Down under

I'm in Australia this week to give the opening keynote for the Inaugural Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum, which will be held over two days at the Rendezvous Hotel in Melbourne, just across from Flinders Street Railway Station (pictured). Melbourne, this part anyway, is quite Bohemian, bustling, vibrant and very colourful. You can stand on a street corner and watch the whole of humanity pass by in about ten minutes. The other invited keynote at the event will be Tom Cochrane (Auckland University of Technology, NZ) who will address the topic: Transforming pedagogy with Mobile Web 2.0. Here are Tom's key points:

·         This session will reflect on the impact of over 30 mlearning projects between 2006 and 2011 illustrating how mlearning can be used as a catalyst to transform pedagogy from instructivist teacher-directed pedagogy to social constructivist pedagogy that bridges pedagogically designed learning contexts, facilitates learner generated contexts, and content (both personal and collaborative), while providing personalisation and ubiquitous social connectedness.

·         The session will outline an mlearning implementation strategy, and illustrative case studies. Links to supporting material can be found at http://web.me.com/thom_cochrane/MobileWeb2/, and http://thomcochrane.wikispaces.com/.

My own keynote speech is entitled: Learning Generations: Looking forward, looking back. I'm also going to be addressing how we might transform the learning experience, and will be interested to see what common areas Tom and I will touch on. Here are my topic headings:

·         A history of learning technology, change management and the adoption of new and emerging technologies in education.

·         Possible tensions between teacher and learner needs and expectations

·         Personal learning environments and student owned devices and their role within institutional contexts

·         The evolution of the web and what new roles teachers will need to adopt to harness the power of new and emerging technologies

·       I will argue that teachers and learners need new pedagogies and literacies if teaching and learning is to be optimised in the digital age. 

The rest of my Down Under lecture tour can be found here on this site.

Image by Hradcanska



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