Learning with the Fang

Those of you following the Al Upton and the MiniLegends kerfuffle will have noted that it spawned an event in Adelaide today - May 2nd 2008. This event started life as the ‘Symposium of Reason’ and morphed into something called ‘Learning in the 21st Century’. Education.au kindly provided a venue and hospitality thanks to the tireless work of Janet (aka lucychili), who also coerced the inimitable Joan Russell into facilitating the day.

UPDATE: RSS Feed for podcasts of the day.

This post represents my view of proceedings which I attended as both a speaker (in my role as parent) and audio dude (attempting to podcast each talk before the day’s business closes). The plan is for output from the day to be collected and posted HERE and HERE either over the weekend or early next week.

Prior to the event, speaker Graham Wegner announced he could not attend the morning session and made the audio of his presentation available HERE. I listened to that audio several times before giving my presentation and found it most inspiring and informative.

The day began with Joan taking firm control of the collective and setting a tone of respectful engagement and deep listening for the morning. No, we would not be live streaming, blogging, tweeting or inviting a back-channel for the first half of the day. At first I was disappointed but that changed as we got underway.

• First speakers were Daniel Bryant and Riana Chakravarti - two very bright and young students who are Wikipedia admins amongst other things.
• Next Peter Simmonds from the Department of Education and Children’s Services delivered a visually rich presentation with his usual flair.
• Karl Goetz shared his perspectives gained as a volunteer in a range of both online and real world technical endeavours.
• After shuffling cars at the morning break, Alison Kershaw posed a range of questions from the Digital Bridge Unit, Information Economy Directorate.
• We then played the audio from Graham Wegner and I responded with my talk given from the perspective of a parent of two teenage children.
• Al Upton gave the final presentation as an innovative teacher with a passion for authentic learning.

The rest of the day was spent setting goals and synthesizing the wide array of ideas offered - the output of which was scribed by a combination of electronic whiteboard and the uber-dextrous Tom Cotton.

Now I need to tidy up the remaining audio bits and put them somewhere I can share them with y’all. Just quietly - I’m stuffed.

http://talo.wikispaces.com/learninginthe21stcentury
http://www.groups.edna.edu.au/course/view.php?id=1843

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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