What the heck is a plenary?
according to Wikipedia - Plenary may refer to:
* Plenary session or meeting, the part of a conference when all members of all parties are in attendance
Ok, now that we know what a plenary is! I'll try really hard to do a short recap of the session.
I thought the opening session was really good - I felt all jazzed. It started with lots of energy (which we needed) – a band playing “When the Saints Go Marching In”. We got a nice energetic welcome from Steve Osfelt, Exhibits, Houston Museum - great presenter. There was also a short video presentation setting up the theme for the conference – “Are We Ready?” Innovation is child’s play” - complete with intense techno music.
Some of the highlights:
Statistics on children’s education, technology, immigration, jobs – for the future.
60% of children now obese, 30 million children visit children’s museums, 79.4 million / billion children in us?, U.S. birth rate blow replacement, growing population due to immigration, 30 billion searches on google a week, 5x more words now than in shakespeare’s time.
Children need an entirely different skill set - children will have jobs that require creative thinking and problem solving and mastery of multiple skills.
100 students – 82 will not attend college
Children are preparing for jobs not yet available with technology not yet created.
They will have 10-15 jobs in a lifetime, solving problems not yet known, technologies not yet known, compete for jobs globally.
The presentation really hit home for me. It is supposed to be available online and I really encourage everyone to watch it. I’m sure we’ve heard many of the facts in the presentation, but to hear them all together in one place was very powerful. It makes you realize how much the world has changed and how fast it is continuing to change. We all fall in to one of these categories - as a member of society, as a member of the library field, as someone who works with children, as someone who has children – we need to help prepare them. Our children are our future and we owe it to them to give them the best start possible. I think it is a very exciting time and there is so much possibility.
We then sat through mayor's speech and awards. Some interesting tidbits about museums to visit - not enough to take up blog space.
The opening speaker was also great! He was a natural storyteller, so his whole presentation was a series of stories that he all linked together. It was all about “Where do good ideas come from” – an actual book he wrote. His whole presentation set up why we need these good ideas (curing cholera, world wide web, gps) and how they were formed.
This all relates back to the environment we (libraries or museums provide) and the exposure and encouragement we provide to any minds - allowing the opportunity for collaboration. The environments that we create plant the seeds for ideas to grow - which could be the next big idea.
He had some really wonderful, funny stories illustrating how ideas grew from seeds (cholera story), how information from a different field could be totally relevant (a wine press spawning gutenberg's printing press), and how collaboration could lead to the next big thing (gps). I plan on reading his book!
Well, you made him seem a lot more interesting than the CLA folks did! I agree with "how information from a different field could be totally relevant (a wine press spawning gutenberg's printing press" - I think we have done that well in Rancho. We have adapted mant things from one field to the next. A good example is the iCell!
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