It was a beautiful morning in Auckland and a pleasant stroll through the University of Auckland grounds to the impressive (fairly new) Owen G. Glenn Building.
A genuine and wonderful welcome and greeting in Maori to start off the conference.
The first keynote by Dr Scott Diener took us through the sense of self, sense of place, & sense of emotion that can be exploited by virtual worlds. He suggested that something different happens when we are together and finished off saying we need to be open and share our development and experiences.
Then a plenary by Mark Nichols who provocatively asked if we thought enough about, and recognised & questioned, the ‘group think’ (the wisdowm of crowds) that can mislead us regarding the imagined benefits of technology and elearning. We need to be realistic and not get caught up in the hype of possibility, but be rigorous in our examination and critique of the affordances of new technologies.
I sat in on a symposium called ‘Cascading Change: The role of social software and social media in educational intervention and transformation’. The discussion was focused on how little effect small interventions have at an institutional level and how might we best approach change from a broader ‘whole of organisation’ scope. What conditions, factors, drivers are required? I missed a social get together to continue the discussion so hope to hear more, in the meantime James Clay has blogged about the symposium.
In the afternoon I listened to presentations on the adoption of web 2.0 technologies. Take home points were; workshops don’t always work, follow-up and evaluate any professional development activity to see if practices have changed, there are always new tools to try, and students can do peer assessment if trusted & scaffolded appropriately.
The next session I attended was focused on mobile learning and we learnt about pod/vodcasts to support information literacy for students, using mobile technology to interact during the lecture and about lecturers adopting mobile technology into their teaching. Summary of these presentations is that while we can understand that there are benefits for learning in the adoption and use of mobile technologies, there are still significant barriers to uptake and we need to think carefully about how we might introduce and scaffold the use of these tools in learning & teaching.
Had some fun catching up with friends and meeting twitter followers/ees during the breaks. This link will search twitter for #ascilite09, the conference hashtag so that you can read all the tweets posted with delicious insights to the presentations and other goodies.
All the proceedings of the conference have been published and you can search the programme and find links to all the papers on line at the Conference Programme website.
