..... well, that was one conclusion which seemed to emerge from the "learners" theme of the 2006 Association for Learning Technology conference in Edinburgh, which ended today. Phil Candy, who is Director of Education, Training and Development within "Connecting for Health", the National Health Service's National IT Programme, provided this summing up from the theme [0.3 MB PPT]. This contains plenty of nuggets from the conference as a whole. Here are a few which stood out for me:
"Schools are the supply chain for universities, and it therefore behoves academics to know more about the technology environments their incoming students are used to."
"Generational differences are relatively unimportant in explaining comfort with technologies and, in any case, are commonly ‘washed out’ within 6 months to a year."
"Game-playing in early life does not seem to be particularly influential in the use of ICT for learning purposes."
"Academics may be seeking to use technologies – both for teaching and for assessment – to reproduce models of learning and social relationships that are in fact at odds with the real demands of most jobs and society at large (e.g., individual effort, circumspection, scholarly precision)."
Phil's summing up concluded with a super brief precis of his 2004 report for the Australian Government - Linking Thinking: Self-directed Learning in the Digital Age. 3 other summings up from the conference (by Chris Yap, Gilly Salmon, and Terry Anderson) will be available from the ALT web site in due course.
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