ICALT - Day Two

For day two of the conference there was a big change to the weather - it was like a bad day in Dublin, with temp of about 14 degrees and rainy.

The highlight of today was the panel session, which discussed a competency approach to elearning - it looked at what a competency was and how we could use competencies as the primary focus of learning. This talk made me think of competency and how I defined this word, as I had always thought that competencies and knowledge are very similar, but this lead me to believe that a competency is the capacity of a person to demonstrate some skill to some level. Where knowledge does not necessarily mean there is a skill involved. A competency is been able to assess if someone can do a job.

One interesting point by a UK collegue was that there needs to be some sort of comparable framework for eLearning systems. He basically has enough of all these technologies been thrown out at conferences without the mentioning of the underlying paradigm, framework and model - and why the system was designed the way it was. I found this very interesting and intend to contact this person for further discussion