The European Association of Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI) host a biennial conference which, this year, was held at Exeter - EARLI 2011. The conference is one of, if not the largest, I have ever attended - I heard there were over 2000 delegates. Certainly there were between 17 and 23 parallel sessions at any one time during the paper presentations which spread across the entire campus and five refreshment halls. The presentations are organised by Special Interest Groups (SIGs) into themes and I was impressed by the invited symposia for each SIG which brought together some of the most well-known names in the fields of education and educational psychology. The weather and campus grounds were lovely which was just as well as we were walking what felt like several miles a day between sessions however, regularly getting out into the fresh air just helped stimulate thinking following a presentation.
The conference theme was Education for a Global Networked Society and I followed sessions that largely focused on learning through collaboration and creative use of digital tools. However, you could have followed many other themes that included assessment, conceptual change, early childhood, motivation, teacher education, religious or moral education, instructional design, social interaction, professional development, neuroscience in education, cultural diversity and metacognition amongst others.
I noticed two reoccurring foci that were novel (well to me). The first being self-regulation which was presented variously as time-on-task, a metacognitive process, a reflective task and in relation to synchronous online learning environments. The second was the role of external representations and my sincere thanks go to Shaaron Ainsworth and Anniken Furberg who in separate presentations gave me much food for thought about the role images and animations play in supporting learning through multimedia resources. Look out for Shaaron's paper in Science last week on 'Drawing to Learn in Science'.
Two other keynotes I particularly noted were Andrew Pollard & Mary James' distillation of the 10 year Teaching and Learning Research Project (TLRP) into ten evidence-informed principles for teaching and learning or pedagogies that ground learning throughout all sectors. And Michael Reiss who raised questions about the role school science currently plays. He then presented a framework for conceptualising the scope of science education that emphasised the whole life course before, during and beyond formal education and the importance of informal, outside school science learning.
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