On the way to the future of technology in education conference this morning. My second visit to senate house for this event, having been utterly enthused by the last one!
However, I approach the conference with a slightly different mindset. Being part way through a period of substantial change in our organisation, my activities in supporting and developing learning technologies have been curtailed somewhat. So, what’s in it for me today?
It’s at times like this when a brief change of perspective can do wonders. FOTE provides a fantastic opportunity to engage again with those in a more fortunate position, where learning technologies are at the core of their responsibility. That’s not to say they aren’t a fundamental part of my own role – they absolutely are, but rather that the focus for me is more often implementation and delivery rather than building the abilities of the user after we have shipped a new innovation. A traditional approach.
Checking out the agenda in the official conference app, I find Nick Skelton’s ideology very compelling, in particular this phrase describing nick’s beliefs:
’a firm believer that people are more important that technology and the IT service succeed or fail due to social effects’
How true.
I am finding things a little frustrating at the moment as we don’t have the technology in College for the students to use and achieve a successful outcome for the Scavenger Hunt we’ve just delivered. All students need is a program to convert videos into different formats to match Windows Movie Maker. They’ve had to download freeware on their computers at home as they can’t download it at College. It would also be great if we had a program which we could use to showcase the videos rather than You Tube and which would accept any format!