If you’ve heard Alan November speak at tech conferences more than once (and I certainly have), then very little in his keynote this morning would be new to you.

But that didn’t matter considering that, to most of his audience, this was all pretty much new territory.

Alan’s two major points were that we need to help our students find a world-wide, authentic audience, and that students need to do more constructing of their own knowledge.

Both radical ideas for a school system that is still largely wedded to the concept of teacher-as-distributor-of-knowledge and learning-as-measured-by-standardized-tests.

Ok. To be fair, however, that pretty much describes most schools in this country.

It was also fun to watch Alan run through examples of potential student assignments in which he used all kinds of tools that probably made our IT administrators nervous.

Few, if any, of them will work well inside our walled garden known as Blackboard. Or fit comfortably into our policies that say kids can learn about working in the outside world without actually going there.

So, although the themes Alan used in his keynote were very familiar, it was still a lot of fun.

He was presenting us with more ammunition to help people understand the overall point that technology will never improve education unless we also change the focus and structure of learning.

Sometimes in the overly-large school district at the center of the educational universe*, it helps to use the coat tails of the outside expert with the long resume.

* Not really. :-)