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Keynote Speakers
Confirmed Invited
Speakers for METSMaC 2007 are:
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Mr. Douglas Butler, iCT
Training Centre, Oundle School, UK – Plenary Speaker
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Mr. David
Graddol, The English Company, UK - General Keynote
Speaker
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Dr. Stephen Heppell,
Heppell.net – Computing Keynote
Speaker
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Dr. Norman Reid,
University of Glasgow, UK – Science Keynote Speaker
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Dr. Linda Schmidt,
University of Maryland, USA – Engineering Keynote Speaker
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Dr. David Tall,
University of Warwick, UK – Mathematics Keynote Speaker
 Mr.
Douglas Butler - Plenary Speaker
What can technology add to mathematics and science teaching?
Mathematics and science have been taught very successfully for
many centuries with just a piece of chalk. This talk will argue
that maybe it has been just the more able students who really
mastered the subjects from this approach, and that there are new
opportunities now to help the less mathematically and
scientifically endowed to visualize what’s going on.
The motivational prospects of using ICT the classroom are
profound: exciting web resources and dynamic software can be
used to bring a new realism into the subjects, and to help
teachers to answer that question they all dread: why are we
learning this? Douglas will draw on experience gained from over
thirty years at the chalk-face, and a keen involvement over the
past ten years in harnessing the new technologies to help
teachers to add a new sparkle to their teaching – and to help
students get to grips with the subjects that, sadly, most adults
admit to being hopeless at when they were at school!
Douglas Butler works at the iCT Training Centre,
Oundle School, Peterborough, England. After graduating in
Mathematics and Electrical Sciences at Cambridge University, and
a spell with EMI Records, Douglas has specialized in secondary
Mathematics. He has served as Head of Mathematics at Oundle
School (Peterborough UK), and was Chairman of the MEI Schools
project, a leading UK curriculum development
project, for 6 years.
A keen pianist and dinghy sailor, he is also author of "Using
the Internet - Mathematics" (revised July 2003), the principal
author of Autograph (version 3 May 2005), and a major
contributor to "Teaching Secondary Mathematics with Technology"
(Open University, October 2004). He maintains a large web site
of educational resources in many subject areas.
In 2000 he founded the innovative iCT Training Centre, based at
Oundle School, which is now creating new resources for the
educational use of computers in mathematics, and running the TSM
(Technology in Secondary and College Mathematics) teacher
training events all over the UK and overseas. He is a frequent
speaker at international mathematics teachers' conferences, and
was the keynote speaker at the 2006 T³ Conference in Denver.
He has also run a new series of conferences on Technology for
Teaching Music.
Douglas Butler on the Web:
TSM Resources
Autograph Math
 Mr.
David Graddol, The English Company – General Keynote Speaker
How global English is changing the world
The first years of the twenty-first century have witnessed a
dramatic shift in the place of English in both the educational
world and the global economy. The traditional paradigm in which
English is taught and learnt as a foreign language is in rapid
decline. English is now treated as a basic skill rather than a
foreign language, as something which is no longer taught as an
end itself, but as a means of acquiring future knowledge and
skills. I will show how the new paradigm explains a number of
recent trends, including the emphasis on teaching English to
young learners, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning)
and changing attitudes towards native-speaking norms. I will
also explain why so many countries now seem to be engaged in an
‘educational arms race’ in their attempts to develop
English-speaking talent in the workforce and show how the
changing status of English is part of a wider shift in the
relationships between world languages.
David Graddol is Managing Director of The English Company
(UK) Ltd which provides consultancy and publishing services in
applied language studies. He is well known as a writer,
broadcaster and lecturer on issues related to global English.
David’s publications include The Future of English?, a
seminal research document commissioned by the British Council in
1997, and English Next published by the British Council
last year. David is the Managing Editor for linguistics books
and journals for Equinox Publishing and is a member of the
editorial boards of Language Planning and Language Problems
and the Journal of Visual Communication. David worked for
twenty-five years in the Faculty of Education and Language
Studies at the UK Open University and also a consultant in
e-Learning. He helped the British Council develop an eELT
strategy in the Middle East and has completed a multimedia
e-Learning project for undergraduates at an Italian university.
Elsewhere he has undertaken educational consultancies in India,
China and Latin America.
 Dr.
Stephen Heppell, Heppell.net – Computing Keynote Speaker
Twenty-first century learning: New ambition, new pedagogy, new
buildings, new opportunities
The 21st century is certainly not the 20th century, although
it is perhaps taking more than half a decade for policy and
practice to begin to reflect this. Computing and education in
the last century were characterized by the simple phrase
"building large things that did things for people": a curriculum
was delivered and wisdom was received with a curious lack of
symmetry. It was a century where content was supposedly king,
with national policies chasing learning objects, portals, VLEs
and meta-data. Yet as the 21st century unfolds we can see that
this first decade is already characterized by a more global
world of "helping people to help each other", with viral, peer
to peer, agile, collaborative and creative outputs valued above
the standards and conformity of the 20th century. Technology has
arguably brought this about, although some would argue that the
organic and collegiate world we now find ourselves in is more in
line with history than the passive couch-potato world of the
late 20th century.
