Keynote - Navigating the future of education
We are part of a transformation in technology-mediated teaching and learning. Over the past ten years, social networking has enabled people to share their interests worldwide, Wikipedia has demonstrated new forms of crowd-sourced scholarship, the open source movement has challenged traditional forms of publishing, and high bandwidth communications have opened the possibility of a global network of personal tutors. The next ten years will see further developments: in personal dynamic media, mobile and contextual learning, and augmentation of the everyday world. In the midst of these disruptive changes, we need to rethink the aims of education for a mobile interconnected world and explore opportunities as well as challenges: to connect formal and informal learning, enable socialised teaching, co-design sharable resources, exploit context, and empower students with powerful investigative toolkits. The emerging methods of design-based research, co-construction of learning resources, and open inquiry learning offer ways to navigate this landscape of future education.
Presenter
Mike Sharples
Mike is Professor of Educational Technology at the
Institute of Educational Technology, the
Open University UK. His research involves human-centred design of new technologies for learning, and the application of studies of human cognition and social interaction to the development of novel interactive systems. He inaugurated the
mLearn international conference series and was Founding President of the
International Association for Mobile Learning.
His recent projects have included the PI: Personal Inquiry project to develop inquiry learning with mobile devices for 21st century science. A collaboration with Sharp Labs Europe is developing mobile technologies for language learning. He is leader of the Learning strand of the National Biomedical Research Unit in Hearing. As a member of the MOBIlearn European 5th Framework project he led the design and evaluation of its context awareness subsystem. His previous projects include CAPITAL (Curriculum & Pedagogy in Technology Assisted Learning) to inform the UK Government's Harnessing Technology Strategy, a study of Web 2.0 technologies for learning at school and home, the design of a Writer's Assistant, an exploration of writing as creative design, computer implementations of creative story generation, and the development of a knowledge-based tutoring system for neuro-radiology.
He is author of over 200 papers in the areas of educational technology, human-centred design of personal technologies, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.
Facilitator
Diane Brewster
Diane has recently finished her role as the Learning Facilitator in the Creativity Zone at the University of Sussex, part of InQbate; the CETL in Creativity, and is involved in the ongoing dissemination of outputs from that project. She is currently working as an Associate lecturer for the OU, teaching a second level Systems course, and as an Education Consultant. Diane has been a member of the JISC Teaching and Learning Practice Experts group for the past 5 years.
Diane started her teaching career in the late 70's teaching humanities at secondary level, followed by 4yrs cross curriculum teaching in a unit for children not in school and 8 yrs teaching for Birkbeck College (London). She was an early adopter of new technologies, a growing interest in which culminated in being asked to help 'kit out' and support the technology for a start up company in the City. During the 6 yrs working for this company she did a "career change" BSc with the OU. This was followed by an MSc in Human Centred Computer Systems at Sussex and a DPhil. Her doctoral research looked at the issues of disruption and failure in Technology Enhanced Learning in the light of Diana Laurillard's Conversational Framework. A major part of the empirical work for this was done within the context of mobile technologies.
