Educators pose challenges at Symposium

Educators pose challenges at Symposium

Luminaries of New Zealand education posed big challenges for the country’s educators during Friday’s CORE Education EDtalks Symposium at Te Papa.

Titled “Leading Minds/Creating Futures”, the symposium was an opportunity to bring teachers, school and business leaders together for a day of short presentations from prominent educators, new media specialists, futurists, technologists, business leaders, researchers and students.

The 16 speakers included: Media commentator on information access and technological change Paul Reynolds of McGovern Associates; REANNZ Chief Executive Donald Clark; Telecommunications Users Association of New Zealand (TUANZ) Chief Executive Ernie Newman; Managing Director of Mohawk Media and Victoria University lecturer in Emerging Technologies Helen Baxter; and Blair Professor of Music at the University of Otago, Prof John Drummond; along with a selection of enterprising young business people, senior school students and innovative educators.

CORE Education Director Development, Nick Billowes says the event was incredibly successful, with around 150 people participating in the “think tank” about New Zealand education.

“CORE Education aims to develop innovative, empowering, creative and effective learning environments and to push the boundaries of educational possibilities. The Symposium provided a sterling opportunity for the leading lights of New Zealand education to discuss, challenge and inspire each other with a view to shaping the future of education. And of course it would have been very interesting for representatives from the Ministry of Education and New Zealand Qualifications Authority who were attending,” Mr Billowes says.

Some of the key ideas put forward included:

• Throwing away textbooks completely and using computer technology as the infrastructure for all future teaching and learning

• Looking at effective ways to create online communities of practice that genuinely meet the perceived and actual needs of teachers

• The need for the Government to realize that putting money into broadband would not necessarily translate into better teaching and learning; and therefore that Government absolutely had to put money into learning

• The need for all teachers to be web-savvy

• Moving away from the “knowledge paradigm” and viewing the internet as the content resource and vehicle for collaboration and discourse

• Using the internet to provide the time and resources for reflection and engagement with individual ideas, away from groups

Photographs, footage and summaries from the EDtalks Symposium will be available on the website www.core-ed.net/edtalks-symposium in the next couple of days.

CORE Education is a not-for profit organisation that has earned an international reputation through our innovative professional learning programmes and our promotion of technologies for learning across all education and training sectors.

ENDS

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