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Five Upcoming eLearning and Edtech Conferences: January to June 2019
By Cait Etherington
December 30, 2018
Staying on top of new developments in the eLearning and edtech fields can be a challenge. As new technologies create new opportunities, the field continues to evolve. But whatever your connection to the industry, it is important to be aware of best practices and new developments. Twice a year, eLearning Inside recommends five upcoming conferences exploring best practices in the eLearning and edtech fields. While some of these upcoming events focus exclusively on training, others target educators working in the K-12 or higher education fields, and some target individuals working on both sides of the online learning spectrum.
Five Upcoming eLearning Conferences
ATD TechKnowledge Conference, February 6-8, West Palm Beach
This year’s TechKnowledge Conference is scheduled to take place in sunny West Palm Beach in early February. This year’s conference will cover a wide range of cutting-edge topics, including augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence, microlearning, and adaptive learning. The ATD TechKnowledge Conference features tracks in eLearning, mobile learning, technology strategy, platforms, gaming, trending technologies, and virtual classrooms. This year’s keynotes include Segway inventor Dean Kamen, and Shaili Chopra, founder of SheThePeople TV, which is India’s largest platform dedicated to sharing stories about women. For more information, visit the ATD TechKnowledge Conference site.
Learning Solutions Conference and Expo, March 26-28, Orlando
Another annual favorite is Learning Solutions, which will take place from March 26-28 in Orlando. Learning Solutions Conference & Expo showcases practices and tech solutions that work in both learning and development. As the organizers emphasize, “Whether you’re a one-person shop or part of a larger team, starting out or a seasoned expert, this year’s program offers learning experiences built just for you.” Find registration details here.
ICELW, June 12-14, New York City
Every year the International Conference on eLearning in the Workplace (ICELW) takes place on the Columbia University campus in June. This year’s dates are June 12-14, and as in the past, conference organizer, Dr. David Guralnick, has an exciting program planned. Keynotes will include Dr. Meredith Broussard, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University. Broussard is the author of Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. To discover more about ICELW, see eLearning Inside‘s 2018 coverage and explore ICELW’s online archive of proceedings from past events. To register for this year’s conference visit the ICELW website.
International Society for Technology in Education 2019, June 23-26, Philadelphia
Another upcoming eLearning conference is the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference in late June. ISTE is a nonprofit organization that works to accelerate the use of technology to solve educational problems and drive innovation. Global in focus, the ISTE has members from around the world, and every June, they meet to share best practices. This year’s ISTE Conference & Expo will take place in Philadelphia from June 23-26 and promises to be just as exciting as it has been in previous years. More details can be found on the ISTE Conference site.
Realities360 Conference & Expo, June 25-27, San Jose, CA
Realities360 Conference & Expo explores how new technologies can generate innovative and immersive learning experiences. This year’s conference will be held June 25 – 27 in San Jose. For more information, visit the 2018 Realities360 website.
These are only five of the upcoming eLearning or edtech events taking place in the first half of 2019. If you have an upcoming event, you can share your news here.
Feature image by Liam Martens c/o Unsplash.
“As bots enter the classroom, both teachers and learners will have to reflect on their uses and outcomes. They will need to adopt an awareness of AI’s presence. Teachers must recognize AI’s short comings, such as inherently developing biases and its inability to process human emotions.”
This statement is correct as it relates to AI, generally; however, it assumes that AI exists as THE entity that students directly interact with. There are many potential expressions of AI, including a human-in-the-loop approach, in which it is configured in such as way as to facilitate dialogs and interactions between people, either studentteacher or studentstudent.
For example, we’re building an L2 language speaking practice app (Language Hero Smart Chat). We use AI to enable beginning students, who speak different languages, to have natural, real life conversations in each other’s language from Day 1. They speak directly to each other, interacting with the system only to select from multiple content choices suggested by it, designed to facilitate a real free-ranging dialog resulting in real bonding, to the extent it’s possible, rather than to practice a particular lexical structure (they can also text or go off the grid to have pure video chat).
Teachers can use this system as well for group chat. They can upload their own curriculum as well (the Smart Chat system configures it as multiple vector (branching script) chat or merges it with the system curriculum (focused on real life useful topics like travel, food, shopping, social chat, expressing ideas, etc.). Everything they say is comprehensible to their students, and so are all student responses.
When such a system is implemented in a manner that pays particular attention to the affective components that make human interaction so effective for creating the desire to learn (and corresponding openness to processing L2 content, in this case), we think it can be a more effective tool than bot chat.