I just want to invite everyone and encourage everyone to come to the Next Generation Teaching and Learning Symposium coming up Saturday April 17, 2010.

There is no charge for folks coming from far away and a nominal change for folks who don’t have to travel. Light meals are included. See the registration page for details.

I will be at the NGTL Symposium and be on a panel discussion Tools and Technological Models.

The list of speakers is indeed impressive. I personally think that it would be worth attending if the only person talking were Howard Rheingold. Howard is a professor in the UC Berkeley School of Information and all-around “try-anything-and-everything” when it comes to teaching kind of guy. He will be giving the opening keynote titled “Participatory Media for Education” and then it will be an action-packed day from then on.

One thing that makes me personally very excited about this symposium is that it blends two topics that I am passionate about that I think need to be brought together. This symposium marks the beginning of looking at the next generation of Teaching and Learning from the perspective of a School of Information.

I think that the iSchools (Schools of Information) can bring so much to the field of teaching and learning using technology. Because iSchools are by their nature cross-disciplinary organizations, we can look at a problem like the next generation of teaching from many perspectives and generate dialog across many different domains and pursue those discussions in depth. Within iSchools, can identify issues, make needed changes, build new capabilities and then measure the effect of those changes.

If there is one thing we might all agree on in terms of the Next Generation of Teaching and learning is that it will be different somehow. It will be more flexible, it will be more personalized, it will be more open, it will be more social, it will be more web 2.0, it will be more web 3.0… The list goes on and on as to how many ways the next generation will be different.

Schools of Information live in this future world already and study this future world in great detail, bringing together technical analysis from graph theory and information retrieval to social science analysis of human motivation and reaction from game theory, influence, and decision making as well as usability, user experience, and information architecture. Just the set of skills that should be brought to bear on the next-generation of teaching and learning.

To find our way to the next generation of teaching and learning we need to be open to the ideas that all of these fields can bring to bear on the problem. In a way, there is no better place to contemplate what this future should be than the collective skills of the Schools of Information around the country.

I am excited to be part of this breakthrough meeting hosted by my colleagues at the Berkeley School of Information and initial steps toward defining a stronger connection between Schools of information and teaching and learning.

I hope to see you there.