It was a great pleasure to speak at the opening plenary session of INTED 2015 in Madrid earlier this month. Over 600 delegates from more than 70 countries attended, and I shared the platform with TED Talks veteran and technology innovator Charles Leadbeater. Below is the video of my presentation, entitled 'Digital Futures; Mind the Gap!' I have given a similar talk before, notably at the FOTE Conference held last year in London, but I have added some new content and discuss the perceptual gaps between teachers intentions and student expectations. I believe that this will become an important gulf to bridge in the coming years, as new learners enter the gates of universities and demand more in terms of technologies, new pedagogies and support. Topics dealt with include mobile learning, new communication cultures, the flipped classroom and change management. Best quote of the presentation has to be that of Canadian author William Gibson who once said: 'The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.' The many divides in society, especially the digital ones, tend to maginalise some as others benefit. But for me, the greatest uneven distribution is that teachers and students think differently. They often have different agendas, power structures and contexts, and within some form of reconciliation, education will never be fully equitable.
Photo courtesy of INTED 2015
Unevenly distributed by Steve Wheeler was written in Istanbul, Turkey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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