Held at the Brewery, Barbican in London in October 2009, the Handheld Learning Conference hosted many interesting speakers who presented a wide range of interesting topics relating to Handheld and Mobile Learning. Speakers included Malcolm McLaren Agent Provocateur (love him or not), Adam Blackwood from the JISC RSC South East, Learning and Teaching Scotland, Sal Cooke from JISC TechDis, Neil Milliken from Iansyst and many more wonderful presenters from around the globe.
Interestingly some of the principal speakers described themselves in their younger days as non traditional learners and conscientious objectors to education but however NOT to learning. Many and talked passionately about the possibilities of using mobile and ubiquitous technologies to support and excite our learners of today. In fact the quote of the day was ‘if your phone serves you better than a piece of paper then you are at the right conference’.
This was the conference where Iansyst/Mobispeech beat off stiff competition to win the prestigious ‘Handheld Learning Award for Innovation’ in the ‘Special Needs and Inclusion category for its CapturaTalk Software.
All of the presentations were recorded and can be viewed by following this link.
However the icing on the cake was the closing keynote delivered by Ray Kurzweil, Principal developer of Kurzweil 1000 for Blind readers and Kurzweil 3000 for those with print difficulties and more recently the KNBF (Kurzweil National Federation for the Blind) mobile device.
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries. His closing keynote speech mesmerised the conference delegates, most if not all stayed to the bitter end to hear him speak and even caused some enthusiastic attendees to miss their transport back home?
Listen to his closing keynote ‘The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century: the Impact of Education and Society’ below:
