A return to Virtual Reality Technology, Web Filtering in Schools, Dale Rankine Calling Mobile ‘old’ technology and an inspirational iPhone Journalism project in a remote indigenous community are some of things still fresh in my mind from last Friday’s annual V2Conference at the State Library QLD.
What is disruptive about this one day event is that we have cross pollination of the education and training sector creating a context for fresh ideas and open minds. We don’t like to hear about the same old thing from our own sector and often we can become stagnated in…let’s call them Sector Silos. But Friday we had a School teacher talking about Arduino/Robot programming activities to Library Technicians. We also had University staff talking about E-learning Project management to Music Industry Tutors. Last year we had a Graphic Designer who didn’t know anything about E-learning teaching us about Graphic Design. This is a good thing! The job of our audience and E-learning practitioners in general is to find the relevance and connections in new technologies and teaching strategies from outside their own context and apply them to their own. Whether it’s BYOD policy, Engagement strategies, Packaging Content, Web Design principles, we CAN learn from every sector and an opportunity is missed if we don’t get outside or our own box.
The V2Conference was born out of a desire by our team to run an Australian E-learning Conference event that was not centred around a single brand or technology and was truly cross-sector in nature (Schools, VET, HEP, Libraries and Workplace training). This year, and as one of our presenters put it, it’s the “Spaces Between” where we learnt about what is important in Educational Technology and practice. I hope we can continue to network the education and training sectors together to learn from each other and better support learners who will at some point in their lives be touched by how well we do our jobs in each and every sector.