The members may have left Torquay but the blogging goes on.
If you have any comments on the conference in general, leave them here, or on a particular session leave them on the posting for that session. A number of Naace bloggers have already commented on the conference on their own blogs. Here’s a flavour of some of the views.
Mike Farmer:
The NAACE conference is probably like most conferences. It has good bits and bad bits. One of the best bits for me was the pleasant sunny, frosty two mile walk into Torquay from the hotel on Thursday morning. This was made even more pleasant by the company and the realisation that the first mile had taken so long that there was no chance of getting to the first conference session in time. The walk then deviated around the harbour and along the promenade ending at the superb Torquay railway station. This prompted a discusion on different classes of steam locomotive including the School’s class so I suppose it did have some educational relevance. After a pleasant coffee in the buffet room of this Brunelian station we made our way to the conference and listened to probably the best presentation of the conference … We thought Peter Ford’s session was going to be on Blogs. It wasn’t. It was on the much more important subject of teaching and it was brilliant.
Terry Freedman:
… John Clare himself has a reputation for being sceptical (I believe that is the polite way of putting it) about the benefits of ICT in education. For example, he once made a comment to the effect of schools being infested with computers to nobody’s obvious benefit, and often complains about the content-free internet-centred curriculum.
Now, here is the interesting thing. Leaving aside the fact that John Clare’s definition of attainment, and his view of the purpose of education, are not necessarily wholeheartedly shared by the rest of us (at the risk of being simplistic and therefore misrepresentative, attainment = recitation of facts, education is for transmitting the culture of the nation from one generation to the next), there was very little in his talk with which one could disagree. Indeed, some very prominent (in the field of ICT in education in the UK) people stood up and said as much. I would have too, had I been there, because I already believe that we as a group are far too uncritical, as I’ve said elsewhere.He received rapturous applause and, I was told, people were surrounding him up to 5 deep in the bar afterwards to ask him questions.
Gareth Davies:
Phew, what a week in Torquay at the Naace conference - stimulating sessions and debate! The ‘talk of the conference’ was the keynote address by John Clare, Education correspondent for the Telegraph and a fierce critic of the educational value of ICT in schools and the expenditure that has taken place in the UK over the last few years. While I expected discussion on his session to have died down by coffee time the next morning, I was still hearing comments on the Friday morning after the conference was over! It seems that he had not in fact entered the ‘lions den’, as I heard of no-one rejecting the general points he made out of hand. Indeed Naace members were prepared to listen, and happy to be challenged on their belief that ICT advances education. However, when it came to questions at the end, at no stage did he attempt to engage in ‘the debate’, which he claimed had hardly taken place …
And finally, some members comments while podcasting in the Internet Cafe, download it here:
Powered by FireStats