EduSummIT 2017: An update

by | Sunday, October 01, 2017

I just returned from participating in EDUsummIT 2017, the fifth International Summit on Information Technology in Education. EDUsummIT is a global knowledge building community of researchers, educational practitioners, and policy makers committed to supporting the effective integration of research and practice in the field of ICT in education. It is held every two years and this year it convened in Borovets, Bulgaria, from September 18 through 20 and was co-hosted by the University of Library Studies & Information Technologies, Sofia, Bulgaria, and the Netherlands Institute for Curriculum Development.

EDUsummIT is held every two years and I have been lucky to have been invited to and been part of the past four meetings, in Paris, Washington DC, Bangkok and now Bulgaria. (More info on past EDUsummIT meetings and the results of these meetings can be found here.)

EDUsummIT is not a conference in the typical sense of the word. It is more of an intense working session (spread over two days) where 100+ academics, practitioners and policy makers, form smaller thematic groups and work together on pre-specified topics. It was my privilege to be co-lead one of the Thematic Working Groups with my friend and colleague Dale Niederhauser. Specifically our group (TWG9) focussed on the topic of Supporting Sustainability and Scalability in Educational Technology Initiatives: Research Informed Practice. Other members of the team included (in alphabetical order): Douglas Agyei, Margaret Cox, Sarah Howard, Djordje Kadijevich, Therese Laferriere, Lynne Schrum, Jo Tondeur & Joke Voogt (see below).

It was a fabulous group to work with and the days of the meeting went by in a blur as we worked together as a team to explore the issue of sustainability and scalability in research approaches specifically as they apply to educational technology innovations. A range of products emerged from the meeting, both from the different working groups individually as well as from the conference collectively. Below I list some of these products – for the record.

  • A call to action: The document was a summary of the recommendations by all of the groups
  • TWG9 Poster: A poster that was presented by the TWG9 group at the end of the meeting (Thanks to Sarah Howard for all her work pulling it together in a really short time).
  • Interim report from TWG9: This is a first draft and is the culmination of the work we did together during the meeting.

There will be other products (journal articles and such) that will emerge at a later date, and I will post them here as they appear.

I would like to take a moment to thank all the organizers, sponsors and most importantly all the members of TWG9 for all their hard work and effort in making this such a great meeting.

Finally, I took a lot of photos during my stay at Borovets and then at Sofia. You can find them on a Google photo album here.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

London Underground Map

One of my favorite pieces of design is the London Underground Map. It has been replicated all over the world - from Mumbai to Tokyo. Leigh Wolf just sent me a link to a BBC 4 video made in 1987 about this map. Check it out here Here is a link to the Wikipedia page...

Rethinking Google Ranking

Matt Koehler suggested that my reasoning in a previous post (Google ranking, a self-defeating approach) criticizing his attempt at raising his Google ranking was mistaken. According to him, providing links to other Koehlers in the world actually helps raise his...

TPACK goes to graduate school

This is a paper that had come out a while ago, and I just didn't get a chance to post it (actually I just forgot). Anyway, here it is: Mishra, P., Koehler, M. J., Zellner, A., & Kereluik, K. (2012). Thematic considerations in integrating TPACK in a graduate...

Systems level change in education

Systems level change in education

How do you design for change in complex systems—like education? Implementing large-scale changes within educational systems can be a challenging task. Doing so requires many actors, working at different organizational levels (and perhaps across organizations), to not...

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

David Zola, Educator Extraordinaire

A teacher affects eternity—Henry Adams I remember the first time I saw David Zola teach. He was on stage in front of 200+ undergraduate students with a plastic cup of wine in his hand. The wine had been poured for him by a teaching assistant from a bottle hidden in a...

The recurring cycle of hype and despair around ed tech

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. — George Santayana (1905, p. 284) The Atlantic has an article titled "Why tech still hasn't solved education's problems" focusing on the failed promise of MOOCs and asks the question Why has the promised...

Generative AI: Will history repeat or (just) rhyme

Generative AI: Will history repeat or (just) rhyme

As generative AI continues to reshape our world, we're faced with a crucial question: Will we repeat the mistakes we made with previous technologies or will this time be something different? George Santayana famously warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are...

eduPUNKing a course website!!

I had written about the EduPunk movement earlier, in fact had even designed a logo for it. A brief description of Edupunk can be found on Wikipedia (a google search will reveal many more). Wikipedia describes it as follows: Edupunk is an approach to teaching and...

Technologies “R us: A great essay by Adam Gopnik

This morning I was at the doctor's office and picked up a dated (February, 2011) New Yorker magazine and discovered a great essay by Adam Gopnik: The Information: How the Internet gets inside us. I am not sure how I missed this the first time around but Gopnik does a...

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  1. EDUsummIT 2017: Summary Report released – Punya Mishra's Web - […] Sustainability and scalability in research approaches (a prelim blog post on that work can be found here). Other members of…

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