November 2008

ULearn09 will now be held in Christchurch, instead of in Auckland as originally advertised. ULearn conferences have been held annually since 2005, and previously had alternated between Christchurch and Auckland. With the number of delegates and presentations continuing to grow each year, there are sometimes up to fifty sessions happening concurrently at different venues. The number of venues available for workshops within a close vicinity is considerably greater in Christchurch. While Auckland venues offer excellent facilities for keynotes and spotlights, limited venues available for workshops close by means that numbers need to be significantly restricted. Also, the Westpac Arena in Christchurch is able to comfortably seat around 2000 guests for dinner, whereas seating at the Sky City Convention Centre is limited to 1000, meaning that many delegates will miss out the opportunity to attend the conference dinner.

In addition, the development of the advanced network allowed excellent connectivity across almost all conference venues in Christchurch, and we are keen to exploit these opportunities again in the future. Therefore, with these factors in mind, it has been decided to once again hold ULearn in Christchurch in 2009.

The keynote videos are now all available on the ULearn08 site. You can watch Will Richardson and Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach discussing the ways in which we need to equip our students for working in a networked age. Karen Sewell, John Hattie and Rod Oram examine the needs of 21st century learners and what more schools could be doing to move our students forward. Steven Carden talks about possibilities for business and education partnerships for the 21st century. This includes details of a project he founded, First Foundation, where a number of New Zealand businesses provide scholarships to support students with academic potential who are financially disadvantaged. Derek Wenmoth (chair), Tania Coutts, Beverly Kaye, Carolyn Stuart, and Linda Tame look at the integration of ICT from a variety of perspectives including a powerful message from the early childhood sector that children there are already being equipped with skills at that level so we need to be building on this in other education sectors.

There are also a range of wikis that were developed as part of ULearn08 that you might want to check out. Lenva Shearing put together a Getting tricky with wikis wiki set up in Wikispaces that gives you many tricks to move beyond the basics of wiki design. You can learn how to do things like making a table of contents on wiki pages or finding out how to easily add your students as members of the wikispaces. Make sure you also look at the links on the home page to Lenva’s other resource wikis.

Suzie Vesper from CORE Education ran a pre-conference workshop on Blogs, wikis and the online tools that make them pop. You can find the basics of what web 2.0 means and the differences between blogs and wikis and comparisons of some of the major online providers. You can find many examples of how these are being used in education and a table of 44 tools that can be used in conjunction with blogs and wikis.

Want to see some reflections from teachers of their experiences at ULearn? Have a look at the Nga-Taonga cluster wiki page where attendees have put together their thoughts around the presentations and sessions that they attended.