I’m keynoting the Irish Learning Technology Association’s (ILTA) annual conference (#EdTech12) today and for the first time have created my slides using web-native HTML5 and CSS3.
Click here or on the image above to access them!
I’ve spent the last week in that weird and wonderful place that is San Francisco. Weird because, well, the number of homeless and obviously mentally ill is quite staggering. Wonderful due to the weather, friendliness of the people, and the obvious unstinting commitment to liberal democracy.
My reason for being there was the Digital Media and Learning Conference 2012 (#DML2012), something I was invited to attend as a writer for the DMLcentral blog. Whilst I was there I also helped judge the DML Competition around Open Badges, which was a privilege and a pleasure. More about that another time, perhaps.
I wrote a day-by-day overview of my experiences at #DML2012 over at my conference blog:
However, I wanted to take 500 words or so here to go through my highlights. I’m all about convenient hypocrisies when their useful so, for the sake of this post, I’m using a ‘Top 5’ construct. Here’s my top five takeaways from #DML2012.
The whole point of conferences is to meet other people and talk about important stuff. I was delighted to meet people I’ve interacted with online for years for the first time face-to-face, such as Bud Hunt, and people who have come onto my radar over the last year or so like Audrey Watters, Rafi Santo, Jeff Brazil, and Richard Scullin. The Mozilla crowd (Mark Surman, Erin Knight, Matt Thompson, Jess Klein) were there, of course, as was Cathy Davidson.
I managed to snag an enjoyable conversation with Howard Rheingold, but didn’t dare approach danah boyd or Henry Jenkins. Thankfully I got to hang out with Richard Mills, a PhD student who is being funded as part of the DML Badges research strand, as well as Jamie and JP from BuzzMath, which more than made up for it. 🙂
DML launched their Connected Learning initiative at the conference along with Spigot (a news aggregator). I could attempt to explain these in detail, but it’s probably easier if you just head over the respective sites to take a look and get involved!
I thought it started slowly, but by the end, John Seely Brown’s opening keynote had me captivated and buzzing with ideas. You can watch Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Learner in the 21st Century below:
As I currently work for an organisation that is part of a larger one that funds projects (JISC), I’m always interested in the rationale behind how money is distributed. Connie Yowell from the MacArthur Foundation, a philanthropic charitable organisation gave a wonderful, lucid, coherent and incisive display on the panel during Day 2. Her reasoning was so fantastic it put the other panellists in the shade, I thought.
More on that panel in my Day 2 write-up.
Having put my name forward for an Ignite talk at #DML2012 I was surprised and delighted when first of all it was accepted, and then second, I was to present to the entire conference. Wow. There must have been close to 1,000 people in the room when I gave the following talk:
My fellow Ignite-rs (20 slides, 15 seconds, auto-advanced) were just delightful. A highly recommended format!
As you can probably tell, I had a ball at #DML2012 and can’t wait for #DML2013 in Chicago. I’m going to get there by hook or by crook! I’d like to thank DML very much for making it possible to be there, and HASTAC for inviting me to be on the judging panel for the DML Badges competition (which is another blog post in itself!)
I’ve just been in an interesting panel discussion at the JISC Online Conference on the subject of ‘digital literacy’. The recording of the Elluminate session is available.
The session reinforced to me just how diverse people’s views on digital literacies are. Most new to the field make the assumption that digital literacy is singular and consists of basic skills in the digital realm. In effect, digital competency. Those more experienced in the field, such as Helen Beetham, talk of the importance of this baseline – the ‘ABC’ of digital literacy as she called it, but higher-level skills as well.
Helen talked about how difficult it can be for learners to know what it is that they need to know, and also how to express it. For example, they may be confident using blogs, wikis and social networking sites, but be extremely unsure as to what’s expected in the form of a 5,000-word essay. The problem comes because we lack a coherent approach: different people and organisations own different parts of the digital landscape.
Another panellist who ‘got it’ was Dave White. Happily, both Dave and Helen are expert consultants to the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme I’m supporting! Dave expanded briefly upon his idea of Visitors and Residents but spent most of his time talking about his intriguing idea of there being a ‘Learning Black Market‘ in education. Students, he contends, develop their ‘user-owned’ literacies that are highly effective, but these are devalued or ignored by institutions. An example of this would be their use of Google searches and Wikipedia, which they are loathe to admit to because of uncertainties around where line around ‘plagiarism’ is drawn.
It was a very interesting session, with the 102-strong members of the backchannel having a conversation at the same time. Ewan McIntosh, for example, who’s giving the closing ‘crowdsourced’ keynote trying to make sense of the whole conference, asked how we all came across our digital literacy skills. It was, in effect, a rhetorical question, as we all reflected on the fact that they were primarily self- or peer-taught on a ‘need-to-know’ or ‘interest’ basis.
It certainly got me thinking about the best ways of developing the essential elements of digital literacies I’ve identified in my research and thesis.
