Learning Technologies Conference 2009

I’ve recently returned from this year’s Learning Technologies Conference 2009 held in Mooloolaba, Queensland. An excellent couple of days with a great range of presentations and a wonderful mix of educators from across a number of sectors. It was great to meet up with old friends and also to meet a number of twitter friends, face to face for the first time (& find a few new tweeps to follow).

Keynote speakers at the conference included: Nancy White on Day 1, spoke of the ‘I’ (as individual), ‘We’ (as community), and ‘Us’ (as a network) & reminded us of the power of online communities. On Day 2, Clay Burell told us about his experiences as a teacher searching for the right tools to support student learning and growth. Lots of other great speakers and much of their presented material is available from the links below.

Some of the take homes ideas for me where:

  1. That as technology stewards for communities, we should to meet people at their point of need, not talk about technology.
  2. That we should encourage the different skills that people have to contribute to our online communities.
  3. That content will become more open and through the affordances of social networking tools we are able to making meaning together.
  4. That innovation can be dangerous in the short term, but useful in the long run, and that our innovators need our support.
  5. As educators we need to read & learn about other opinions & points of view, ask questions, make up our own minds and encourage our students to do the same.
  6. That we need to spend time on nothing (to nurture our creativity) and if you’re not upsetting people, you’re not doing your job.
  7. That we could encourage students to work/learn on their laptops at home & then come to class to apply their learning (with the help of their students peers & the teacher/coach).

My presentation went well and I had some good feedback when I talked about the six month professional development (PD) activity we ran in an online environment. My questions were centred around the usefulness of this as a model for PD and how we can ‘meet people at their point of need’ (to borrow a phrase from Nancy White).

A lot of what I thought we were talking about was that we need authentic learning activities that encourage questions, thinking, reflection and testing out ideas. Technology can be used in a range of ways to support these activities and we can choose from any number of tools to facilitate good learning.

Checkout the resources available on the conference website which are generously made available to everyone.

  1. Papers & presenter information
  2. Podcasts .mp3 recordings on most sessions
  3. Posterus (for the Pirate shenanigans) the social treasure hunt game…
  4. Flickr photos
  5. The conference Ning
  6. Video & other bits & pieces to come…

There’s more reflection at Alison Bickford’s blog and much more reflection to come from other participants no doubt…

The twitter tag was #lt2009 and you’ll find lots of tweeted insights there. Well done to the conference organisers and hope to see you next year….

6 Responses to “Learning Technologies Conference 2009”

  1. Damn damn damn. It’s the reflective blog posts like yours that make me really regret that I’m taking a break from educational matters. Running away from my own institutional environment, where the focus was on the technology, not the learning was a good thing for me. But it’s so good to see that LT 2009 (and the ones before) are continuing to focus on using the technology for learning, and inter alia, reflecting on the nature of learning itself.

    I applaud you all, and really miss the contact with innovative minds like yours and the other iconoclasts in education.

  2. […] from a trip to Queensland where I attended the Learning Technology Conference 2009 in Mooloolaba (you can read more about that here), I met up with old friends whom I hadn’t seen for 30 years, and caught up with some of my […]

  3. Colin says:

    Hi Vyt, I appreciate that you might be missing the day to day of learning & technology, but isn’t it great that you can keep ‘in touch’ with the ebb & flow of things from so far away in your Balinese villa. Things are only for a time and soon enough you’ll have the opportunity to choose again as what you’ll do next. Hopefully it will be something to do with the ‘trade’. In the meantime, keep up the reflections on life as an expat in paradise.

  4. Howard Errey says:

    Thanks for such a thorough summary – in particular about seeking authentic learning activities and opportunity, as Clay reminded us it isn’t necessarily that the technology is the priority.

    my own thoughts are here http://www.tumblr.com/tumblelog/howardsconferencenotes

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