Erica McWilliam's afternoon keynote neatly brought these themes together. Taking us on a short journey through the history of pedagogy, she argued that the era of the teacher as the 'sage on the stage', the great man (usually) at the front of the classroom imparting his knowledge, has passed into the 'guide on the side', a more nurturing role where the teacher is facilitator. But she argued compellingly that too much rigour has been sacrificed in the name of protecting students' self-esteem, and made the case for the teacher as 'meddler in the middle': a provocateur who knows their stuff and challenges students to rise up to meet them.
Dylan Wiliam opened his talk by sharing evidence that intelligence is partly inherited and partly environmental: education can make people smarter. When students are allowed to duck answering questions or get away with sloppy thinking and incomplete work, we are limiting their life chances - and limiting our capacity to cope with the challenges of the 21st century. As Erica put it, we've left the children of today hard problems to solve. They need to be capable of higher order thinking, so we must help them to experience to the pleasure of the rigour of learning
"Learning Management Systems (LMS) are walled gardens. They provide substantial control over the environment in which learning activities take place, and at first glance this appears to be a good thing. For this reason they are often relatively appealing to faculty members beginning to make the transition from fully traditional classroom instruction. The level of control is familiar… but it is also misleading when taken in the context of the full learning process (see "Hack the LMS: Getting Progressive" for more on this)."
"Learning analytics is the "measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about learners and their contexts, for purposes of understanding and optimising learning and the environments in which it occurs," according to the 1st International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge.1 The NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition notes that this promising set of practices and tools aims to "harness the power of advances in data mining, interpretation, and modeling to improve understandings of teaching and learning, and to tailor education to individual students more effectively."2 Finally, George Siemens and Phil Long have even proposed that learning analytics should ultimately be focused on disruption and transformation in education, changing the very nature of teaching, learning, and assessment as we know it.3"
"Awe might seem like just another three-letter word, but it is so much more. A recent New York Times article detailed how humans can get goose bumps when we experience awe, that often-positive feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends our understanding of the world. It is a catalyst that can motivate people to do more good. The article also highlighted the research of Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner who found that awe helps bind us to others, motivating us to act in collaborative ways that enable strong groups and cohesive communities."