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…

Undo this

Wouldn't it be great if life came with an undo key-stroke-combination? Just a thought I threw out today during a meeting which led to a discussion of how this could be a great movie idea. Seems intriguing...

ON@TCC: Do not toss aside lightly…

One Night at the Call Center is the second novel by Chetan Bhagat. I picked it up from the library, since I had read nice things about it on some website somewhere. What a tragic waste of time. This is a terrible novel - maybe the worst I have read in a long, long...

Designing 917: A conversation

Danah Henriksen and I taught CEP917 (Knowledge Media Design) last semester. This was a somewhat unique class, with half the students being present here on campus and the other half online. We met synchronously once every two weeks and the rest of the class happened...

Learning landscapes, special issue on creativity

My friend Teresa Foulger at Arizona State University  informed me about the fact that the journal LEARNing Landscapes has a special issue on creativity.  I had not heard of the journal before and I was pleasantly surprised by the articles in this special issue....

Fact / Fiction, ambigram

Yesterday after I had posted my two latest ambigrams (see them here) I got a message on Facebook from my cousin Sonny (the one who composed the cool music for my Explore, Create videos) saying Big deal. I can make "fact" and "fiction" blur together till they are...

Summer Institute for Superintendents, presentation

I was recently invited to present at the 2009 Summer Institute for Superintendents at the beautiful  Crystal Mountain Conference Center in Thompsonville, Michigan. The yearly institute, which began in 1999, is co-sponsored by the MSU College of Education and the...

Martin Gardner, RIP

Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010 Martin Gardner died five days ago. Gardner was an influential writer about mathematics and was one of the greatest influences on me (and my friends) as I was growing up. His recreational mathematics column was the main reason I subscribed...

Plagiarism, update II

Just heard back from Innovation Tools. They are changing the status of the articles by Dr. Jiles to "not visible" till, as they say, "the matter is settled." It is not clear to me what "settled" means. I doubt that David Jiles Ph.D. is emailing me (or anybody else)...

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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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