Will Richardson

Speaker, consultant, writer, learner, parent

Curtis Bonk Interview

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For those who may want to catch the archive, here is my interview yesterday with Indiana University professor Curtis Bonk as we chatted for about an hour about a variety of topics including the effects of technologies in Third World countries, the barriers to change in K-12 schools, and what the future might hold for the Web. We also talked at some length about a book he is looking to publish about how learning can be leveraged by the connections we can now make, and about his other new book titled Empowering Online Learning.  He made the point that a lot of folks are making these days, that many of these ideas have been around for a long time, mentioning Seymour Papert and others from 20 and 30 years ago. When we asked him to pull off a few books from his shelf behind him, he grabbed Mindstorms, Apprenticeship in Thinking and some other older but still relevant titles. All in all, it pushed my thinking in some good ways. Enjoy!

Some session notes: Apologies for the choppy audio in the first half; not sure why it mysteriously cleared up all of a sudden. Thanks to everyone in the chat session (about 30 folks) who offered up some great questions, and to Sheryl who moderated. And last, having some trouble converting to MP4 since the .flv file was so big. UStream won’t do the conversion on files over 100MB.

The World is Flat for Education–Curtis Bonk Interview

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Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 2 pm EST I’ll be continuing my thread of interviews with authors with Curtis Bonk, professor of e-learning at Indiana University. Curtis has just finished a comprehensive companion to Thomas Friedman’s work that looks at the world through an education slant. His blog has been recounting some of his travels around the world, and he’s got a lot of great stories to share that might give a more global perspective on how this is all playing out. He’s early in the publication process and has some interesting ideas for putting the book out, which will also be fodder for our discussion.

The interview will happen on my Ustream channel, and I hope you’ll join in the conversation. If you have any questions that you’d like to ask, feel free to post them here.