SITE Conference – Day 3 – 28th March 2007

Day 3 started with a  Keynote Address by Curtis Bonk on ‘High Quality Learning: It’s about Nature (technology) and Nurture (Pedagogy) by Curtis Bonk.

As I was the first to be at the conference room, I managed to have a private chat with Curtis. He appeared to be a nice friendly guy. He told me that he had addressed at a number of conferences in Australia, including Wollongong University.

His keynote on Web 2.0 was very entertaining and informative. He was indeed a fantastic speaker and his keynote speech was, in my opinion, the best of all the keynote addresses give at the conference. During the address, he changed his costume a number of times to transform himself into characters in movies such as the Dart Vader in Star Wars and Matrix, to add flavor to his presentation.

His website is at: http://mypage.iu.edu/~cjbonk/ and many of his presentation are available here for your download and perusal. As such, I will not be commenting much of his address except to mention the following points/tools that he referred to in his talk.

·         Curriki site.

·         Facebook, MySpace

·         Learner-Centered Learning Principles.

·         Students find articles they find interesting.

·         Just-in-time-teaching.

·         Create free ebooks.

·         Pedagogical uses of these technologies.

·         Kairos.

·         Wikibooks.

·         Google groups, Google notebooks.

·         NTIP

As I have access to a  CD with some of the work done by Curtis, I will write more about his work later.

Later in the day, I had opportunities to choose some workshops to attend. However, I found some of these workshops were a bit disappointing.

One of the workshop that I attended and which I found useful was on Problem Based Learning, a subject that which I was interested in knowing more about.

The topic was ‘Using PBL–Online in Educational Technology Graduate Programs, Professional Development and International Collaboration’.

The website refered to in their workshop:  http://pbl-online.org/ is a very useful website which can be assessed and used by any educators interested in learning and using PBL in their teaching.

In the afternoon, we took sometime out from the conference proceedings to do some sight seeing in the Riverwalk area of San Antonio. It is a popular area among tourists visiting San Antonio. We also visited the famous Alamo Fort here.