National Conference Season

The MITE Team is on the road, traveling the country to participate in a growing number of conferences about education, technology and online learning. National conferences tend to bunch up in the fall, but we also present, conduct workshops and organize round tables throughout the year at smaller, focused, regional conferences. We especially enjoy hooking up with NROC members to share tales and ideas.

Each year there are a few consistently popular topics that pop up across most, if not all, of the conferences. As one would expect, these themes show up when they are somewhere between the second stage of innovation and becoming mainstream. Conferences are one of best venues for spreading innovation beyond pioneers. When a conference room is packed with faculty and staff learning about educational applications of games, virtual reality environments, podcasts and web. 2.0 tools, you can expect to see the tools turning up in classrooms and online programs in non-tech subjects at a campus near you.

This year we continue to see standing-room-only sessions around tools that allow instructors and students to co-create immersive and interactive learning. Techie-pioneers were presenting earlier versions of such tools in previous years; now practitioner-pioneers share their reflections on the realities of using the tools to teach. Educators who advocate for more constructivist learning methods should be delighted at the abundance of these types of tools coming into mainstream use.

It's very encouraging to see an increase in sessions on two important non-tech subjects, which we at MITE have been pushing for a few years: sustainable models for open education resource (OER) projects, and inter-institutional collaboratives for developing and sharing digital content. We'll share some new ideas and highlights as we hear them out there.

What other topics are hot this year? We'll report back from the conference circuit, and welcome your comments.