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| Yong Zhao enthused about creativity and passion in learning when Nashville, the Music City, hosted the SITE 2011 conference. Yehuda Peled (Ohalo College of Education) gave an inspiring presentation on wiki production and its evaluation in teacher training. The evening program included a taste of the world famous ribs served in music bars on Broadway. |
The SITE 2011 conference was held at the Nashville Sheraton Music City Hotel March 3–7, with participants from 51 countries. Presentations focused on a wide variety of research and experiences with the educational use of technology. Given the continual online presence of students, many of the attendees are eager to apply the tools of social media more widely in teaching.
Yong Zhao (Michigan State University) entertainingly presented statistics on how American students never do well in tests, but have plenty of self-confidence, while Asian students mistrust their skills, but do well in tests. In this sense, Finnish students seem to follow the Eastern trend. Despite their low scores in school tests, Americans perform well in GDP comparisons. The presentation convinced us listeners that an entrepreneurial attitude takes you further in life than mere success on tests.
Punya Mishra and Kristen Kereluik (Michigan State University) continued envisioning the future in the same spirit. They summarized the challenges of the future under three headings: content knowledge, meta-knowledge and life management. Content knowledge includes information literacy and an interdisciplinary approach; meta-knowledge involves areas like problem solving, communication and creativity; and life management includes professional skills, cultural knowledge and ethics. The life-management topic sparked a great deal of discussion.
Many presentations stressed the importance of diverse reading skills, particularly that by Margaret Leahy (Dublin City University) on creating meaning in multimodal digital texts. Leahy emphasized that weak readers often cannot recognize the main ideas in even easier texts. Such students benefit from working on the texts together with others. Identifying the most important material is challenging for poor writers as well. Their work is not made easier by the rule that the main point should be written first. One technique to improve skill in finding the main idea is for students to create animations or comic strips based on a text.
Other conference topics of high interested includes questions connected to digital learning material, especially materials available for the iPad and student-produced online books. For the latter, several new services exist that are easy to use and free of charge.
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| Punya Mishra’s excellent presentations rescue even the more lacklustre events. Michael Herrick (University of Hawaii) gave an award-winning presentation on how to improve online discussions through a two-deadline approach. Due to shockingly slow communication from the organizers, Satu Nurmela had to miss our own presentation and could only participate via video. Laura Palmgren-Neuvonen and Henna Mikkola represented The University of Oulu. |