School of the Future Summit 2008

Microsoft recently held its fourth annual school of the future summit. Were you there? Me either. But fortunately there are ways to get something out of the event even if you were not one of the people who was invited to attend. I followed some of the event by reading Will Richardson’s Twitter feed. Will had an interesting and thought provoking blog post about the event and his time there called So What is the Future of Schools? Will has some mixed feelings with I largely share. I think there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the school of the future should look like. This is an area where we (actually anyone interested in improving education) have to have more discussion about.

I’ve got a couple of other resources to recommend for additional reading about this event and the ideas that were discussed.

Derek Wenmoth has a number of posts on his blog but you may want to start at a post called School of the Future Summit that includes links to his reviews of a number of the keynote and other major speaker talks. A number of attendees from New Zealand created a group blog called SOF – What’s Possible.  The main School of the Future web site also has a SOF documents page that holds a good many of the presenter’s slide decks. (Note that the decks I looked at were in PowerPoint 2007 format but there is a free PowerPoint viewer available.)

There is an official School of the Future blog with a number of comments from participants. It’s not so impressive but at least it is something.

Computerworld also had a summary article about the summit which I found interesting.