Tim flies

Tomorrow I head off to Nicosia to keynote the Cyprus International Conference on Educational Research. The event, hosted by the Middle East University (North Cyprus campus), will feature four keynote speakers and presentations of papers, workshops, posters, seminars and virtual presentations on a wide range of pedagogical research themes. In total, it looks as though there are over 400 presentations accepted into the three day programme.

The conference aims to "bring together educational scientists, administrators, counsellors, education experts, teachers, graduate students and civil society organizations and representatives together, to share and to discuss theoretical and practical knowledge in a scientific environment".

The three other keynote speakers are Janet Parker (Open University, UK) who will speak on the topic of 'Encouraging Early Career Researchers to become Expert Published Writers', Lejf Moos (NTNU Trondheim, Norway) whose theme is 'European Educational Research Today', and local academic Mehmet Çağlar (Near East University, Cyprus).

My own keynote will cover the proposition that social media, mobile technologies and the Web are together changing the way we perceive knowledge, learning and education. I'm going to  propose that we are witnessing a radical shift in the way knowledge is represented, consumed, created and shared, and that as a result, we need to reappraise the way we conduct research and disseminate our findings. I'm going to talk about adopting open access journal publishing as the best way forward for widespread and effective publication of research, and I'm going to champion open scholarship. Let's see how that will be received.

I'm going to blog again about the conference once I'm there and it's in full swing. Cyprus is a wonderful country to visit any time of the year, but doubly so at the moment, with the inclement weather here in the UK assailing the senses. The island's temperate Mediterranean climate will be very welcome, and the Cyprus culture and history are rich. It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. 


Tim flies by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.