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Martin Westwell is a great speaker on social change, technology, neuro-science, ‘back to basics’ policy and evidence-based practice in education. Unfortunately this video is only part 1 of his keynote to the 2009 Innovation Showcase (I’ve scoured the web for part 2, but no luck so far), but it’s well worth it all the same.

Some of Martin’s observations include:

• There’s no such thing as evidence-based practice … evidence should inform practice and policy but not dictate it.
• We remember what we feel. The changing environment changes the way we think, which changes the way we interact with the world.
• We’re shifting from a question-rich, answer-poor society (where knowing stuff was where the value lay) to a question-poor, answer-rich society (where the value lies in transforming information into knowledge).
• The appearance of a ‘back to basics’ policy in education means something has changed, and the system doesn’t understand the change and is pushing back against it.
• We can’t assume that the use of technology in itself will have the influence that we want it to … It’s what you do with the technology that makes a difference.
• We can use technology purposefully to manipulate the learning environment and learning experiences to meet the needs of specific students.

Here are Martin’s presentation slides, and here’s a series of podcasts from Martin on similar themes. (Thanks to Jedd Bartlett, who provided the link to this video over twitter.)