EPISODE 3 - THE SHIFT TO DISTANCE LEARNING

UPDATE: The video is now available, and the podcast will be coming soon.
 
 
 
On Thursday, May 14 at 4:00 pm US-EDT, we record the third LIVE episode of the new LearningRevolution.com weekly interview series, REINVENTING SCHOOL. The recording will be available on our website and on YouTube by early next week, and the audio podcast will be available on our website and on popular podcast services.
 
This week, our topic is distance learning, a phenomenon that has suddenly captivated the world of school and education. Certainly, under the best of circumstances, with the most clever of professionals and parents, distance learning is an ideal short-term solution for students attempting to learn during this global mess. With second and third waves of coronavirus looming for later this year and 2021, along with the very large number of students for whom distance learning is a poor or otherwise unacceptable solution, there are big questions to be asked about how we learn, what we learn and why we learn.
 
Host Howard Blumenthal welcomes Jessica Piotrowski, Associate Professor at The University of Amsterdam, in The Netherlands, and Director of the Center for Research on Children, Adolescents and the Media (CcaM); Monica Goyette, the Superintendent of Schools for the Mat-Su Borough School District in Palmer, Alaska in the U.S.; and David Weinberger, author of Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility, and senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. We will be joined by Aiden, a student from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
 
Please join us for the live recording, or visit www.reinventing.school early next week to watch the recorded edition.
 
More about this week's guests:
 
5222015872?profile=RESIZE_180x180Dr. Monica Goyette became the Superintendent of Schools for the Mat-Su Borough School District in April, 2017. An Alaska educator since 1998, she holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Sciences, a Masters of Education in Guidance and Counseling, a Masters of Education in Educational Leadership, and a Doctorate of Education in Educational Leadership/Curriculum & Instruction. Prior to becoming the Superintendent, Dr. Goyette worked as a counselor, teacher, school principal, executive director, and assistant superintendent of instruction. Dr. Goyette’s teaching and educational leadership experiences have shaped her agenda, which has an unwavering focus on student achievement and success. She looks forward to making learning meaningful and lasting for students; using capital assets resourcefully and wisely; and meeting the needs of students, parents, and employees.
https://www.matsuk12.us/domain/4644
5222025277?profile=RESIZE_180x180Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, PhD is an Associate Professor in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). She is the Director of the Center for Research on Children, Adolescents, and the Media (CcaM), the Program Group Leader for Youth & Media Entertainment at ASCoR, and recently completed a 4-year term as the Chair of Children, Adolescents, and the Media division of the International Communication Association – the largest academic division of children and media scholars worldwide. An award-winning scholar, Dr. Piotrowski’s research investigates how youth process and comprehend media content, with specific attention to the potential benefits of media. She is particularly focused on understanding how young users process media content (cognitively, affectively, and physiologically) and the role of individual differences (dispositional, developmental, and social) in the selection and processing of media content. In recent years, she has begun to dive deeply into the topic of digital literacy in childhood and adolescence. Dr. Piotrowski frequently speaks at academic and trade conferences on the role of media in the lives of young people today. Moreover, with a strong belief in forging the divide between academic scholarship and societal practice, Dr. Piotrowski often shares her work in higher education classrooms, at public policy organizations, at children’s media organizations, and with childcare providers both within the Netherlands and worldwide. She is the co-author of the book Plugged In: How Media Attract and Affect Youth (Yale University Press, 2017), and regularly publishes in communication, psychology, and education journals.
5222037690?profile=RESIZE_180x180Dr. David Weinberger: In books, articles, posts, classes, and talks, David Weinberger, Ph.D. explores the effect of the technology on ideas. He is a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and was co-director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and a journalism fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Dr. Weinberger has been a marketing VP and adviser to high tech companies, an adviser to presidential campaigns, and a Franklin Fellow at the U.S. State Department. In four books he has explored the effect of the Internet on knowledge, on how we organize our ideas, on business, and on the core concepts by which we think about our world. His new book, Everyday Chaos: Technology, Complexity, and How We're Thriving in a New World of Possibility (Harvard Business Review Press) argues that AI and the Internet are transforming our understanding of how things happen, enabling us to acknowledge the complexity and unknowability of our world. Dr. Weinberger has a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto and lives in the Boston area.
http://www.weinberger.org/David

4995562699?profile=RESIZE_400xHoward Blumenthal created and produced the PBS television series, Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? He is currently a Senior Scholar at The University of Pennsylvania, studying learning and the lives of 21st-century children and teenagers. He travels the world, visiting K-12 schools, lecturing at universities, and interviewing young people for Kids on Earth, a global platform containing nearly 1,000 interview segments from Kentucky, Brazil, Sweden, India, and many other countries. Previously, he was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist for The New York Times Syndicate, and United Features. He is the author of 24 books and several hundred articles about technology, learning, business, and human progress. As an executive, Howard was the CEO of a public television operation and several television production companies, and a state government official. Previously, he was a Senior Vice President for divisions of two large media companies, Hearst and Bertelsmann, and a consultant or project lead for Energizer, General Electric, American Express, CompuServe, Warner Communications, Merriam-Webster, Atari, and other companies.
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ABOUT THE SHOW

Before the virus, more than a billion children and teenagers relied upon school for learning. After the virus (or, after the current wave of our current virus), basic assumptions about school and education are no longer reliable. School buildings may become unsafe for large numbers of students. The tax base may no longer support our current approach to school. Without the interaction provided by a formal school structure, students may follow their own curiosity. Many students now possess the technology to learn on their own. And many do not.

Reinventing.school is a new weekly web television series that considers what happens next week, next month, next school year, and the next five years. Hosted by University of Pennsylvania Senior Scholar Howard Blumenthal, Reinventing.school features interviews with teachers, principals, school district leadership, state and Federal government officials, ed-tech innovators, students, leading education professors, authors, realists and futurists from the United States and all over the world.

Each episode features 2-4 distinguished guests in conversation about high priority topics including, for example, the teaching of public health, long-term home schooling, technology access and its alternatives, the role of parents, friendship and social interaction, learning outside the curriculum, the future of testing and evaluation, interruption as part of the academic calendar, job security for teachers and support staff, setting (and rethinking) curriculum priorities, special needs, student perspectives on the job of school, the importance of play, the psychology of group dynamics and social interaction, preparing for future rounds of a virus (or cyberattack or impact of climate change, etc.), college readiness, higher education transformed, the higher education promise in an economically challenged world, and more. Clearly, there is much to discuss; nearly all of it ranks high on the list of priorities for raising the world’s children.