Recently attended this conference with a couple of my colleagues. Particularly liked Phil Bradley's opening Keynote "Dancing on Quicksand"interestingly I must have picked up this phrase from the pre-conference blurb and then forgotten because I had been using the phrase for a week or two previously.
What I found particularly useful was the idea that you don't have to know everything you just have to keep moving. Although for my college I am at the bleeding edge of technical innovation, in the wider world there is so much happening and changing that being aware let alone adept can become a struggle (see my last post on m-learning, 2 weeks after that I went to another on m-assessment and had about 6 tools I had never heard of presented). What is important is not that I know every elearning tool but that I have used some, if they are a dead end well the skills and experience will still be transferable - "even when I am wrong I am right" to quote Phil Bradley.
Which chimed nicely with the workshops that I went to. There were 2 on Second Life and they had progressed from "Oh look we can build islands" to actually discussing what they were doing in there and what it can offer as opposed to real life teaching (a very good discussion on the tendency of teachers to try to recreate their classroom online, because that's where they are comfortable, and how this misses both the point and the oportunities of virtual worlds). So my SL character has had the dust blown off him and I am back in world as even if SL vanishes I will be likely to be teaching in a virtual world at some point. Now if only the summer upgrades hadnt eaten all my time I could have done a bit more than been a tourist.
