Capturing the moment

It was a great pleasure to give the opening keynote at the Social Science special interest group Higher Education Academy conference yesterday in Manchester. You can look up the Twitter hashtag for the two day event which is #HEASocSci15. The audience were a group of academics from across the UK and Ireland who specialise in social sciences. In the room there were lecturers in economics, politics, sociology, psychology and education. I had some very interesting, and at times intense conversations with a number of delegates as between us we tried to navigate the future of higher education from our various perspectives. Perhaps the standout part of the day for me though, was to see the wonderful artistic skills of Simon Heath, as he captured the essence of my keynote (illustrated above). As a consulting artist, Simon is incredibly talented because it's a rare skill to be able to listen to a speech, fillet out the key elements and then render them in real-time as a collage of images and words. He also live tweets from the conference as the images take shape!

On the left is Simon's later cartoon development of the strange pairing of Mickey Mouse and Superman - an example of the #twistedpair blogging challenge I instigated in the summer. He captures the idea perfectly, and adds the caption 'pedagogy of the unlikely', which perfectly captures what the blogging challenges were all about - finding meaning and learning together through seemingly bizarre and disassociated pairings of ideas, characters or objects.

I'm sure you will agree, his work is pleasing to the eye as well as informative. We need more of this at conferences! The title of my keynote was 'Learning in the Digital Age - Theory and Practice'. Just in case you want more detail though, the entire slide deck from my HEA Social Science conference keynote is below.

Learning in the digital age - theory and practice from Steve Wheeler

Photo by Steve Wheeler
Graphic by Simon Heath


Capturing the moment by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.