Beat the Drum Until Everyone Listens

Earlier this morning Chris Lehmann took the stage at the 140 Characters Conference in New York. I've heard Chris speak in-person and via the web about a dozen times over the last couple of years. Although his delivery might change for different audiences, his message has remained the same. I'm paraphrasing but the message is generally, "technology in schools needs to be like oygen" and "In the age of Google, we need to teach wisdom."

As I was watching the live stream this morning I thought, "I've heard this before, why am I watching?" I continue to watch Chris give his message because he's a dynamic speaker and because I now enjoy watching the audience's reaction to his message. Today's audience, both live and on the web, seemed to really embrace Chris's message. The significant thing about today's 140 Character Conference audience is that it was not an audience of educators only. In fact, I'd hazard a guess to say that the audience contained very few professional educators.

So then why do we need people like Chris Lehmann to continue to deliver the same message? Because more people need to hear it. It's easy for those of us who spend a lot of time in the edu-blog-o-sphere to forget that we are the minority of educators, there are millions of educators and other stake-holders who have not heard the message yet. If change is to happen, all stake-holders need to hear the message that Chris is delivering.

Here's the Twitter stream that was going on while Chris was speaking today. It was amazing how fast it was updating. I'm looking for the archived video of his presentation, if anyone finds it, please leave a comment with a link.


Here's the video in which I first saw Chris Lehmann speak.