Learner Bytes

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….

I’ve been thinking about eportfolios a lot lately and thought it may be time to write of recent developments that have encouraged me to keep up the momentum in getting them into the mainstream at my institution.

It’s already over a week ago that I was fortunate enough to attend the VET E-portfolio showcase, and as well as catching up with friends from across education sectors, I was able to listen to a number of excellent presentations. Visit the E-portfolios blog to read about updates to the showcase and to find links to the Elluminate recording of five of the sessions that were presented at the VET E-portfolio Showcase.

Amongst other presentations, I was taken by Hazels Owen’s metaphor of eportfolio as ‘performance’, with a backstage (for collecting, development and assembly), a stage (for showcasing or testing work), & an audience (range of presentations or views) that was part of a comprehensive overview of the uses of eportfolios. See her presentation, Web 2.0 ePortfolios that work for both students and educators: Strategies and recommendations on slideshare.

I’ve also noted in a recent blog post on using portfolios for assessment, Limitations of Portfolios that Helen Barrett has added a dimension to her suggestion that an eportfolio can be both a ‘product’ and a ‘process’, she also speaks of portfolio as ‘workspace’ and portfolio as ‘showcase’.

It’s all good grist for the mill that is helping me improve the narrative I tell academic staff at my institution when suggesting they should be using eportfolios to support their students’ learning. Our current review of the university LMS will include a requirement that an eportfolio be part of the package – all good signs for the future. I’ve really come to believe that eportfolios are one of the best tools that we might have to help students engage more with their learning. The challenge for us to make them ubiquitous, persistent, transferable, and life-long, but more on that in a future post.