I had the great pleasure of connecting with a community of like minded and creative individuals at the 2015 Adobe Education Leader (AEL) summit at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in July. This was originally established as a YWCA camp in 1913. It now is a park and comprises some of the last relatively undisturbed sections of ocean facing dunes in this part of California.
Although our time together was short, we had a lot of great conversations regarding inspiring students and developing their creative side. I thought readers of this weblog might be interested in some insights I gained during this trip.
I arrived on Friday (the facility is located about 90 minutes south of San Francisco airport). Given the physical beauty of the spot, I wish I had arrived a couple of days earlier. I do plan to post a slideshow or two of what the place looked like. We held our first event (an unconference) on the beach. We discussed a number of issues facing us as educators (not the least was how to deal with the rapid pace of change). This photo was taken along the path to the beach.
We also participated in a set of creativity talks (12 of us had the honor of presenting to the group). Ann Bown-Crawford discussed how her institution had recently combined their fine arts department with their CTE (Career and Technical Education) department and all the implications. The new emphasis is to give students access to a creative education. Greg Hodgson discussed his efforts with the Adobe Generation Professional online classes and how social media changes things. His focus was also on advocating excellence. Ian Usher discussed recreating the physical classroom online (and whether we should even attempt to). Jim Kinney provided our “word of the day” during the ensuing discussion – anamnesis – which means to draw out. Mike Skocko discussed his experiences building the Mac Lab and how he is now trying to change that through disrupting this successful initiative. Nancy Dick discussed coordination between government, education, and employment and why this is needed now more than ever. For example only 6% of children born into low income families will now make it up the income ladder to the top. There are roughly 5.6 million young Americans who are neither in school nor working. 36 million are underskilled in literacy and numeracy. These are staggering numbers and do not bode well for our collective future unless we make significant changes. Jeff Larson spoke about the CAST Academy (Creative Arts for Social Transformation) he developed at Balboa High School and the relevance of forming partnerships between schools and industry. Mark Shufflebottom spoke about arts as interaction. Andy Phelps spoke about his Splattershmup project which uses JavaScript in the guise of a game to build Jackson Pollock sorts of images. He had to build roughly 19K lines of script with his students to accomplish this. Lea Anna Cardwell discussed finding a voice in the digital age. Kelly Kermode discussed the need to make learning relevant. She focused on some of the back story on the Humans of New York project. Sherri Kushner spoke about issue based projects she has instituted with her students. I also had the honor of presenting an overview of what we are doing with Competency Based Education in our CMWEB program. For those who are interested, I provide a link to my slides. I know the talk was recorded and hope to provide a link once the recordings are made available.
We also spent a lot of time discussing how Adobe Education Leaders can play a larger role and take more of a leadership focus. I will report more on that in the coming months.
I hope you found this overview helpful. As always, I look forward to your comments.
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