Thomas Horejes Visual Deaf Space Classroom Ecology: Lessons in Learning from Gallaudet University

This talk was focused on Gallaudet University in Washington DC which was predominantly for deaf and hard of hearing students.

The speaker talked about issues of design for these students. There was a need to enable visual learning and ensure they could all see each other. This had implications for class design needing circles to be used and for teaching where there was more use of visual display colour and lecturers using hand movements to illustrate points. A traditional classroom would not work and there needed to be a sense of community and collaboration in classes.

The take home message of this talk was that visual capacity for deaf students was important and this needed to be considered for all classes.

Anthony Antonio The New Voc-Ed: Teaching Life as a Vocation

In this talk the speaker wanted to focus on the notion that higher education at its core should be vocational education. He talked about his own education and how he ended up in a career he was not committed to or fulfilled in. He talked about the need to ask students what they really want to do and to provide space for reflection, writing and reading. He suggests that classes are spaces for this and that we should interact and engage our students in Tolstoy’s question, “What shall we do and how shall we live?“ Education is about teaching students the skills and knowledge they need to seek their life’s work and their vocation.

Sian Bayne Digital Essays: Academic Writing at the Edge

This talk focused on the difference of difference of text to digital presentation of work.  The discussion and presentation focused on the new media that could be used such as digital essays and how media, images and audio made assessment different now and how different media afforded different approaches such as the essay with link for every word and the essay that used pictures to support different words. The internet permitted so may more approaches to production of work now.

The message of these presentations was different but was around enabling students to consider their future and their media to present this in as well as the classroom environment in which this may be developed.