Keynote Lectures

Abstract
The leaders in higher education are increasingly interested in the connection between creativity and technology. In particular, they are interested in designing an educational culture that will encourage students to develop and display their creativity, and providing various forms of emerging technology to enrich their creative processes. Over the past 12 years, The Virginia Ball Center for Creative Inquiry—at Ball State University—had explored these issues through a series of interdisciplinary, project driven, community based, immersive learning seminars. This presentation will explain the strategies that have shaped these seminars and provide award-winning examples of the products students have created in these seminars.

Abstract
In the past few years, there has been criticism of e-learning practices and a renewed interest in enhancing students’ engagement in this form of education. Engagement typically refers to providing student activities that involve active cognitive processes such as creating, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and evaluation. Due to the meaningful nature of the learning environment and activities, students are intrinsically motivated to learn. In this presentation, I will discuss various theoretical perspectives, research evidence and multiple practices that support engagement and the consequent improvement in student learning. The characteristics of ‘net generation’ students will be reviewed and several examples given of online activities to engage them, based on each of these characteristics. I will close with a description of the skills needed by the 21st century instructor and provide suggestions and resources for acquiring these.

Abstract
Traditionally learning has been seen as a solitary and individualistic task; learning has been represented as committing knowledge to memory and the personal acquisition of skills and literacies. The affordances of early computer technologies amplified this perspective, and transitions of learning technologies to networked platforms sustained the individualist context within the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). However constructivist critiques of learning environments have emphasised the value and importance of social interactions and the benefits of working in groups to solve problems as a means to learning and knowledge acquisition. Advances in Web technologies over the last decade (the so called Web 2.0) have paralleled these changes and have enabled us to build tools to support and integrate many kinds of collaboration and learning in networks. Such tools have been retrofitted to existing VLEs. This presentation argues that the current generation of Virtual Leaning Environments is no longer fit for purpose; they embody educational processes that promulgate ineffective/inappropriate didactic methods, and do not complement the expectations or approaches to learning taken by Generation Y learners. Nor do they prepare students for using the tools and working methods that will be required in the increasingly virtualworkplace. Personal learning environments put the onus on the learner to take responsibility, not only for their learning but also how they go about that learning and the tools that they use. Such self-determination and choice is ideal in a self directed or informal learning scenario, but how can institutions provide such an experience for groups of learners? Is this even possible? A number of Universities are attempting to deploy personal (personalised and personalisable) rich learning environments in an attempt to scaffold their learners (and teachers?) to become independent users of authentic tools to support their lifelong learning beyond the university. This talk will examine the some of these environments, and the part played by Web 2.0, linked data and cloud computing.