Tuesday Keynote: Millennial Learning Styles

The Keynote presentation today is coming in live from the Harvard School of Education. Chris Dede, is talking about Emerging Digital Media and "NeoMillennial" Learning Styles.

Dede is describing Millenial & Neo Millennial Learning Styles - students using the web to compare multiple sources of information, individually incomplete and collectively inconsistent. Is it mindlessly accumulating or seeking, sieving or synthesizing? He's wondering about his daughter multitasking... can she really concentrate? He described his daughter and her virtual "think tank" of friends on IM doing their homework.

He's describing how Cisco is using multitasking for meetings and using PDAs for multitasking and instant messanging.

And here I am in this session multitasking! Showing IM to the person sitting next to me, IMing my office back home, blogging the session, and listening to it all at the same time!

Now Dede is suggesting we use distributed learning instead of distance learning. The term distributed infers how the learning is spread across time, space, and media.

This reminds me of reading The World is Flat this summer and how companies are collaborating across space and time using videoconferencing, instant messaging, and other real-time and asynchronous collaboration tools.

I still want to design some type of international project that uses this same type of multitasking learning environment that Dede is describing. How could we create a learning environment and videoconference project that requires students to collaborate across time & distance to solve or attempt to solve a difficult challenging real world problem?? That is the question I keep mulling over.