E-Learn 2008 was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, from November 17th to 21st. The conference had a record attendance of 1100 which is 200 more than ever before. It was truly an international conference and I did enjoy and benefit from the diversity of ideas and views. The keynote and invited speakers were one of the best that I have encountered in the last few years. Richard Baraniuk, Mark Milliron, Ellen Wagner…Here are a few:
Mark David Milliron, President and CEO of Catalyze Learning International, presented “A New Generation of Learning: Diverse Students, Emerging Technologies, and a Sustainability Challenge” and discussed the diversity that baby boomers, Gen Xers and NetGens bring to the learning environments. He recommends that we, educators and change agents, should be prepared for the upcoming changes and build an appropriate infrastructure for changes and shifts in education over the next 15 years to enable change to take place. To be prepared, we will need to be open to open education and the idea that education should be adaptable and personalized. Mark reviewed the current environments and how information is exchanged using different technologies. He also mentioned the CNN debuts hologram on election night https://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=rUTJsXGLOEg and the new Google Earth’s Ancient Rome in 3D. http://earth.google.com/rome/ to emphasize that we need to determine what improves and expands learning and what changes are on the way. Perhaps in the next few years our medical students at UBC will be able to attend an open heart surgery using hologram technology and our astrology students will be able to walk on the moon and feel weightless while on earth using another technology.
David Wiley, from Brigham Young University and President of the Board of the Open High School of Utah, started his presentation “Openness and Disaggregated Future of Higher Education” by an interesting opening quote: “Your institution will be irrelevant by 2020” . A wake up call for us that shift happens and a new window for us to see our today students. I would recommend looking at his presentation slides online – Openness and Disaggregated Future of Higher Education .
Lucifer Chu, did another interesting and thought provoking presentation on the subject of the Future of Open Education and Edutainment. I really enjoyed his talk on the importance of game-based learning and game approach (immediate feedback, interactivity, consequence and result, fun) and how we can incorporate games into our learning and teaching. His effort in developing and promoting the Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System (OOPS) is very interesting.
I also attended the “Evaluating Elearning” workshop by Tom Reeves from University of Georgia which I found very useful. You can find valuable rubrics and tools at http://www.evaluateitnow.com.
My presentation on Accessibility also went well and I was able to reconnect with old friends, exchange information with experts in the fields and socialize with new contacts.
For those of you interested in attending this conference, the Elearn 2009 will be in Vancouver next year; for more information visit Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education