Keynote & invited speakers and organizers at IEC2011
On January 13-14, I attended the IEC2011 in Bangkok. The crossing theme of the conference was empowering human capital through online environments. The keynote speakers included Markku Markkula, Advisor to the Aalto Presidents (Finland), Professor Denise Kirkpatrick, the Vice-Chancellor of Learning, Teaching and Quality at the Open University UK, Professor Carol Yeh-Yun Lin from National Chengchi University (Taiwan), Joanne Kossuth, Vice President for Operations at Olin College of Engineering (USA), Professor Dae Joon Hwang from Sungkyunkwan University (Korea) and Lucifer Chu (Taiwan), founder of the Foundation of Fantasy Culture and Art and the Chinese translator of more than 20 fantasy novels – one of them being Lord of the Rings.
Markku Markkula’s presentation, titled “Inventing the Future Through Digital Agenda and Other European Flagship Initiatives”, discussed the rapid changes business and public sector are facing through digitalization and globalization. The points Markkula made are exactly the same that have influenced our work at the School of Vocational Teacher Education: the knowledge society imposes entirely new requirements on learning, working methods and working cultures. He addressed this issue by introducing three approaches: EU 2020 strategy, lifelong & e-learning and e-skills for innovation. Markkula also pointed out that new generation innovation activities are getting increasingly complex and international; they must be created within collaborative global networks and communities. Also the role of universities needs to change radically; instead of providing information, learning to learn and learning to create new knowledge and expertise must be in focus.
Our own presentation continued with the same theme, from the point of view of 21st century teachers’ professional development. Our paper, written with Dr. Marjatta Myllylä and Marko Teräs, was titled “Empowering Teachers to Meet the Digital Native Learners”. In the new era that Markku Markkula also described in his keynote, graduating students need new, 21st century skills in order to be successful in the new world of work. Traditional teaching methods and learning environments don’t support them in acquiring these. On the contrary – we’ve found that even the generation of “digital natives” who are supposed to be collaborative, innovative and globally oriented (see Tapscott 2009), become passive learners when they go through the process of formal education. Educational practices are rooted deep; even young teachers often tend to repeat the methods of their teachers, who in turn have learned from their teachers, and so on. It doesn’t take very many teachers to go all the way back to the industrial revolution. A completely new approach to teacher education using social media and team learning seems promising in empowering new teachers to build a 21st century professional identity and working culture. You can find more information about the teacher training program in my previous blog post. The slides of our IEC2011 presentation are here.
All in all the conference was very useful and interesting. The emergent trends and crossing themes throughout the conference seemed to be personalized learning and personal learning environments, teachers as facilitators (and how hard this seems to be in practice), the use of social media and smart technology, and getting the fun and engagement of gaming into learning. The latter was especially the message of Lucifer Chu who demonstrated in a visually captivating way that the world that we live in has changed irreversibly.
