ULearn Conference - 2011
Keynote 1 - Dr Jack Bacon - The Parallel Bang
- author of "My Grandfather’s Clock"
- today we need to teach skills of how to reinvent yourself
- people learn things, pass them on and then they become possible for others.
- every 18 months we double what the silicon world can achieve
- more physical persons on the planet gives us more brains to think and get ideas
- barcodes are going away
- www.worldcommunitygrid.org
- open course ware
- life is moving exponentially faster - we are all connected - half the cellphones going into Africa this year
Keynote 2 - Graeme Aitken - Dean of Education University of Auckland
- teaching most needs open mindedness and optimism as well as high performance
- many great inventions have never really taken off or worked - due to disaster like Titantic and Hindenburg or be too expensive etc
- some innovations succeed in spite of dire warnings - Socrates was worried writing would stop people remembering and reading would stop people thinking and listening
- We need measures of impact of innovation
- Teachers have obligation to cause successful learning and achievement, greater interest and greater confidence but we also need to cause all of them together
- You can waste time in classrooms through misalignment, disengagement and lack of success so effective teaching is when you lessen this
Ultra fast Broadband - UFB - Howard Baldwin
Keynote 3 - Dr Jan Hetherington - Mobile Technology
- mobile technologies are everywhere - not using them very well in education
- look at Funky schools on youtube
- need to centre learning around the learner
- learn with technologies not about technologies or from them
- “teach carpentry not hammer”
- created stories for iPods - brainstormed in inspiration and kidspiration and then created podcasts
- information based approaches don’t result in deep and sustained learning
- authentic learning - authentic context (setting for task - motivation for learning, relevant), authentic tasks (real world tasks - not just a name on a wall google it to find it), expert performance (access to the way an expert would think and act - sharing of what is learnt in an authentic way), multiple perspectives (looking at a range of research resources), collaboration (joint problem solving, connecting through technology), articulation (opportunity to speak and write about their growing understanding), reflection (to think about and reflect and to discuss choices, can be a very social process), scaffolding and coaching (support to each other in the learning environment, not only by the teacher), authentic assessment
- authentic tasks? - word searches (not really - perhaps if children create them), video games create tacit learning but usually you don’t get to create a product
- we use web 2.0 tools to create and publish our learning - the shared wisdom of the crowd
- Questions to think about - What does the student do and is it legal?, Who uses the technology?, How long does it take?, Is there collaboration?, Is there a polished product?, Is there a showcase or forum for the product?
- http://web.me.com/janherrington/ULearn/
Keynote 4 - Stephen Breakespear - Step into Edupreneurship
- need a propensity towards action
- we need to be more ‘recipe makers’ instead of ‘cake makers’
- We need stability but adaptive ability
- teachers are the solutions to the problems - not the MOE
- 4 mindsets - question (need to challenge the status quo - Smart have the answers but stupid have all the questions - need to be disruptive, Slman Khan), design (Prof Sugata Mitra - holes in the walls - design for the learner not the institution - If you have a brain you are a learner), experimentation (the only way to succeed is to fail often - we learn the most when we fail - make and do rather than think and meet, fail often to succeed sooner, we need to celebrate failure), lead (we need to put pedagogy first before technologies, no longer need positional leadership to lead)