Inspirational stuff from Stephen Heppell at ALT 2006
I have never seen Stephen Heppell speak but he was, as he was introduced, the best speaker you could wish to hear on e-learning.
With no pomposity and with great humour he took apart many of the assumptions that are made about learning and elearning. His comments contrasted sharply from the presentation made the previous day by Professor O’Shea of Edinburgh University
O’Shea had argued that:
- …’content is king’
- …traditional universities, as repositories of knowledge and expertise over centuries, would retain that position of excellence in e-learning.
- …new universities might model their educational paradigm on army training, teaching the troops to be precise in their use of lower level skills (someone amusingly shouted at that point in the presentation ‘abolish the polytechnics, bring back national conscription’)
- …the best new universities (and presumably FE institutions) could do is to get some reflected shine off the traditional universities excellence by arranging partnership arrangements.
On the other hand, Heppell made a sharp attack on the governmental’s conservative record in this area, which is significant in that he played a role in defining that policy for the 1997 election and advises numerous government’s throughout the world (although a dissident voice as far as the current UK government is concerned).
Heppell’s was the only presentation that didn’t use the standard linear Powerpoint delivery. This may be a small point but indicative.
He challenged the argument that large educational institutions like schools and universities will even need to exist in future decades. He showed a primary school in existence with an enrolment of only 3, functioning effectively wth their bemused students watching webcam images of gridlocked traffic of the other world.
He demonstrated the government’s damaging preoccupation with control rather than meaningful education by analysing government policy pdfs by searching for frequency and incidence of certain key words such as creativ*** and standards. (Acrobat lends itself to this use very well). He gave practical demonstrations of how students of every age (even those excluded from schools) are using the creative tools that are now available to connect, communicate, express themselves and learn.
Truly inspirational stuff.
September 8th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Hi Pete,
I agree that Stephen Heppell was the best keynote speaker at the conference. I’ll certainly be tracking what he’s up to with interest.
As for the none use of Powerpoint (instead he used lots of nice tools packaged with/available for Mac OSX); for saying ALT-C is a technology conference I was amazed at the amount of linear, textual, unreadable powerpoints used. Perhaps they ought to ban them next year and force presenters to use the technologies that they were all ‘talking’ about and not using?