1) Our schools must be inquiry-driven, thoughtful and empowering for all members

2) Our schools must be about co-creating — together with our students — the 21st Century Citizen

3) Technology must serve pedagogy, not the other way around.

4) Technology must enable students to research, create, communicate and collaborate

5) Learning can — and must — be networked.

More on EduCon 2.1 HERE

I took this photo this morning, on the way to breakfast. It seems like ages ago already. When I got back to town I called in to school briefly, dropped off some stuff and picked up some other stuff and remembered again about traffic and all that. Lorne already seems a long way away.

Three days away at the Expanding Horizons Conference was a real delight, and I hope to blog about it a little later, maybe once more, when it’s sunk in a bit, about the take-home messages if I can.

My impressions now are the pleasure of being in a beautiful place with a whole lot of educators concerned with these ideas and wanting to do something about it. And though there were some very good sessions, including the conversation with Bruce Dixon today, it’s the conversations over coffee or a muffin with colleagues or strangers, that are the strongest at the moment.

By this time next week it will all be a distant memory. Maybe earlier than that he says, as he looks at the pile of SACS by the desk. But right now I’m pretty glad I went, and had a chance to sit and think for a couple of days. I hope they do keep this conference at Lorne (there’s talk that the bandwidth is so poor down there that they may move it) because there’s something about the place that adds to the meaning somehow. And this morning, walking to breakfast, with the beach shining in the sun like a newly minted coin, it all seemed very possible.

The ELH Conference website is HERE

It’s hard for a hardware manufacturer to have something meaningful to say about education; even Apple struggle with that. And Mark Whittard mentioned as much when he began his keynote.

We got a potted history of Toshiba and their history (130 years!) and their diversity. He claims that Toshiba invented the double coil electric light bulb in 1921 and flash memory in 1984.

Whittard talked about some of the coming innovations: fuel cells in 2009, fast-charging (super charge) batteries and their commitment to environmental values, becoming the ‘greenest computer supplier’ this year.

One interesting thing was that over 80% of the education market were now ordering the tablet pc now; which is higher than I though and promising in terms of the kinds of education specific.

He talked about, and then talked down, the new small computers and said they weren’t recommended for the education market. I’ve talked about the ASSUS(?) and that kind of thing before; I’ve love to have one for travelling, but I couldn’t last long without a full blown machine I don’t think.

I liked Bruce Dixon’s closing bit here too, talking about the original conceptualisation of the notebook computer as a tool for education, or as one early notebook computer put it, as ‘an instrument, whose music is ideas’.

It was based around a number of tools: edublogs, delicious, wikispaces, some of my favourites in the web 2.0 world currently. It was great to see a young teacher talking passionately about these tools, and also asserting their place in the senior English and Humanities classroom, where I’ve found that some schools find this hard to maintain.

Esterman began by talking about what student centred learning was and then moved to the web 2.0 tools that enabled the HOW of a student centred approach. It was a practical session that focused on using a tool or two, on getting teachers to take that first step

It was funny when he came to talking about edublogs that he asked participants to look at two edublogs as examples, one of which was mine. I didn’t know whether to say ‘that’s me’, but I shut up and hoped that no-one would criticise it too loudly. Thankfully no-one did.