Greek Nights with ICICTE and Papandreou

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the International Conference on Information Communication Technologies ICICTE at the fashionable Rhodes Palace Hotel in Greece. The EDEN Excecutive Committee was well presented with a presentation by Airina Volungeviciene and the most important Steering Committe and Garden Party support by Costas Tsolakidis. Here are some of my reflections and highlights from the conference which supplement my Greek thoughts from our EDEN conference in Athens last October.

Interesting Meeting with George Papandreou

Papandreou delivers his speach

Former Greek Prime Minister and current President of Socialist International George Papandreou was honored with an ICICTE award for his contributions in the field of education. A video of Mr. Papandreou's conference speech and the full text of it is available at the conference website.

During the conference dinner I had the pleasure of discussing several  technology and education issues with him, and I was really impressed by his broad overview and in-depth knowledge of our field. I also noted that he used his Ipad actively for note taking during the conference.

Presentations

My mobile photo of
the artwork I received

The Steering Committe chaired by Dr. Chris Barlow and over one hundred participants from more than thirty countries could choose between about eighty presentations. The respective conference papers are available from the conference web-site.

Russel Stannard gave an excellent keynote titled Feedback using Screen Capture in which he focused on his experiences with Jing and www.teachertrainingvideos.com - a website dedicated to helping teachers incorporate ICT into their teaching with step by step videos. Jing is a free software that captures anything  you see and hear on your computer as an image or short video, and allows you to store and share it on the web.

It was an honor for me to give a keynote presentation at the conference and my PowerPoint presentation is embedded below. As a keynote presenter I also received one of the remarkably etched and painted metal artworks created for the conference by the Danish artist Marie Louise Kold who also attended as the conference photograph.

Cooperative Freedom and Transparency in Online Education

View more PowerPoint from Morten Flate Paulsen

The Graduate Student Award

I was invited to be on the panel for the conference Graduate Student Award, and this year's award winner was Marcia J. P. Lindqvist, Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Education at Umeå University in Sweden. Her paper was titled Teachers' Expectations Regarding Possibilities and Challenges of Learning Practices and Processes in Two Schools in a 1:1 Computer Initiative.

Posters

Lorraine McGinty from University College Dublin in Ireland was honored with the best poster award for her presentation: Providing Needs-focused Curricular Reform during a Recession. Since I often promote transparency in online education, I also appreciated Ralph Springett's presentation of Review IT! which is a learner-led course evaluation tool that provides access to advice from students on what to expect from their courses.

Conference Friends

An interesting ICICTE conference feature is the honoring of Conference Friends. This year Katherine McGuire was recognized for her contribution of time and expertise to help ICICTE move forward. She is a Senior Instructor of Psychology at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John, Canada.

Social Highlights

Finally, Conference Director Nancy Pyrini and her team of most hospital Greek hosts topped the conference with an excellent social program including a guided tour and a Greek night in the old town of Rhodes and the boat trip to the beautiful village of Lindos.