Ellen Wagner Opening Keynote

I’m at the USDLA Annual Conference listening to Ellen Wagner’s opening keynote. She’s the Senior Director of Worldwide E-Learning Solutions with Adobe Systems, Inc. Here are some snippets of wisdom and ideas.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Albert Einstein

Shift Happens – watch the presentation if you have a moment. Check out the wiki and the follow-up questions.

“We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problem yet.” From the Shift Happens presentation.

Question: what are you doing to prepare yourself for life in the learning metaverse?

“If no one’s been there before, no one will know you’re wrong.”

How do you collaborate with someone 12.5 hours away? How do you work and collaborate with co-workers 12.5 hours away? Ellen experiences this. She accidentally scheduled a major event during a major holiday in India. Oops! I’ve been thinking it’s time to have a calendar with the holidays in the countries I want to collaborate with via VC.

Wayfinding – a method used by travelers to find relatively unmarked and often mislabeled routes. This is the metaphor she offers as a way to make sense of the rapid change and insane schedule of global learners and workers.

  • Prepare for the quest. Gamers prepare for the quest.
  • Stay the course… but keep an eye on where you’re going. The only way out is through.
  • Leave that extra baggage behind. old practices, old ways of doing things… “but we can’t do that”
  • Engage with your fellow wayfinders. Use your Facebook pages to find colleagues to help you. When confronted with an overload of information, we turn to our friends.
  • “Be excellent to each other” Allusions to patent disputes and issues with proprietary code.

Are you using the technologies for YOU? A thought provoking presentation to consider further….

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