it
• savy of gaining digital literacy

"If a nation wants to live ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson

• a number of books he recommended
• "Connect" and "Human Moments" by Ed Hallowell
• "Got Game" by John Beck and Michael (something beginning with W)
• "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman
• "The Cluetrain Manifesto" by Richard Florida
• natives vs. immigrants
• "The Middle of Everywhere" by Mary Pipher
• "Growing Up Digital" by Don Tapscott
• "Millennials Rising" (didn't catch author)
• experience of the majority
• "Good to Great" by Jim Collins

To see more of a relfection on part of this, see the entry titled Start of the Second Day of VSS.

Tags: virtual school, cyber school, high school, education