Association for the
Advancement of Computing in Education
Celebrating 30+ Years of
Service to the IT in Education / E-Learning Community
Celebrating 30+ Years of
Service to the IT in Education / E-Learning Community
Keynote Speaker
The pace of current technological advancement is phenomenal. In the last few years we have seen the emergence of ever more sophisticated gaming technologies, rich, immersive virtual worlds and new social networking services that enable learners and teachers to connect and communicate in new ways. The pace of change looks set to continue as annual Horizon reports testify (http://www.nmc.org/horizon) and as encapsulated in the following quote from the NSF-report on cyberlearning:
Imagine a high school student in the year 2015. She has grown up in a world where learning is as accessible through technologies at home as it is in the classroom, and digital content is as real to her as paper, lab equipment, or textbooks. At school, she and her classmates engage in creative problem-solving activities by manipulating simulations in a virtual laboratory or by downloading and analyzing visualizations of real- time data from remote sensors. Away from the classroom, she has seamless access to school materials and homework assignments using inexpensive mobile technologies. She continues to collaborate with her classmates in virtual environments that allow not only social interaction with each other but also rich connections with a wealth of supplementary content… (Borgeman et al., 2008: 7).
Gráinne Conole is Professor of E-Learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK. Her research interests include the use, integration and evaluation of Information and Communication Technologies and e-learning and the impact of technologies on organisational change. She heads up a new research strand of activity within IER, ‘Learning in an Open World”. Two of her current areas of interest are how learning design can help in creating more engaging learning activities and on Open Educational Resources research. Updates on current research and reflections on e-learning research generally can be found on her blog www.e4innovation.com.
She has extensive research, development and project management experience across the educational and technical domains; funding sources have included the EU, HEFCE, ESRC, JISC and commercial sponsors). She serves on and chairs a number of national and international advisory boards, steering groups, committees and international conference programmes. She has published and presented over 300 conference proceedings, workshops and articles, including over 100 publications on a range of topics, including the use and evaluation of learning technologies. She is co-editor of the RoutledgeFalmer book ‘Contemporary perspectives on e-learning research’.
