Keynote+Speakers

=Keynote Speakers= home

Former Head of Education.au
Gerry White has been an educator for over forty years. In that time he has seen changes ranging from schools as outposts of army barracks, schools as springboards for teacher’s ambitions and schools becoming irrelevant as places that stimulate critical thinking, discovery and learning innovation. Networks of people have emerged as places for innovation, learning and knowledge creation. Teacher, consultant, lecturer, Principal, Director of Education and head of a federal national agency in education, Gerry sees the future in the connectedness.
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The emerging maturity of the services on the internet are beginning to enable shared learning through collaboration and community building. Tools such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, mashups, tagging and semantic tagging can provide the capacity for educators to enable learners to participate in communities of competence to build knowledge. Collaboration has taken on a new meaning in education because learning is powerful when it is shared, comes from diverse perspectives and is interactive involving critical thinking. Standardised curriculum belongs with the dinosaurs and traditional testing has become a new employment industry with little or no purpose. The future of education centres on shared learning and open and critical thinking. [|What the 21st Century will bring] [|E_Learning in Schools] [|Google Video at Global Summit] [|education.au]
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Institute of Information technology's Internet Logic Research Group, Canada
Born in [|Montreal], Quebec, [|Stephen Downes] lived and worked across [|Canada] before joining the [|National Research Council] as a senior researcher in November, 2001. Currently based in [|Moncton], New Brunswick, at the [|Institute for Information Technology]'s Internet Logic Research Group, Stephen has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata, weblogs in education, content syndication, digital rights and related issue. Stephen is perhaps best known for his daily research newsletter, [|OLDaily] (short for Online Learning Daily), which reaches thousands of readers across Canada and around the world. Learning online is different from learning in a classroom. Using tools like blogs and wikis, students do more than merely absorb content, they engage in conversations with a community. But how does that help? Why isn't it just a chatty waste of time? It is arguable that the use of the internet creates better conditions for learning. In this presentation, Stephen Downes outlines those conditions and explains how employ them in the design of online learning. [|Stephen's Web] [|Wikipedia page]
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University of Southern Queensland
Peter Evans has over 20 years experience in universities and private enterprise developing and promoting ways in which ICT can empower educational work and scholarship. In the mid 1980's he worked to establish a culture of "computing use and competency" within the School of Education at Deakin University. His is currently an online community consultant and teaches several Masters courses in the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland.Over the last couple of years my experience with the knowledgeGarden learning community has convinced me of the power of Communities of Practice built on both the tools and the techniques of Web2.0. Our student's backpacks and our lounge rooms contain emerging technologies which are immeasurably more powerful and personal than last centuries' "personal computer". Moreover, these tools have forever changed our children's expectations of what it means to communicate and learn. Perhaps the clearest sign is the change from the "read-only" to the "read-write" web which places individuals at the centre of their information and communication universe. It allows people, like you and I, to build and participate in overlapping communities based on shared interests and mutual trust. This presentation will examine the ‘knowledge Garden learning community’ built on the power of Communities of Practice using the tools and techniques of Web2.0 and how it has transformed learning and teaching. >
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 * [|KnowledgeGarden] learning community
 * [|Professional Website]

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