Nevertheless, an education world of "helping people to help each
other" is challenging for organization, for assessment, for
institutions, for teachers and learners too. In addition
learning is finally, rather belatedly, going global too. A
National curriculum sounds anachronistic in a world of global
trading, worldwide holidays and international commerce and
communication. If key institutions like universities are
struggling to come to terms with this new century the learners
certainly have no problems. At the birth of educational
computing the tough question was just what if anything we could
manage to harness these 'new' computers to do. In 2006 it is
clear we can do anything and the much tougher question is just
what exactly do we want to do. What makes that an urgent
question to address is that the learners already know. As we
move from one-size-fits-all to personalization and, as we begin
to hear the learners' voice, this keynote explores what that
means for the future of computing, learning and policy.
Stephen Heppell spent around a quarter of a century
building Ultralab, which established an
exceptional, unique, reputation as a world leading learning
technology research centre.
He has been a professor for 18 years, including nowadays a
number of visiting chairs too,
but he now heads his own policy, research and practice
consultancy, at the heart of
a network of innovative collaborators worldwide.
Stephen chairs or sits on a number of boards and committees. For
example: a long term virtual school producing exceptional success for children
excluded from school by
circumstances or behavior; Teachers' TV a radical new TV
channel for teachers with
over 800 programs on-line, podcast and broadcast
traditionally; the government's
Building Schools for the Future working group and has a guiding
role in the BBC's
ambitiously large Digital Curriculum project, and UNESCO groups
in Europe and S E Asia.
Stephen remains a respected regular in ministerial offices (he
advises a string on governments, rich and poor), in blue-chip
and innovative boardrooms, and is frequently found in the
world's media. Current major projects include building a
Learning Metric to help governments measure what improves when
they innovate in education, a Global Learning Survey to map out
emerging trends in teaching and learning annually, a portfolio
based GCSE where each student defines their own assessment
curriculum, a student voice project to inject the learners'
authentic voice into educational designs, work on the design of
a radical new "Useum" home for William Blake's work, hosting the
annual "Be Very Afraid" DfES / BAFTA event showcasing children's
digital ingenuity, and much more besides across diverse sectors
including health, cinema, sport, architecture, policy, finance
and of course education.
Stephen is also passionate about sailboat racing.
Professor Stephen Heppell on the
Web.
 Dr.
Norman Reid - Science Keynote Speaker
A Scientific Approach to the Teaching of the Sciences: What
do we know about how students learn in the sciences and how can
we make our teaching match this to maximize performance?
In the very early 1960s, there was a revolution in many
countries in school science education, with subsequent changes
in many university courses. There was a massive updating of the
curriculum and quite radical changes in emphasis. However, very
quickly, it became apparent that all was not well: school and
university students were reporting difficulties. Considerable
research was undertaken to explore such problems and eventually,
in the 1980s, the common thread underlying all the known problem
areas became apparent: it related to the way humans process new
information. Arising from a quite enormous amount of research
evidence, a model of learning was developed. This explained and
interpreted the data but it also was used to predict how to
bring about considerable improvements.
The fundamental idea is that all humans learn in essentially the
same way: we process incoming information in ways which are well
established from research. If learning situations are designed
in line with this, then learning can be highly efficient and
effective. If learning situations are not consistent with the
way students learn, then problems can be expected. The
curriculum revolutions of the 1960s, quite inadvertently, had
brought about such inconsistencies. Many students were losing
confidence and many countries reported a drop off in numbers
electing to choose the subjects.
The research work of the 1990s started to refine the model of
learning and to use it to predict how improvements could be
made. In several major studies, these predictions were applied
to lecture-type learning, laboratory learning, to problem
solving, and to curriculum construction and presentation. The
results have been quite remarkable, with quite dramatic
improvements in performance being reported along with some
amazing changes in student attitudes.
This presentation seeks to summarize some of these results and
to show how great improvements in learning (defined in terms of
understanding) can be achieved simply by changing teaching
approaches in line with the predictions from the model. This has
been applied successfully in countries from the West, the Middle
East and the Far East.
Norman Reid has enjoyed an unusual career, having taught
chemistry at university level and chemistry and physics at
secondary school level as well as enjoying long experience in
research in science education. He was awarded the RSC education
medal in 1982 for his curriculum development at school level and
the RSC Nyholm Medal for 2006-7. He has also taught science
education at Masters level for the past ten years and has
supervised 24 PhD and 14 research masters students as well as
several postdocs. For part of his career, he took up school
management, being the headteacher of a large Scottish secondary
school for a number of years, the school being awarded the much
coveted Curriculum Award in 1992.
