ICLS 2012

The week before last I went to my first ever international conference: the International Conference of the Learning Sciences.

It was a little less international than could have been wished - it was right here in Sydney, which meant I didn't get to travel anywhere exciting. But it was international in the sense that most people attending were from overseas.

I found it really worthwhile - the theme for the conference was "The Future of Learning", and it really did give an exciting picture of things to come. I've seen demos in the past of the "interactive classroom", but this was the first time I've ever seen things that actually looked like they could be  used in a real classroom - a symposium ("Interactive Surfaces and Spaces: A Learning Sciences Agenda" by Michael A. Evans, Jochen Rick, Michael Horn, Chia Shen, Emma Mercier, James McNaughton, Steve Higgins, Mike Tissenbaum, Michelle Lui, James D. Slotta), showing projects with big touchscreens, projectors, kinect sensing, and others based on iPads, was an amazing glimpse into the near future of learning. Matthew Berland was also a very impressive presenter, and I really enjoyed his talk about using strategic board games to support computational thinking (and was surprised how many people in the room were familiar with Pandemic, the game he was using).