Daniel Russell is the Űber Tech Lead for Search Quality and User Happiness in Mountain View.  He earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Rochester (1985), specializing in Artificial Intelligence until he realized that magnifying human intelligence was his real passion. These days, he is actively combining these two very different types of intelligence into a new human augmentation.  He enjoys teaching, learning, running and music, preferably all in one day.  His MOOC (PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com) has had over 3.7 million students, which suggests that there is a large interest and appetite for learning how to do research more effectively.  

Talk: "The Future of Learning: How will people learn the skills they need for academe, work, and life?"

Abstract: What does it mean to be literate in the age of Google?  At a time when you can search billions of texts in milliseconds, scan over trillions of online images, and look deeply into planet-wide maps, we need to rethink what it means to be literate, and to be a learner.  Although you might think that "literacy" is one of the great constants that transcends the ages, the skills of a literate person have changed substantially over time as texts and technology allow for new kinds of reading and understanding.  Knowing how to read is just the beginning of it - knowing how to frame a question, pose a query, interpret the texts that you find, organize (and use) the information you discover, and understand your metacognition - these are all critical parts of being literate as well. How will virtual- and augmented-realities affect the way we reason, understand, and think?  In his talk Dan reviews what literacy means today and shows how some very surprising and unexpected skills will turn out to be critical in the years ahead. 

The advent of the networked world changes our expectations from traditional learning behaviors to ways of learning that leverage the networked world and networked people.  From his perspective as a MOOC instructor of more than 3M students (and as someone who spends considerable time teaching in K12 and public libraries), Dan will describe the changes in literacies that are taking place, how we are becoming perpetual students, and what this means for the future of learning.