I know that I am not the only teacher in this town who is genuinely excited about the opportunity presented by the Apple Education Leadership Summit in Hong Kong this weekend. Indeed, if my Twitter network is anything to go by, it seems to have the attention of most of the technology using educators in the East Asian region.

I am really hoping that discussions are frank and open about what is really happening and not just about pockets of excellence as David Jakes calls them. By that I refer to the fact that conferences can be places where we talk about best practice in a very public forum. I know that in the past I have come away from these events feeling like my institution is a long way behind in what we are doing in classrooms only to later learn that the presentation was describing an outlier and not what was mainstream in the school despite what had been portrayed in the presentation.

I am not saying that there is anything wrong with discussion of best practice. It is only through sharing these ideas that we all move forward. The point I am trying to make is that there are a lot of teachers out there that are working hard to try to move a fairly traditional, standards focussed school with busy teachers who say that they have little time to learn “new fangled Web 2.0 tools” to slowly come onboard with open-ended, inquiry based learning that encourages creativity, collaboration and communication over worksheets and benchmark testing. Many of these teachers share frustrations and stories over their PLN to a great collaborative and knowledgable group who they can trust and who understand how it is for them at their school. A much more public forum like a conference can be seen as a dangerous place to share these frustrations, especially when you may be wearing a name tag that identifies your employer! I think that this is one of the reasons why some teachers are beginning to find their own PLN via Twitter, Blog, email and others a more effective way to share and learn than the large conference event.

As someone who is putting many hours into the setting up of a conference, I really hope that we can highlight the journey more than the technology and share in an open and honest way the challenges that come from trying to change mindsets that have always valued memorisation and reguritation onto a test paper as the core fundamentals of good education.

Photo: Serious Conversation http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcazadi/2388418126/