Mike Keppell is the new president of ASCILITE (that’s the Australasian Society for the use of Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education), an organisation with a long and honorable history of promoting improved uses of technology in higher education down under, and whose most recent conference we have done some coverage of in another forum.

Mike is pretty excited about lots of the devices and systems that were gathered together at Macworld, because they promise to make a massive impact on the way we go about our teaching and learning in universities. In particular, increasing mobility and interoperability mean that we will of necessity become much more learner-centric, especially as learners acquire enhanced capacities to collect content on the fly, and indeed to generate their own content.

In this podcast Mike speaks to an equally excited Allan Carrington, for whom, of course, the question of how we disseminate and implement the visionary ideas inspired by Macworld is never too far away.

Allan Ellis, from Southern Cross University in Lismore, Australia, likes the sense of innovation that pervades IDG Macworld, and he talks in this interview about the ways in which education needs to change in response to some of the technological developments in evidence here. Allan feels that devices such as the iPhone could turn around the way we have traditionally conducted assessment in higher education.

No longer need students be locked away in a room scrawling in individual examination books; they could rather be out there in the real world, working with real world data, and collaboratively solving real world problems. And devices like the iPhone could allow us to track their performance and assess them appropriately

Allan was interviewed by Allan Carrington in one of the cavernous spaces of San Francisco’s Moscone Centre.

Background photo from Flickr.com: uploaded on September 7, 2008 by Pyrii