The New Media Consortium 2008 Summer Conference has been a great event. This is BYU’s first year as an official member of the consortium and this is my first time attending the conference.

In the opening keynote for the conference, Diana Oblinger, President of Educause, set the tone for the conference by providing a vision of Education 3.0 (for more on this, see John Seely Brown).

You can watch Diana’s presentation online. She makes the case that we’re moving into a new phase of education & learning with different rules and opportunities than we’re used to.

Here’s what I thought was most interesting / thought-provoking:

1. Technology matters a lot, but it’s even more important to understand our students, what they do, what motivates them and how they spend their time. Tidbit: the average student spends less than 10% of their time in class per week. What are they doing the rest of the time?

2. We’re inundated with references to the “digital native” and the “Generation Y” student . . . But how are they different in ways that really matter to learning? One of the most important realities of today’s students is that they don’t see themselves as passive recipients (consumers) of information. They are content and knowledge producers with a plethora of outlets for self-publishing (e.g. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Blogger, etc.). Whether we’re ready for it or not, whether we like it or not, learning is increasingly situated in a “participatory culture” (see Henry Jenkins).

3. Oblinger asserts that learning context matters as much as learning content. Accordingly, she argues that we need to keep learning about learning and encourage our students to do the same. I appreciated her perspective because we often deal with learning ex post facto, i.e. after we’ve put everything together that way we want / think is right (or convenient for us), then we ask the “learning” question. This is exactly backwards. We should always begin with student learning (the “end”) in mind and then work toward facilitating it as best we can.

Oblinger concluded by calling for the creation of a “discovery infrastructure” in which we think about ways to repose data and distribute resources to promote learning. This is really the heart of “Education 3.0″–utilizing distributed computation and knowledge resources in a learning network that leverages both computation and human power to maximize opportunities and potential for learning.

The bottom line? As new possibilities and modalities are enabled by new technologies, we have to continue to keep our eyes on the prize. None of it matters if it doesn’t contribute to more, better and longer-lasting student learning.