Last week, on Thursday, I was able to participate in an NEC-hosted roundtable on the future of education, which took place at the O2 Arena.

The discussion at the event focused around the usage of technology in the UK education sector, from compulsory education through to higher stages of learning.

The roundtable brought together a wide spectrum of education specialists, and a student or two as well, to discuss the ways that technology can and should impact and influence teaching and learning.

Two speakers presented and sparked off the discussions: Nick Skelton, Residential & Mobile IT Manager from the University of Bristol and Ronan O’Beirne, Assistant Director of Learning Development at Bradford College.

Nick discussed how students preferred to be taught and communicated to, with most pupils stating a preference for being taught in their own style of language. Interestingly for an audience of digital natives, school children appear to value face to face interaction above that of interaction with technology.

The presentation covered the subject of higher education and the desire of higher education students to have lectures in a TV on demand structure, allowing them to fit lectures around their schedule and enabling them to pick and choose which lectures they want to attend or view. Nick then discussed the kinds of collaborative research and learning that have been enabled using online platforms and the benefits that these have brought in all areas of academia.

Following on from Nick’s presentation, Ronan opened up by considering learning from the perspective of social networking. He stated that it was important that any educational platform should enable learners who want to create content and upload work, to be able to. Students themselves are a learning resource and being able to network with other learners is a key part of the new education experience. Ronan admitted, however, that it was important with the broad quality spectrum of data sources available online that students were taught to improve their ability to trawl and filter data.

After Nick and Ronan’s presentations the conversations covered other ground, including:

· How do we make sure that we don’t push education on pupils in their online comfort zones?

· How do we personalise teaching to suit the strengths of students?

· How do you manage the balance between encouraging online learning and restricting access to unsuitable content?

· Is online learning detrimental to the development of socialising skills?

The event was a great forum for sharing ideas and, more prominently, questions. It’s something I’m definitely keen to repeat and I think all of the attendees learnt a lot from the discussions.