Reshaping the educational landscape? #ofetech

Earlier this week, in my capacity as Vice Chair of ALT, I had the pleasure of chairing the Technology in Learning: Reshaping the Educational Landscape event in Manchester.

The event organisers brought together a wide range of speakers who all gave their perspectives on changes in education just now.  You can see a full list of the speakers here.   From encouraging more criticality around the use of social media, to analytics, to assessment to developing more fully online delivery options to the inevitable cloud computing is the future, there was a lot packed into a relatively short space of time.

A couple of the highlights for me were Adam Cooper’s overview of analytics as a process, and his caution around predictive analytics, “accuracy is treacherous” he said. All data needs to be seen in context, and instead of predictive analytics he prefers to the term estimated risk -which I quite like too.  Sophie Emmertsen gave a really interesting talk about the accelerated route to fully online assessment in a number of Scandinavian countries which was of particular interest to many delegates.  Denise Whitelock also gave a fascinating overview of work around using more data informed processes to help with feedback with writing assessments – rainbow diagrams ftw!

The day was pretty full on with an awful lot covered over the day. I’m not sure we reshaped the landscape but perhaps just put down some more markers down around where we are just now and where we are heading in the next year or so.

You can download copies of all the presentations here.

I also liked this clock in the room!