Building a conference framework
So looking at the development of ULearn07 as an integrated part of a wider professional learning agenda, there seem to me to be the following rationale. The conference needs to be a wide-ranging education event with a very specific leadership, learning and teaching focus. It should be predicated on transformative whole school change that enables the school to focus on the learning needs of individuals in creative new and empowering ways. It needs to provide professional development/professional learning in virtual and F2F environments, before during and after the actual 3 days of the conference. Students need to be an integral part of the mix… The past few years of development of these ideas are distilled below and are entirely consistent with the blog entry from Stephen Downes recently on “How I would run a conference”
Pre Conference ??? blogging, forums, hotseats, readings, debates, info-sessions, podcasting, audioconferences, webplanners for tracking PD strands
Pre-conference workshops ??? to leverage the advantage of having the keynotes/spotlights in town a range of half day and full day sessions
Actual Conference ??? blogging, workshops, skills, debates, discussions, keynotes, spotlights, video recording
Post Conference ??? reflection forums, conference papers as digital media, blogging, podcasting, streaming
The focus of the conference could derive from alignment with the MOE???s overarching goals of empowerment of student learning through ???quality teaching fo diverse students???, ???quality providers for support and resourcing of education???, and ???community engagement to validate the educative process???.
NZ Education???s 8-10 ???big questions??? could provide the essence of the strands that support the main goals, including Leadership, e-communities of practice, curriculum, assessment, learning and teaching, vision and values, pedagogy and practice, diversity, student perspectives etc. . These questions need to be developed by a group of knowledgeable people and they need to cover the big issues in NZ education.
Each area needs to have a spotlight or two and a group of key personnel (facilitators) who could act as a coordinating group to find/provide key people who can contribute to pre conference forums, can facilitate conference discussions, can facilitate workshops etc and can put together a post conference paper using the information gained during the pre and conference activities.
Each question will have…
1. Pre conference
A discussion paper, online forums, debates, and a knowledge attack (resources and activities provided to bring people up to speed) Facilitated discussion.
2. Conference
At least 20 workshops (each question), all interactive and covering aspects of the question from different cultural perspectives, teaching levels etc. The aim is to use the delegates as integral parts of each workshop by engaging them ahead of the conference and throughout the sessions. An interactive set of workshop sessions would be chosen by the selection committee. These sessions would be filmed and used as part of the reflection, post conference discussion using appropriate electronic mediation. The NFT recommend that there would still be workshop type sessions but these would be very targeted around the questions and many of the presenters hand picked to ensure highly effective delivery;
Conference delegates could follow a question all the way through. I envisage one question lasting a day.
3. Post conference
The facilitators would have the job of collating all the key ideas from each question and writing these up at the end of the conference using the video footage and the pre conference discussion. In doing this the proceedings of the conference would be a living record of the work done by attendees and be well informed by current ideas and practice alongside the views of the presenters.
Take a look at the ULearn06 conference blog to get a feel for how this pans out