SITE 2012 Day 2

My time at SITE has been busy enough to negate my good intentions of compiling this report on a daily basis. Here I am at lunch time on the final day and I’m just now finding time to make some notes about the second day of the conference proper.

I started the second day early, attending the TPACK SIG meeting to catch up on developments in that area and to accept one of 4 SIG awards for my paper – Looking for evidence of change: Evaluation in the Teaching Teachers for the Future project – presented the previous day. The TPACK SIG awards took the form of a large coffee mug, a ‘Thompson’, named in honour of Ann Thompson, a former president of SITE and and early mover on TPACK.

The Tuesday keynote was presented remotely by Larry Johnson from the NMC Horizon Project and was shared across the Internet with the SXSWEdu conference down the road in Austin and the COSN conference in New York. The focus of the presentation was on rapidly changing technologies, the Horizon Report, and implications for higher education. Mobile computing and tablets are the near horizon focus for 2012 and represent trends that we need to accommodate in planning for revisions to courses and programs.

I managed to attend several parallel sessions through the day. They addressed topics including using TPACK to analyse teachers’ task design in a Swedish 1:1 setting, evaluation of a 2 year PD project in Nevada, extreme learning (including adventure learning), digital storytelling, idea videos, and authentic learning in instructional design (presented by my former doctoral student, Jay Wilson). The take home lessons were about variety and creativity in the ways that teacher educators and their students are working to build capabilities for learning and teaching with ICT. There is clearly no single solution but many different tools can be used to achieve useful outcomes.

Two hours of the afternoon were devoted to presentation of our symposium with 4 papers about different aspects of the Teaching Teachers for the Future project. The symposium was organised by Chris Campbell from University of Queensland and other presenters included Matthew Kearney (UTS), and Jason Zagami (Griffith). Jason presented over Skype. My contribution to the symposium considered redesign of EDP4130 Technology Curriculum and Pedagogy to make TPACK and ICT integration more explicit.

The SITE welcome reception from 6:30 – 7:30 pm was followed by the Leadership Summit dinner from 7:30 – 9:30 pm. After 14 hours of conference it was time to call it a day.