ACEC 2014: Now it’s Personal - Day 1

The day started off bright and early in Hall B for the opening welcome. Two grade 4 students played the ukulele and sang for us before then being welcomed by Dr. Jason Zagami,@jzagami and the conference being opened by Julie King.

“Digital technology curriculum assists students to become confident creators of digital solutions.” – Julie King 2014

After that we had our first keynote presenter, Dr. Alec Couros, @courosa. The main idea I took away from listening to Alec was the importance of digital identity, even as an accident. These days’ people are making amazing contributions though the internet, creating, collaborating, remixing and posting media for all to see, no matter if it’s intentional or not all these creations help develop a digital identity.

One of the most important things, just like in real life, is to teach students what and when is private as well as what and when is public. There is a time to share things and a time to keep things private and distinguishing the difference between the two can be quite difficult; in classrooms when talking about cyber safety generally we don’t distingyish the difference, we will go through not sharing personal details such as address, full name, etc, but the difference between private and public content isn’t discussed and we don’t talk about how to decide if it should private or public.

It’s become a custom in today’s society to share every intimate detail online, from wedding videos and images to pregnancy announcements and much more. However when do we over step the line and is there one? Does sharing these intimate moments publicly make them less intimate? Should we be sharing these memories this way? Can these memories be tainted with comments from the public eye due to social media? In the end there is no right or wrong answer, it all comes down to personal preference. For an example Tabs24x7Official recently got married and as she has became a fairly well known youtuber everyone was so excited to see footage and videos of the wedding. However while she has shared things like the decor of the wedding and getting ready for it she has actually said she didn’t video the actual ceremony. Having an extremely small wedding and wanting to keep it as it is in her memory she decided not to film it even for herself just to keep it that pure, happy, magical memory. She also mentioned that she didn’t want to have the ceremony online as to not let it get tainted by comments of the public eye. Personally I admire her so much for this and think it’s a really smart idea. However as I previously started it is a personal choice.

Alec also spoke about how ideas can grow from being naive, using digital technology to document growth, how mediums change the environments, becoming internet famous and mind your own business learning.

After Alec had finished his keynote we had a bit of a break before going to the conversations with the keynote speaker. Here people from the crown sat with Alec and asked him questions and overall had a discussion about his presentation. For that session I was there just to listen and see how the questions are being put forward as the next session was for the Digital Leaders to have a conversation with Alec. Walking away from the conversations it was a lot to digest and process. We spoke about learning not just in the classrooms but also in everyday life, guidance being the role of the teachers, building networks and much more. Some of the things that stood out to me the most in that conversation were:

·       Developing the abilities to use mediums to express and share knowledge

·       Vibrant student centred environments make different types of learning happen

·       It’s important to make people self aware of where their attention is going

·       Instilling confidence and vulnerability into the average writer

·       Using vlogs as a step to building confidence talking in front of an audience

In the afternoon I got to listen to a group of students from Tea Tree Gully primary school between grades 4 to 8 present about digital leaders in their school. They presented very well talking about what digital leaders are in their school and what they do. The skills they use to create games, test out new apps, program and solve digital problems as well as being self taught and being the go to people to get help from for digital problems in their school.

Just before afternoon tea I had my twitter presentation that went fairly well.

After that I went to the ‘Technology: What’s around the corner?’ workshop before the end of the day. The workshop spoke of technologies ranging from what is already out, in the processes and predictions and plans. A key focus was ‘the internet of things’ explaining what that was and what the future appears to have in store of that. One thing about this specific workshop that I really enjoyed was that the future technologies didn’t seem to just be phones, laptops, etc. There also seemed to be things for a more efficient world and to improve things such as saving money, fitness, posture and even helping people to eat at a better speed. I walked away from this workshop mind blown and with a list of things I want.

Overall the day was amazing, exhausting but at the same time amazing. I look forward to the rest of the week and bombarding my head with information.

Also there was a constant stream of tweets throughout the day as well as a few blog posts which can be checked out bellow. 

Conference twitter: @ACEC2014

Student twitter: @ACECDLs
Hashtag: #ACEC2014

Student blog: Digital Leaders Australia

My other posts on the conference:
1     Shining Remix         2         3