SICTASSY – Learning Symposium #1

The national ICT in Learning Symposium is part of the strategic ICT advisory service provided to the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) by Education.au. Held in Sydney on Friday, the day was a series of small group focus discussions. I am sure others will blog about their discussion, I’m really only going to talk about three – over three posts.

“Implications of continuously emerging technologies for learning and learner”

This table discussion – was a diverse group – which we live blogged, and is still open, so if you want to add your comments – please do – a few people added comments from the network at the time. The entire day uses the obligatory wikispace to summarise the conversations and capture the spirit and comments of the day too.

The factors that we saw as important were the way in which technology affects;

community – how we come together to use them in teaching and learning

motivation – how we are not putting motivation at the heart of learning, focusing on ‘tools’ and ‘problems’

connectedness – how the new paradigm needs to create empathy between teachers and learners

There were many perspectives in a cross-sector discussion.

The conversations revolved around these three main ideas – and much of the technology and tools mentioned we either supported or questioned them in these contexts – but we returned to them again and again. To me it is significant that we were not talking about testing, software or even filters as main themes – though all were cited as factors. It is clear that those attending, really saw the challenges for Australia as quite different to other countries in many ways.