Attention, Please!

I had great fun at the LAK11 conference today, and was honored to do the opening keynote for day 2. Actually, I didn’t do the keynote alone, but was proud to do so together with my 12 year old daughter, HannaH.

Bit of trivia: Banff is an awesome location with spectacular scenery.

The slides are above. Doug Clow provides an almost verbatim transcription – I wonder how one can type so fast. Or is Doug [using] a piece of speech-to-text software?

There were quite a few twitter comments – many thanks to all!

In a (hopefully) fun kind of way, the video above illustrated one of my main points: the learner (never mind it’s a dog) is not ‘paying attention’ at the start of the session, while the teachers (never mind they are my daughters) set up the technology. After a gentle prompt – putting the dog in front of the laptop, the technology takes over and the learner is actively paying attention.

That is kind of what we often try to do… And it’s fine to do so by direct observation, but that doesn’t scale very well and we can use technology to do this in a more systematic way.

I think that the talks at LAK11 were recorded and that they will be made available later. If not and there is interest, I’ll record the talk a bit later.

In any case, your comments and feedback are more than welcome!