By far the best talk I attended at Wimba Connect was the final keynote given by Darcy Walsh Hardy, who heads UT Telecampus, a central unit supporting online education initiatives within the University of Texas. The talk was a general educational technology one rather than having anything to do with Wimba.

Darcy made a lot of interesting points and showed some great video clips to make her points – my favourite is below. Part of her talk focussed on the need for more support for learning technologies in institutions and the need for more leadership in the field. Nothing revolutionary but it was particularly interesting to me as in our talk earlier that day Hervé & I had suggested leadership & support plus user-friendly technologies & collaborative working as being 4 factors necessary for the wider adoption of technologies such as Wimba.

The talk also focussed on the need to involve students to a greater extent in the selection and implementation of learning technologies. I think this is very important and we certainly learnt a lot from our student focus group in our recent VLE evaluations. Something we should do more of.

Darcy’s message to educational software vendors – stop cold calling us & research who we are / what we need before any form of contact went down well too!

Best Clip of the talk: Microsoft Surface Parody