Wondering whether your panel has been picked for SXSWedu? Wait no longer. The education-centric segment of the SXSW family has announced its first round of panels and speakers for 2016.
It’s been a busy week for SXSW announcements, with Interactive, Film, and Music all making early programming announcements for next year’s multi-stranded gathering. Now the four day education conference that acts as the festival lead-in has announced is first wave of speakers.
Top of the list is keynote speaker Temple Grandin. As Autism has become a burning issue in education and health policy circles, Grandin’s personal story has made her an increasingly significant figure in the discussion of what sufferers experience. A professor of Livestock Behavior and Welfare at Colorado State University, her book about living with profound Autism, Emergence: Labeled Autistic, changed how people perceived the disorder, ending the stigma that a diagnosis automatically meant an independent life was impossible.
Of course, it’s almost impossible to put together an education without guests that will court controversy. Former Google engineer Max Ventilla founded the AltSchool group, and faces broad criticism as another representative of the IT millionaires that think they know education better that educators. Expect his featured session, “Silicon Valley + Education = Real Change?” to spark lively conversation.
His is just one of a series of featured sessions, including:
• Personalized Learning Games CIO Jessica Berlinski, Avielle Foundation CEO Jeremy Richman, Committee for Children/Second Step executive director Joan Duffell, and Newtown School District Superintendent Joseph Erardi on Effective SEL (Social and Emotional Learning): From Classroom to Community.
• Chancellors and presidents of the Universities of Kansas, Georgia State and Arizona State discussing How Universities are Crowdsourcing Innovation.
• Collective Shift CEO Connie Yowell on Redesigning Learning for the 21st Century.
SXSWedu sprang out of SXSW Interactive, but it also has a kinship to the film festival. There will be three schoolroom documentaries screening during the conference:
• CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap: A Tribeca 2015 Film Festival selection tackling the symptoms and structural causes of under-representation of women in programming, just one area of many areas in IT with serious gender disparity.
• Tested: Director Curtis Chin chronicles a year in the lives of several New York eighth graders as they study for the Specialized High School Admissions Test in hopes of getting into one of the city’s high-performing specialized public schools.
• The Hunting Ground: Director Kirby Dick and producer Amy Ziering tackled the issue of rape in the military with their Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War, and now tackle the question of sexual assault on college campuses.
SXSWedu runs March 7-10, 2016. More info at www.sxswedu.com.
This article appears in October 23 • 2015.
