Day 2

Some thoughts on today's presentations...

Learning Theory and Augmented Realities
This morning's presentation by Harvard University's Chris Dede was an in-depth look at how mobile technologies support the strategy of using augmented realities in inquiry learning. He discussed how the ECOMuve Pond project provides student with authentic learning experiences in the sciences--they do science activities in a 3-D world that lets them explore an ecosystem and learn about the habitat. Also, he discussed a project in which students use mobile devices in actual fieldwork and collect information about an actual ecosystem. In general, his discussion was interesting because he made good connections between the technology and how augmented reality benefits students in a complex learning environment. Dede also said that it's best if faculty do not become designers of instructional technology; rather, they should be able to adjust it (and let their students adjust it) as they put it to work in their classrooms.

Poster Presentations
One excellent poster presentation was by Amy Mangrich, from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She developed a method for students to use digital reflections that they can share in an electronic portfolio. Her heuristic helps instructors address the common problem of students not reflecting substantially about the concepts they are learning in the course. In an art history course, the students do some initial reflection about concepts they are using, and they then take keywords from their reflections to search for images in Flicker, which then become objects for more reflection. Students use VoiceThread to record audio over the new images that they found on Flicker

After day 1...

At the first day, I went to big sessions in the main meeting room. The keynote, by Sannier, was a vigorous call to action to transform education to make it more social, more team-based, more relevant to 21st-century skills that people need. In many sections it was kind of ominous because he discussed the ways that technology is making many kinds of jobs irrelevant.

Later, I attended a session about the value of education and how we can leverage technology to help learners succeed. At this session, the speaker spoke a lot about how we can use technology to meet students' needs and how education, in general, has great benefits for people. He cited how UPS mitigated their high turnover rate by enabling employees to receive their degrees through giving them flexible work schedules. He also discussed many initiatives such as the curricular resource strategy, which has the goal of helping people have access to content.

There was a large debate about learner analytics at which they talked about current analytics are not optimal because they are centered (mostly) on data that people get from the LMS. And this data is limited to grades, numbers of clicks, and other things that are superficial measures of learning. The panelists all agreed that learning analytics is in an embryonic stage and that they hope that future technologies will enable better kinds of data.

Here is where it is.

This is where Sam is blogging about ELI 2012!