School-Networking

It was an awesome experience to see how scientists and policy makers from all around the world were analysing the problems in teacher training and all came up more or less with the same usual suspects that are an obstacle to change. At this level there was unanimous agreement that change was needed and this was not to be discussed anymore but all speakers were dealing in a mostly very passionate and inspiring way with the ways this change could be facilitated. They did not all agree on whether the education system was to be blown away or whether there were remedies by curing singular diseases. But again they all agreed that education  in the old way was broken.

The remedy they all agreed on- no wonder as it was the topic of the conference – was that change could only start within the training of new teachers. This is more promising than to kind of force in-service teacher staff to change their minds about technology and new ways of teaching and learning.

The second crucial point were the usual supsects in the persons of administrators, school managers and especially ICT departments.

F Ruiz Tarragó claimed that ” the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its managers…”

so this again raised the question whether change would be a bottom up or top down process. I am convinced it needs to be both ways to be efficient!

I am not going to give a summary of the conference and the talks,  there was live-blogging during the conference by @ictlogist who did a great job! You can browse through his notes under the individual reports.

As to be expected Steve Wheeler alias @timbuckteeth was again much faster blogging on the conference which comes in handy for me as I can just link to his blog … that is what Steve calls “sharing”

I would just like to end with a few re-quotes from the conference:

Hilary Cottam: We need to stop patching and mending institutions designed for another era.

Manuel Castells: There is a lack of imagination, knowledge and audacity. Let’s experiment .. there is nothing to lose.

Ruiz Tarragó. Challenge 1: Teachers should be aware that they are requested to be excellent in an outdated system.

Ruiz Tarragó. Challenge 2: Teachers should widen the scope of their professional mission regarding students

Ruiz Tarragó: Prepare students for the future, not the past

If you go to the twitter stream of the conference #eLChair11 you will find many more statements, all of them being a great source of discussing the topic.

If you have the time – and I tell you it is worth!!! watch the recorded videos you can access from the website! It needs a bit of patience to match the contributions with the programme as they are not described.

So my conclusion of these 2 days of virtual conference participation : I never had the impression to be only a passive lurker but thanks to the twitter feed and all the people who took part from outside too, it was a personal learning experience. Thanks to all those people who made this possible!