Theme: The Personal Touch: Personalizing Learning Using Technology
Mark your calendar for Maricopa Community College's premier learning technology event on May 14, 2013. The program will include a keynote speaker, track sessions, and more. Wireless access will be available, so please bring your favorite mobile device so that you can participate in the social networking of the conference.
About the Speakers
Dr. Mimi Ito
Mizuko Ito is a cultural anthropologist of technology use, examining children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications and is Professor in Residence and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at the University of California, Irvine, with appointments in the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Informatics. Her work on educational software appears in Engineering Play: A Cultural History of Children's Software. In Japan, her research has focused on mobile and -portable technologies, and she co-edited a book on that topic, Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life. She has led a three-year collaborative ethnographic study, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, examining youth new media practices in the US, and focusing on gaming, digital media production, and Internet use. The findings of this project are reported in Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Youth Living and Learning with New Media. Most recently, she has co-edited and contributed to a book on fan culture, Fandom Unbound: Otaku Culture in a Connected World.
Continuing work on informal learning with new media with the support of the MacArthur Foundation, she is Research Director of the Digital Media and Learning Hub at UC Irvine and Chair of the MacArthur Research Network on Connected Learning. In addition to her current work funded by the MacArthur Foundation, she has been awarded grants by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Intel Research, the Abe Fellowship Program, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and is the recipient of the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies from the American Educational Research Association.
Dr. Alec Testa
Dr. Alec Testa is the Chair of Counseling and Psychology and Director of Counselor Education at Southern Arkansas University. An early adopter of technology in Education and online earning, Alec was the founding Director of Assessment at Western Governors University where he also served as the Director of Institutional Research and as a Senior Faculty Member. He and his colleagues built a successful competency-based, online university' obtained four regional accreditations, national accreditation, and NCATE (the first online university to do so). These days he is a faculty member and department chair, teaching 50% online.
Prior to that he was the Executive Director of Planning and Analysis at Eastern New Mexico University. He took his doctorate in Counselor Education and Supervision from the University of Nevada-Reno. Alec has more than 25 years of experience in higher education in student affairs, administration, and as a faculty member. His areas of research interest are emerging trends in technology, evaluation of the effectiveness of technology in education, and assessment of cognitive abilities.
The pace of change related to MOOCs in the last three years has been tremendous, much more so than Internet education and the adoption of open courseware. With a track record of contemporary innovation in higher education he is wondering what are the opportunities and options that MOOCs provide for students, faculty, and colleges. This includes in what ways can we take content to learning, how are individual needs met in a massive scale, and what is needed for the use of MOOCs to be a valid, reliable, fair option for both US and International education.
Breakout Session Topic Areas
The conference will provide a rich and diverse learning experience through exciting, interactive and thought-provoking presentations and workshops focused on relevant topic areas in educational technologies. Presenters will showcase effective instructional use of learning technologies and innovative ideas in the following topic areas.
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Assessment and Learning Analytics: This topic area is designed for presentations that focus on ways to use assessment tools and learning analytics to individualize/personalize learning for students.
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Innovation and Ideas: This topic area provides an opportunity for faculty to share an innovative idea or project in hope of getting faculty excited about exploring the idea or project with them.
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Mobile Computing: This topic area is designed to share technologies that can be used in the face-to-face, hybrid, and online classroom for enabling students to personalize their own learning.
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Pedagogical: This topic area focuses on pedagogy with a mention of technology tools that may be used for one or more of the following types of pedagogy: active, collaborative, connected, contextual, universal design, and design-based learning).
- Social Media: This topic area is design to share social media technologies that can be used in face-to-face, hybrind, and online classroom for enabling teachers to personalize learning for students or assist students in personalizing their own learning.
Location
Glendale Community College
6000 West Olive Avenue
Glendale, AZ 85302