Educators from the five nations gathered in Reading on 22-23 November 2012 for the 13th annual conference. This year, the conference was themed around the topic of Digital Citizenship.
The event featured a range of workshops and guest speakers designed to stimulate discussion, introduce new ideas and ways of thinking and encourage participants to try out different kinds of digital and communications technologies.
The aims of the conference were to discuss the potential for information and communications technology to encourage new ways of engaging with Citizenship learning, explore these technologies as potential teaching tools, and promote the use of these tools to support dialogue and learning across country partnerships. Click here for the programme.
The topic of Digital Citizenship is an umbrella term that can include pedagogy, civic participation and democratic engagement as well as other areas related to Citizenship education where technology is used to enhance teaching and learning.
Key questions raised at the conference included Can Twitter be an effective teaching tool? How can we safeguard students online? How can we engage those students who don't have access to the same technological tools as their peers? How can we make democratic engagement online a meaningful activity and not just tokenistic? These discussions will certainly continue in the months to come, both in person and online.
Participants' use of Twitter during the conference Throughout the conference, participants used Twitter and it was great to see some brand new tweeters get involved as a result! By creating the hashtag stream #5NN (still searchable on Twitter), a collaborative running commentary on events emerged, allowing conference attendees to share their thoughts and discuss the topics of the moment with others.
