e-Assessment Scotland 13

On Friday I went to this conference in the University of Dundee. David and I were invited to broadcast and record audio from some of the speakers and others at the conference.

There was a pretty packed programme which is continuing online (I’ll be trying to make the ds106 one. I only attended the keynotes as I was busy recording during other sessions. The atmosphere was great, folk from all sectors talking and sharing.

It was a great privilege to get access to the folk I talked to for Radio EDUtalk. As usual I am surprised at how generous folks are with their time and ideas. Lynn Boyle, @boyledsweetie did all the hard work of organising folk to come and talk to me. We also arranged to have a couple of people plus myself for each session, this makes, I believe, for a more interesting conversation.

I enjoyed and learned a great deal from the keynotes, although my notes are mostly single words to remind myself of questions to ask the presenters when we broadcast. I’ll not blog much about these, but you can see Catherine Cronin‘s slide deck. She kicked off the topic of working in the open which was certainly a theme of my conversations throughout the day. Helen Keegan‘s keynote was mind-blowing: getting her students involved in an ARG without their knowledge.

I’ve now posted all the archive audio at EDUtalk with the tag easc13, if you find it half as interesting as I did you are in for a treat.

My other treat was to be able to have a great chat and dinner with David Noble, my edutalk partner and regular contributor Ian Field.

Not being in the classroom I was able to take a holiday to visit the conference. Many classroom teachers would have found it of great value too, if they could have attended. We know that many teachers are happy to give up a day holiday to attend cpd (we hare run well attended summer courses for the past 3 years), it is a pity that class committed teachers could not have a ‘cpd day, get out of class free’ card to be able to attend events like this. e-Assessment Scotland was a free conference and wonderfully organised.