Sort of highs and lows... but more sort of very highs and not quite so highs with a smattering of serious reflection.
The very highs - of course - the people! special mentions go to Bryan, Gardner, Gardner's students Serena and David, Diana O, Julie Little, Carie, Don and John (both from BbIESC)...as well as new friends to add incl Holly (my co-interviewee), Laura and Barbara (of digi-fear), Joann, Jose...and some others including every presenter I saw (yes this is a bit like an Oscar's acceptance speech but probably my only chance) - I took something away from every session and every conversation, as always it was ELI so pretty intensive (aka exhausting) but also very inspiring.
The not quite so highs - never quite enough time, too many parallels (although to be fair, for me, two parallel sessions is 1 too many) and, of course, being completely supplier free means not so many "fabulous" freebies.
The new kids on the block - everyone was talking about two dominant features of the conference - the apple-sponsored student content showcase (a really nice idea, spoiled ever so slightly for me by the skew towards things that involve apple technologies, I know that is how it has to be, but it was just a shame) and twitter (intelligirl described twitter as the grand-dame of the conference and I can't sum it up any better than that, it was like having access to a conference back channel and I definitely got more out of running parallel the real world conference and the virtual twittering than had it been the event alone)
A conference divided (?) - I felt that there were definitely two camps at the conference
- the "run as fast as we can towards web2.0" group extolling the virtues of SecondLife, WoW, croquet, twitter, mashed up maps n IM, gaming, Facebook etc etc (and of course that VLEs (esp Bb) are inherently evil) - all based on the premise that the kids are leaving us behind and we need to be where they are and know what they know to enable education to keep up with social uses of technology.
- the "digi-fear, the technology is OK but what about the people" group asking challenging questions about who the kids are and how confident are they really, how do staff become more digitally fluent to embrace these new technologies when CMS/VLEs still scare them and what are the true tower and cloud implications of the brave new world.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
If each of you could only have gone to one thing from this ELI conference, what would it be and why?
hmmm, this really is a tough one, cos there are a lot of things I didn't go to but wished I had let alone picking from the ones I did -I'm going to have to go for the digi-drama: fear 2.0 just because it presented such a different perspective on a well worn topic and it really did make me think a lot about where we are, where we want to be and how the **** we are going to get there. In terms of the session itself I think the way they presented the videos "theatre-style" and the clear expertise of the speakers made the session so interesting and because the groupwork activities worked really well the discussion was very rich and engaging.
close seconds - Gardner's session and the first keynote.
For me it had to be the George Siemens session on Connectivity - it brought the whole DF purpose into sharp focus for me, questioning what, why and how we educate.
The fact that he looked a bit like a younger version of Ryan Oneil helped too!
Will get the stuff on the blog asap.
Post a Comment