Welcome to the Philadelphia Area Educational Technology blog! I want to use this space for two things. One, to plan for next year’s conference. Two, to share resources and ideas among the many people in the Philadelphia region.
I’ll start by asking for suggestions for a theme for next year. Post your suggestions in the comments to this post and I’ll begin moving them to the top for discussion.
Also, if anyone wants to contribute to the blog, let me know. The more the merrier!
Tim McGee said
I have two themes to recommend: Multiliteracies & Convergence.
And, the two may be combined into one theme. I suspect I don’t need to explain the first, but here’s what I mean by the latter: Technologies that used to be discrete and do one thing, e.g. wordprocessor or telephone, now do many things. (Some PDA’s seem to do “every” thing.)
These convergences have ramifications in various academic domains, e.g., language arts instruction and visual arts instruction are converging into multimedia communication instruction, in part, because word processors can now handle images so easily and well.
Laura said
Tim,
Convergence was a huge topic at SXSW this year. I think that might be a good theme.
Jin An said
My main suggestion is to have “some” theme. I truly enjoyed many parts of this year’s PAETC; however, the topics varied so much that some of them were of little or no interest whatsoever. I don’t know if that will make the conference too specific/particular and we may alienate some people who want to just get a pretty broad idea of “what’s going on in educational technology.”
Chris Lehmann said
Very cool… SLA would love to be involved. I think there’s a *huge* untapped community for this… are you thinking about this as inclusive K-12 and higher ed?
Laura said
Chris–we’d love for SLA to be involved! I’ve been watching the progress of that. I’d love for my kid to be attending SLA.
We’re absolutely trying to bridge the K-12 level with the higher ed level. I think these two groups don’t talk enough.