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Beyond Distance Conference 2007
Learning Futures
9th-10th January 2007
The 2006 Beyond Distance conference focussed on 'setting the e-learning research agenda'. It provided the opportunity for those involved in e-learning teaching and learning to come together to exchange ideas, and think through development of concepts, theories, and rigorous and appropriate methodologies, identification, promotion and support of good practice and models of change. The focus on e-learning provided a key way to provide for multi and interdisciplinary research agendas through virtual research environments.
- The 2007 conference was firmly focussed on Learning Futures: spotting future trends and riding the surf to improve learning and teaching.
The aims are:- To articulate and surface key transferable e-learning ideas and models for consideration in different contexts
- To develop stronger relationships promoting research on innovative teaching in inter-disciplinary, intra-disciplinary, cross professional, multi institutional ways through building principles and models for testing through work in practice and context
- To continue to shift the focus to improving student learning from learning technologies, with a particular emphasis on those renewing distance learning programmes
Foreword from Prof. Gilly Salmon
- The challenge
There is a gap emerging that requires new approaches and fresh thinking. We know little about how to prepare for changes in learners' expectations, including what, in the huge range of technological opportunities, is significant for learning in Higher Education, and what is not. Meanwhile, our universities, with their essential concerns for quality and their natural conservatism, change slowly, and sometimes painfully. Hence we need to look beyond the obvious and get ahead in order to prepare. The Learning Futures conference intends to get a complex community together - learners, teachers, technologists and creative practitioners - and start to consider practical, sustainable approaches to developing and planning possible and preferred futures.
There are gaps in our understanding of the way learners may wish to engage with new technologies for learning which leave room for stereotypical views, or those based on past experience rather than fresh insights, e.g. that the 'net generation' already knows how to learn through digital media, or that experienced teaching staff cannot embrace teaching with technologies. We need to change this.
People born in the 21st Century will never know a world without the internet. Many young people are fully engaged with online social experiences such as MySpace. Year on year, freshers arrive at university with yet more potential learning technology in their hands. Online gaming, music and video downloading and social networking are normal parts of their lives. Lifelong learners buy wireless enabled laptops. Ownership of mobile phones and home access to the Internet in the UK is amongst the highest in the world and crosses the age and wealth divides.
Hence the opportunities for knowledge generation are changing. Many H.E. providers are struggling to achieve transformations that enhance or transform the student learning experience in successful, efficient and effective ways. We will be in continuous change for the foreseeable future and need to ensure that the changes made are beneficial for student learning. Thus we need more ways of creating strategies and plans for growth and development that meet the challenges that social, economic and technological changes in society bring to education and explore technologies that engage young learners but are currently peripheral in H.E.
We hope you'll be part of creating the future for learning.
Professor Gilly Salmon
Learning Futures - Day 1 - January 9th - Presenters and Presentations
Research (S)mart - Day 2 - January 10th - Presenters and Presentations
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