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Keynote and Theme Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Vijay Kumar
Assistant Provost for Educational Technology, and Director
of Academic Computing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Vijay Kumar is currently the Assistant Provost
for Educational Technology and Director of Academic Computing at
MIT. Through these roles he influences and helps to implement the
Institute's strategy for educational technology. Through leadership
of the Academic Computing Practice (ACP) in Information Systems
and the Academic Media Production Services (AMPS) in the Provost's
office, he helps promote and support the effective integration of
information technology in MIT education. AMPS brings together MIT
Video Productions, Streaming Media Services and Educational Media
development in support of MIT's initiatives such as SMA (the Singapore
MIT Alliance), CMI (the Cambridge MIT Institute) and OCW (Open Courseware).
Vijay is a member of the Advisory Group for OCW, a member of the MIT
Council on Educational Technology (MITCET) with key roles for infrastructure
planning, strategy and grant allocation. He also serves on the steering
committee for Microsoft-MIT alliance I-Campus initiative and on
MIT"s IT Architecture Group - ITAG, and is the Principal
Investigator of the Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), a collaborative
effort supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an Open-Source open architecture for internet
based educational applications.
Keynote Summary: From Open Resources to Educational Opportunity
Since MIT's bold announcement of the Open CourseWare initiative in 2001, the content of over 700 of its courses have been published on the Web and made available for free to the world. Alongside, other innovative projects such as iLabs from MIT's iCampus initiative are making educational resources and tools available to advance first-hand and experience-based education across disciplines.
Important infrastructure initiatives have also been launched recently with a view to enabling the sustainable implementation of these educational programs, through strengthening organizational capacity as well as through building open, standards based technology. A notable example is the Open Knowledge Initiative (O.K.I). This MIT-led collaborative project developing an open architecture to promote the development of portable and sustainable applications that can be easily integrated into existing infrastructure.
Each of these initiatives point to a rich palette of transformational possibilities for education. Together with the growing open source movement, they offer glimpses of a sustainable ecology of substantial and quality educational resources.
This presentation will highlight some of the educational opportunity presented by MIT's current IT-enabled educational agenda and related initiatives, along with their strategic underpinnings and implications. It will address various dimensions of their impact on the form and function of education.
It will examine how these ambitious programs achieve a vision characterized by an abundance of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities, not merely pervasive technology.
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| http://web.mit.edu/vkumar/www/ |
Wendy Hall
Professor of Computer Science, University of Southampton,
and President of the British Computer Society
Wendy
Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton,
UK. She was the founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia
(IAM) Research Group in the Department of Electronics and Computer
Science at Southampton and is currently the Head of Department. Her
research interests include the development of web technologies, open
hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies,
digital libraries, multimedia information management, agent-based
systems and human computer interaction. More information about her
research interests and work can be found by looking at her publications
and past and current research projects. Wendy was awarded a CBE in
the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2000, and became a Fellow
of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in the same year. She
is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and a Fellow of
the IEE (FIEE). In 2002 she was made a Fellow of the City & Guilds
of London Institute (FCGI) and was awarded an Honorary DSc by Oxford
Brookes University. Earlier this year Wendy was appointed by the Prime Minister to the Council for Science and Technology (the UK Government's top-level advisory body on science, engineering, and technology policy).
Wendy regularly speaks at international conferences,
and is a member of a number of editorial boards of journals in her
research area, including IEEE MultiMedia, the Computer Journal and
JoDI. She is currently President of the
BCS and chairs the Education sub-committee of the IEE Qualifications
Board. She is also a member of the Council of the Royal Academy
of Engineering.
Keynote Summary: What Webs We Weave - the Future of Web-based Learning Environments
Long before the Web existed hypertext visionaries and researchers
foresaw a richly inter-linked world that allowed authors and readers
alike to move easily between related items of information in a global
network: many were excited by the idea that such environments could
be used to support learning. The Web provided the infrastructure to
enable those ideas to become reality but in some ways is far more
limited than many of its antecedents. Links, the fundamental building
blocks of any hypertext system, are still difficult to author and
maintain. Associative, personalised links, which formed the basis of
Vannevar Bush's off-cited article "As We May Think", are largely
missing from both the theory and the practice of building Web sites,
and it is left to search engines to fill the gaps. However, the
development of the Semantic Web promises to provide a much richer
environment for exploring these ideas, and in particular how they
might provide support for learning. This talk will discuss the future
of Web-based learning environments in the context of the evolution of
Web technologies.
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| http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~wh/ |
Ron Oliver
Foundation Professor of Interactive Multimedia at Edith Cowan
University, Western Australia
Ron Oliver is the Foundation Professor of Interactive
Multimedia at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. He teaches and supervises
in the School of Communications and Multimedia. He is Associate
Dean (Teaching and Learning) in the Faculty of Communications Health
and Science. He is the Director of the Centre for Research in Information
Technology and Communications.
Within the University, he is Chair of the Academic
Board, a member of
the ECU Council, a member of the University Curriculum Teaching
and Learning Committee, the University Research and Higher Degrees Committee
and the Vice Chancellor's Planning and Management Group. He is also
active on many sub-committees and working parties.
He is Chair of the Steering Committee for Ed-Media 2004, Executive
Member of the Asia Pacific Chapter of the Association for the
Advancement of Computers in Education and a member of the Editorial
Boards of British Journal of Educational Technology, Journal of
Educational Media and Hypermedia, Distance Education, Journal of
Interactive Learning Research. Australian Journal of Educational
Technology, Australian Educational Computing and ALT-J.
