Dr. Ghergulescu at EdMedia 2015, Montreal.
Back in June, I attended the EdMedia 2015 conference in Montreal, Canada, where I presented the research paper titled “Adaptemy – Building the Next Generation Classroom”. EdMedia – World Conference on Educational Media and Technology, is the premiere international conference in the field, organised annually by the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).
The conference draws a large number of participants, and serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for discussion and exchange of information on the research, development and applications of multimedia and technology in education, as well as on strategies and practices for using educational technologies.
For me, EdMedia 2015 provided a great opportunity to introduce to a worldwide audience of researchers and practitioners our adaptive and personalised solution for supporting classroom learning, and to disseminate preliminary outcomes from the pilot study that we conducted with over 60 schools in Ireland.
I also participated to the 2 EdMedia SIG Meetings. In the first meeting “Emerging Technologies for Learning & Teaching” we discussed how emerging technologies will change education in the future, while in the second meeting, “Learning Design” we discussed learning design in general and learning design quality evaluation frameworks in particular.
The conference organisers were very keen to support interaction between participants, through networking events and integration of social media such as Twitter and the Academic Experts interactive platform.
By attending EdMedia 2015, I got a cross-cultural perspective on educational multimedia and technology, by being able to discuss ideas with experts and practitioners from other countries such as USA, Canada, Belgium Germany and UK among others (see the attendee world map).
EdMedia Attendee Map
In her keynote speech “Digital blurring – how do we teach in an increasingly converging world?” Jennifer Howell from Curtin University, Australia, gave new insights on how the increasing use of technology in the classroom provides a richer learning space for all educational contexts, and how educators can harness this trend to improve their practice.
The insights and positive feedback received at EdMedia 2015 further confirms to us how important the work that we are doing here at Adaptemy is to support students in their learning experiences and teachers in the classroom.
