For those with an interest, here are the slides from my webinar for Contact North | Contact Nord that I gave today: How to be an educational technology (warning: large download, about 32MB).
Here is a link to the video of the session.
I was invited to do this webinar because my book (How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique, briefly reviewed on the Contact North | Contact Nord site last year) was among the top 5 most viewed books of the year, so that was what the talk was about. Among the most central messages of the book and the ones that I was trying to get across in this presentation were:
- that how we do teaching matters more than what we do (“T’ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”) and
- that we can only understand the process if we examine the whole complex assembly of teaching (very much including the technique of all who contribute to it, including learners, textbooks, and room designers) not just the individual parts.
Along the way I had a few other things to say about why that must be the case, the nature of teaching, the nature of collective cognition, and some of the profound consequences of seeing the world this way. I had fun persuading ChatGPT to illustrate the slides in a style that was not that of Richard Scarry (ChatGPT would not do that, for copyright reasons) but that was reminiscent of it, so there are lots of cute animals doing stuff with technologies on the slides.
I rushed and rambled, I sang, I fumbled and stumbled, but I think it sparked some interest and critical thinking. Even if it didn’t, some learning happened, and that is always a good thing. The conversations in the chat went too fast for me to follow but I think there were some good ones. If nothing else, though I was very nervous, I had fun, and it was lovely to notice a fair number of friends, colleagues, and even the odd relative among the audience. Thank you all who were there, and thank you anyone who catches the recording later.