SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008 - 1

Just two hours at home after joining the SURF Onderwijsdagen 2008. The closing keynote by Gordon Freedman (vice president educational strategy at Blackboard) was a little bit disappointing. The good thing was that he did not get into the Bb Next Generation plans, which would be quite strange in this setting (already mentioned by Wilfred Rubens in his blog). Freedman's talk was about education innovation, which should be the key issue for the next couple of years. "Let's put technology aside". Strange to hear someone say this who claims to have an install base of 3000 organisations in 70 countries using Blackboard. Is this to prevent them from looking at other VLE's in the meantime? It's hardly news to say that we should think about education innovation. This should always be the basic drive, shouldn't it? Well maybe this is a difference between the European approach and the US approach. After analyzing which educational processes should be facilitated, one gets to the required functionality and finally to one or more applications that are able to deliver this. Taking the ongoing process of ICT development into consideration it would be a pity to neglect potential new ICT solutions. You could miss a lot.
One of the highlights today was the session by Wilfred Rubens about the non existing net-generation. It was interesting to see how he handled a multichannel approach: face to face presentation, streaming video, powerpoint and a backchannel (also displayed by a beamer) through which participants (sometimes at other locations) could make contributions. This was a strong demonstration of a (temporary) NET-community. There were also other backchannels, like the Twitter feeds that went around and which were used by participants to have short Twitter discussions during the presentation. The conclusion of the session was that it's not relevant whether or not the net generation exists. ICT is there and we can use it, independent of age. It's important to deal with the information skills, plagiarism aspects and digital literacy if we want to use ICT. There are many reasons to use ICT, and for a personalised environment it's a prerequisite. So far for now. Further impressions will be in a next post.