Symposium Keynote 1: Learner-expectations, technology and formal/informal learning

Expectations are not always what they seem, and the answers we elicit from learners when we ask them about their expectations, at both undergraduate and post graduate level, need to be more critically examined. Technology plays a big part in all our daily lives, learners may expect one thing, need another and when asked the question may tell you what they think the right answer is! Furthermore, we need to understand how and when learning is occurring, and the part that technology is playing in the process.

Lawrie Phipps' keynote at our symposium on Friday will draw upon conversations with Dave Cormier and his ideas on rhizomatic learning, George Siemens’ theory, connectivism and recent work through the JISC Users and Innovation programme. The presentation will ask the delegates to consider the emergent technologies characterised by web 2.0 through two different perspectives.

• The technologies are disrupting to the students’ learning and staff time, they pick up information that we haven’t given them off the internet, and the technology is everywhere like an omnipresent technodeity
• The technologies are providing new ways of engaging in discourse between peers, offering new opportunities to find knowledge and exercise creativity and the sheer breadth of the technology creates something that most people can engage with at some level