TLt 2013 Brings Ideas Together

[social-bio] The University of Saskatchewan and the Gwenna Moss Centre hosted this year’s Teaching and Learning with Technology conference on May 1 and 2. The theme was “Making IT Mainstream: Everybody’s doing IT,” focusing on “the mainstream integration of learning technologies at both the level of the institution and individual instructor; what is working and what is not, and how all of this will continue to effect higher education.”

Two pre-conference events were held on the first day; Evaluating the Integration of Technology: Understanding the Purpose and Process of Evaluation Research with Valerie Irvine, Brad Wuetherick and Stan Yu, and IDing our Future: A Meeting of the Minds of Instructional Designers, for instructional designers. Four concurrent sessions took place, with each session focusing on a four different topics and each topic featuring up to three different presenters. The diversity of presenters and topics ensured that a broad range of issues were addressed.

The conference attracted two experts in the field to speak at the opening and second plenaries. In the opening plenary, George Veletsianos shared “six research-based stories describing the integration and use of social media in higher education.”  The second plenary, titled The 21^st Century University: Implications and Benefits of Access through Connections and Openness, was delivered by Valerie Irvine. The plenaries delved into interesting problems about the use of social media (Veletsianos plenary), the problem of “artificial authority” (Irvine plenary) and ubiquitous content in education, and the importance of open access to content (Irvine plenary). The conference wrapped up with a closing panel presentation.

Below are video recordings of each of the plenary talks.

George Veletsianos

Valerie Irvine