He came back to the excitement of science educational research
when, some nine years ago, he was invited to be the Director of
the prestigious international research centre at the University
of Glasgow: the Centre for Science Education, where he is now
Professor of Science Education.
This centre seeks to explore all aspects of the teaching and
learning of the sciences and mathematics at all levels, the
research work following a scientific paradigm. The centre has
grown and expanded its activities and Norman is often called
upon for advice and guidance from all parts of the world.
He has extensive overseas experience, having undertaken lecture
tours and led courses in many countries. He has numerous
publications to his name, including several books, and is called
upon to speak at meetings in universities throughout the UK and
beyond. He derives his greatest satisfaction when he sees others
becoming more enthusiastic about teaching and learning as well
as the ‘buzz’ when the experimental work of postgraduate
students leads to exciting new ideas and insights.
He is a family man, with four daughters and a grand-daughter and
finds his greatest joy in seeing the progress of the family in
their very varied careers.
 Dr. Linda Schmidt - Engineering Keynote Speaker
Teaching & Learning Engineering Design: A Need for Unifying
Models
Teaching engineering design is a daunting task made more
precarious by the responsibility for assessing students to
assure that they have actually learned engineering design.
Surveying engineering design texts highlights most obvious
challenge in teaching and learning design: a lack of agreement
among design theorists of a common set of first principles.
First principles are the backbone of many topics of engineering
and the foundational disciplines of mathematics and science and
form a unified structure for basic knowledge of the field. In
contrast, texts on engineering design present it as a succession
of process steps may have general commonality but differ greatly
in the areas of design for which they are suited and the
strategy to design that they employ. The result is a field with
many paradigms in need of a unifying model that students can use
to take forward into practice. Schmidt will present a process
design meta-model relying on the premise that there is value in
practically all of the design methods, models, and tool that are
the defined in the leading textbooks, exist as heuristics in
industry practice and appear in the peer-reviewed literature.
Existing design methods populate the framework of the
engineering design model in a manner that enhances student
learning. The overarching model of design is a principled
framework to use for establishing project learning strategies
and tools for assessing individual subject-matter mastery in the
context of a complex, group design project.
Linda Schmidt is an associate professor in Mechanical
Engineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering in the
University of Maryland. Her background includes over a decade of
teaching engineering design at all levels of the curriculum.
Schmidt believes that there are benefits and insights in all of
the approaches used to teach engineering design and the
challenge to instructors is to weave different design paradigm
into a coherent package for students. Accordingly, Schmidt
conducts research into design theory and methods of teaching
engineering design to improve the student learning experience
and better prepare engineering graduates for a career of design
work. Schmidt has envisioned, tested and implemented innovations
in engineering education and on the use of team projects in the
classroom. Linda Schmidt is on the
Web.
 Dr.
David Tall – Mathematics Keynote Speaker
Teachers as mentors to encourage power and simplicity in
active mathematical learning.
The teaching of mathematics is under stress around the
world. Imposed targets in many countries press teachers to train
their students to obtain higher marks on national tests. This
often leads to ‘teaching to the test’, perhaps producing higher
marks, but often with a sense of disappointment that the
students have not understood what they have learnt. This
presentation considers how flexible knowledge can be built by
focusing on significant ideas to produce rich concepts that are
both powerful to use yet simple to relate to each other.
Techniques taught sequentially may enable the individual to do
mathematics, but not necessarily to think about it, making the
mathematics grow increasingly complicated. The secret of
long-term learning therefore lies in focusing on essential ideas
to produce powerful concepts without becoming clouded by
inessential detail. I will use the notion of ‘compression of
knowledge’, which involves learning to put ideas together to
focus on the most important aspects. This will be linked to the
giving of meaning through reflection on physical activity to
conceptualize ideas such as vector, function, solution of a
differential equation, in increasingly sophisticated ways. Over
the long term, students who form rich compressed ideas are
likely to be able to build on them in a much simpler way than
students who learn procedures just to pass tests. As a
consequence, this suggests that teachers need to act as mentors
to encourage their students to build powerful ideas that link
together in coherent ways.
David Tall is Professor of Mathematical Thinking at the
University of Warwick, UK. His fundamental objective is to think
through mathematics to find its underlying simplicity at all
levels of development. He builds on his experiences as a class
teacher of eleven-year olds, analyses the way we use symbols
dually as process and concept, has developed a ‘graphic
approach’ to calculus for teenagers, led the development of
research in ‘advanced mathematical thinking’ in the transition
from school to university and has many publications including
mathematics text-books and research in the learning of
mathematics at all levels from early childhood to mathematical
adult. His research shows clearly the need for making sense of
mathematics for long-term building of powerful ideas rather than
short-term learning of procedures to score marks on
examinations. For those who learn to think meaningfully,
mathematics gets essentially simpler, while for those who learn
isolated techniques, it becomes increasingly complicated. |
