Dr. Milton Chen is senior fellow and executive director, emeritus at The George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), a non-profit operating foundation in the San Francisco Bay Area that utilizes its multimedia website, Edutopia.org, and documentary films to communicate a new vision for 21st Century schools. With more than 600,000 monthly visitors, Edutopia.org has become a destination for educators around the world interested in innovation in classroom practices. Dr. Chen served as executive director of GLEF for 12 years and has been the founding director of the KQED Center for Education (PBS) in San Francisco, a director of research at Sesame Workshop in New York, and an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

He was appointed by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to the National Park System Advisory Board to advance their role in STEM and humanities education. Dr. Chen also serves on the board of trustees for Sesame Workshop in New York and is chairman of the Panasonic Foundation in New Jersey. His work has been honored by the Congressional Black Caucus, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s Fred Rogers Award, the Association of Educational Service Agencies, and two Bay Area science centers, the Exploratorium and the Lawrence Hall of Science. Dr. Chen’s 2010 book, Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools, was selected as one of the 10 best education books that year by the American School Board Journal. Perhaps most importantly, on his 50th birthday, he was named a Jedi Master by George Lucas.

Keynote Title

Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in Our Schools

Dr. Milton Chen will discuss how school systems are reinventing themselves, focusing on their growing edges of innovation in districts, states, and nations. These Edges are redefining the nature of “school” as it was known in the 20th Century and include 1) the Thinking Edge, 2) the Curriculum Edge, 3) the Technology Edge, 4) the Time/Place Edge, 5) the Co-Teaching Edge, and 6) the Youth Edge. The Six Edges form the framework of his 2010 book, selected as one of the 10 best books of 2010 by the American School Board Journal. The Edges address fundamental shifts to our thinking about schooling; ways in which technology is transforming when, where, and how students learn; and roles of teachers and students as teachers form teaching teams with other experts and students take on more responsibility for their own learning. Dr. Chen will show examples of these innovative practices from Edutopia.org, the Lucas Foundation’s multimedia Web site and its archive of documentaries, available for free download and embedding, with foreign language captions from Google Translate.