Day one of the ULearn07 conference began today in Auckland in style with 1254 delegates from all over New Zealand, 200 workshop presenters – and including 100 early childhood educators!

Ewan Mcintosh was the opening keynote speaker, and presented a fascinating talk covering a variety of aspects relating to the use of ICT in education. For me there were two things that stood out in what he spoke about. The first was the significance of audience in terms of learning and achievement and how the online technologies are providing a far greater reach in terms of audience, and the second was the potential contribution to the assessment process that many of the web2.0 technologies are enabling.

Ewan has written a bit about his thoughts from the conference, including a summary of links to information relating to his key points on his edu.blogs.com blog.

Reference to games and gaming featured quite a bit in his keynote, and Ewan shared with me the link to the recently published Consolarium website, published by the Scottish Centre for Games and Learning, a part of Learning Technologies Scotland (LTS). There are some wonderful clips in the sharing practice section of students explaining why they like games and what they believe they are learning from playing them.