Keynote Summary: Quality Assurance and E-learning - Seeking Acceptable Standards and Benchmarks
Quality assurance is a process with which most academics are now
familiar. In times of economic rationalism and high accountability,
all academic activities in higher education now find themselves under
close scrutiny. Among these activities is e-learning, an activity
that has, until recently, usually managed to avoid the auditor’s gaze
and the difficult questions of quality, standards and benchmarks. But
e-learning is in the spotlight these days and institutions are being
encouraged and in some cases, compelled, to rigorously explore how
well they do e-learning.
When it comes to quality assuring e-learning at the organisational
level, there are a number of areas which impact on quality. This
presentation will consider the process of developing a university-
wide framework to ascertain e-learning quality. The presentation will
discuss outcomes from a quality activity undertaken in an Australian
university and will describe the measures, instruments and benchmarks
used to assess and explore aspects of best practice in e-learning in
the local setting. The presentation will consider the overall quality
that exists in contemporary approaches to e-learning and will seek to
demonstrate where quality is most often compromised and will argue
strategies that can address the problems encountered.
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| http://elrond.scam.ecu.edu.au/oliver/ |
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Theme Speakers
Cathy Gunn
Vice President of Ascilite and Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Professional Development, University of Auckland
Evidence based research in education [0.5 MB PPT]
Cathy Gunn is one of New Zealand's leading e-learning practitioners. She is currently in her tenth year with The Centre for Professional Development at The University of Auckland, and has developed an international reputation for teaching, research and consultancy across the disciplines since the award of a PhD in Computer Based Learning Research in Scotland in the early 1990s.
Current research interests include evaluating the impact of ICT on learning; the role of conversation in learning; effective strategies for online assessment; academic development and teacher education for learning innovations; gender issues in online education and management of ICT related organizational change. A long list of publications, keynote presentations and visiting scholarships reflects this breadth of interests and experience.
She is current Vice-president of the Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ASCILITE) and a long-term member of the UK Association for Learning Technology (ALT). Close links with international higher education communities are maintained through these affiliations and through contract work in Australia and Hong Kong.
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Rob Koper
Director of Learning Technology Research and Development at the Open University of the Netherlands
Organisational Issues in eLearning [1.14 MB PDF]
Rob Koper holds a masters degree in educational psychology from Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a doctor's degree in educational technology from the Open University of the Netherlands. He was director of a company for teacher training, before he became the head of ICT application development (e-learning infrastructures and educational software development) at the Open University of the Netherlands. In that time, he was responsible for the development of all the educational computer applications of the Open University of the Netherlands, including the campus-wide information systems (e.g. StudyNet).
Since 1998 Rob has been a full professor in educational technology, specifically in e-learning technologies. As director of RTD into learning technologies he was, among other things, responsible for the development of Educational Modelling Language (the predecessor of IMS Learning Design). His research focuses on self-organized distributed learning networks for lifelong learning, including RTD into software agents, educational semantic web, interoperability specifications and standards.
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Angela McFarlane
Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education, University of Bristol
Pedagogical aspects: thoughts on a theme [65 kB PPT]
Angela is a director of the TEEM project on evaluation of digital content in the classroom, and is on the steering committee of Nesta futurelab. She ran a software research and development unit at Homerton College, Cambridge, and has experience of educational software development from concept to market.
Angela has designed and directed national research and evaluation projects on ICT and learning, and was part of the team that designed the longitudinal study of the impact of networked technologies on home and school learning - Impact2. She was a member of the OECD expert group on quality in educational software and the first Evidence and Practice Director at Becta. Current research includes the role of e-learning in professional development, and computer games in learning.
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Sarah Porter
Programme Director for e-learning at the Joint Information
Systems Committee
Technology infrastructure and new technology: a review [0.5 MB PPT]
Sarah Porter is the Programme Director for e-learning at the Joint Information
Systems Committee. She works closely with the JISC Committee for Learning and
Teaching to specify activities to investigate the use of e-learning to enhance
learning and teaching.
Sarah's current responsibilities are for the JISC
e-learning programmes, including MLEs for Lifelong Learning, e-learning and
pedagogy, and e-learning frameworks. She works in partnership with the Centre
for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards to support the use of
educational specifications and standards.
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| http://www.jisc.ac.uk/mle/ |
Michelle Selinger
Education Manager at Cisco Systems
Accessibility and inclusion [0.5 MB PPT]
Dr Michelle Selinger a manager for education at Cisco Systems, based in
the UK but working across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Her work involves research and dissemination of effective solutions for
e-learning in all aspects of education and training. She works at the
interface of academia and industry drawing on successful experiences
from both sectors to help organisations develop their e-learning
strategies and competences and to make informed purchasing decisions for
infrastructure and services. Her expertise in the field of e-learning is
wide ranging from professional development of teachers in all sectors of
education, to the development of skill sets for teachers and trainers in
vocational education using e-learning materials in a blended learning
environment as well as evaluation of the use of such learning
environments across EMEA.
Michelle has a strong education background and
has worked at the Open University and latterly the University of Warwick
where she was the Director of the Centre for New Technologies Research
in Education. She has recently been appointed to the Advisory Group of
the European Commission's e-Europe 2005 Action Plan. She is co-editor of
Teacher Development and a member of the editorial board for Technology,
Pedagogy and Education.
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Paul Ramsden
Chief Executive of the Higher Education Academy
Paul Ramsden's career has combined an academic record in the field of teaching, learning and policy studies in higher education with successful experience in university management and leadership. He was formerly Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Teaching and Learning) at the University of Sydney and is a Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education,
University of London. His best-selling book, Learning to Teach in
Higher Education, is one of the classic texts on university teaching.
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