Monday, April 04, 2011

April 7th - Interview with Bernajean Porter on Local Communities Charting Their Education Future Together

Join me Thursday, April 7th, for a live and interactive FutureofEducation.com webinar with education consultant Bernajean Porter as we discuss how local communities can hold an event, or events, to chart the future of education for their students.  Specifically, we'll talk about the "Future Search" planning methodology to do this.

Date: Thursday, April 7th, 2011
Time: 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern / 12am GMT (next day--international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tr.im/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event at the event page.
Event and Recording Pagehttp://www.learncentral.org/event/142208

With over thirty years of experience as an educator, Bernajean Porter's presentations, seminars and project work reflect extensive, practical experience in community future searches, technology planning / evaluation projects, TLCF grants and large scale projects with over 2000 districts, regions, and state departments throughout the United States and overseas. She participated in 1997 President's Technology Initiative, NSF-DoDEA Hanau Models School overseas project and is presently adjunct faculty for Lesley College's Masters program for Curriculum and Technology. She recently developed the IL Technology Planning Blueprint and IL NextSteps assessment toolkit with Illinois' state-wide leadership team. She is author of Grappling with Accountability 2002: MAPPing Tools for Organizing and Assessment Technology for Student Results and Assessing Technology for Student Resultsand Evaluating Student Computer-based Products.  Along with having a comprehensive understanding of the field of education technology, her skills as a highly trained facilitator, organization developer and large scale project manager give her work with change a unique, catalytic validity. Her work uses the application of systems thinking and chaos theory to deal with the challenges of the change and re-culturing efforts in education today.


What is Future Search? (See http://www.futuresearch.net/method/whatis/index.cfm)

"Future search is a PLANNING MEETING that helps people transform their capability for action very quickly. The meeting is task-focused. It brings together 60 to 80 people in one room or hundreds in parallel rooms.  Future search brings people from all walks of life into the same conversation - those with resources, expertise, formal authority and need. They meet for 16 hours spread across three days. People tell stories about their past, present and desired future. Through dialogue they discover their common ground. Only then do they make concrete action plans.  The meeting design comes from theories and principles tested in many cultures for the past 50 years. It relies on mutual learning among stakeholders as a catalyst for voluntary action and follow-up. People devise new forms of cooperation that continue for months or years.  Future searches have been run in every part of the world and sector of society."

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