Ian Jukes has been a teacher, an administrator, writer, consultant, university instructor and keynote speaker. As the Director of the InfoSavvy Group, an international consulting group that provides leadership and program development in the areas of assessment and evaluation, strategic alignment, curriculum design and publication, professional development, planning, change management, hardware and software acquisition, information services, customized research, media services, and on-line training as well as conference keynotes and workshop presentations. Over the course of the past 10 years, Ian Jukes has worked with clients in more than 40 countries and made more than 7,000 presentations typically speaking to between 300,000 and 350,000 people a years. Recently Consulting Magazine Online named him one of the top ten educational speakers in America.
Ian Jukes has written six books, 9 educational series and had more than 100 articles published in various journals. Ian is also the publisher of an on-line electronic newsletter, the Committed Sardine Blog, which is electronically distributed to almost 60,000 people in 60 plus countries.
Ian Jukes is also the creator and co-developer of TechWorks, the internationally successful K-8 technology framework; and was the catalyst of the NetSavvy and InfoSavvy information literacy series; he has been a Contributing Editor for several journals and magazines. His two most recently published books are Net.Savvy: Building Information Literacy for the Classroom, co-authored with Anita Dosaj and Bruce Macdonald, and Windows on the Future, co-authored with Ted McCain. Corwin Press publishes both books. Ian Jukes is currently working on 3 books - a 2nd edition of Windows on the Future, a book on Understanding Digital Kids and another on Designing Schools of the Future.
Ian Jukes has also been working for several years with architectural firms to help facilitate planning new learning environments by taking the groups through a visioning process to help them align the thinking of the community (school board, administration, parents, students, community) about what new facilities should look like and how its design should align with the learning and instructional intentions of the school/district.
Ian Jukes also works with organizations and communities that have lost their market or economic base and wish to explore possibilities for preferred economic futures.
But Ian Jukes is an educator first and foremost. His focus has consistently been on the compelling need to restructure our educational institutions so that they become relevant to the current and future needs of children. His rambunctious, irreverent and highly charged presentations and articles emphasize many of the practical issues related to ensuring that change is meaningful. As a registered educational evangelist, his self-avowed mission in life is to ensure that children are properly prepared for the future rather than society's past. As a result, his material tends to focus on many of the pragmatic issues that provide the essential context for educational restructuring.
- Speech Topics
- Beyond TTWWADI (That's the Way We've Always Done It)
It's amazing how we can embrace doing things the way they have always been done without examining where the original decisions came from. We just accept a pre-existing mind-set because it's the path of least resistance. For example, the mind-set for the structure of our schools is based on decisions that were made in the days of the horse, buggy, kerosene lamp, factory floor, and production line. It's a system in which most students are still released for 3 months each summer so that they can harvest the crops based on some European agricultural cycle. This is classic TTWWADI (That's The Way We've Always Done It).
Accepting this preexisting mind-set of what schools look like is easy because they haven't changed that much in a long time. Most educators embrace the entrenched ideas about schools and learning without thinking. However, the world is no longer the stable and predictable place it once was. Technology is fueling an engine of change that is making the world a moving target. What is startling is that the rate of change is picking up speed with each passing day. Radical new developments in technology are having increasingly profound implications for life as we know it. In this environment of change, it is critical that we begin to question the rationale behind TTWWADI in our schools.
This presentation examines the development of our current mind-set for what schools look like. It traces the source of many of the foundational assumptions we take for granted in public education. It then looks at some of the key areas of technological development that are putting pressure on schools to change and explore the implications these developments have for what new skills and habits-of-mind we should be emphasizing in our schools to prepare students for life in the 21st century.
We will examine the power of TTWWADI and discuss the difficulties we face in shifting people's ideas to a new vision for schools and learning. Finally, we will suggest a number of ways educators must change in order to keep up with a world on the move, a world that is forcing us to face a fundamental question about the nature of education: Do we prepare them for the world of tomorrow, or the farms and factories of yesterday? - Born To Be Wired: NetSavvy & Communication Literacy for an Information Age
The Information Age is upon us! The development of the World Wide Web as a research tool has brought the Internet with all its flavors of information- text, photos, audio and motion video - into the public consciousness overnight. As the Web has exploded into our consciousness as a full-fledged information medium, telecommunications has suddenly gone from being a specialized thing done by propeller heads to something that is taken for granted. While the sheer magnitude of available resources is beyond our comprehension, we ain't seen nuthin' yet!
But at the same time, just because this multitude of resources is widely available doesn't mean that we are more knowledgeable or any the wiser. It simply tells us that there is more information available everywhere for everyone. As a result, people of all ages are beginning to suffer from InfoWhelm, which is leading to widespread informational dysfunction.
This presentation carefully examines IDD (information dysfunction disorder) and proposes a remedy - InfoSavvy. InfoSavvy is a multi-level, integrated and interdisciplinary, problem solving information literacy framework based on the 5As of information fluency - ASKING questions, ACCESSING data, ANALYZING & Authenticating information, APPLYING that knowledge to solve real-life problems; and ASSESSING both product and process. Participants will come away from this session with a clear understanding of how to teach information processing skills in a structured, organized and progressive manner. This presentation is based on the new book Net.Savvy: Building Information Literacy for the Classroom published by Corwin Press and co-written with Anita Dosaj and Bruce Macdonald.