From 25 to 28 July, the last Open Conference on Computer in Education was hosted in Linz, Austria, by the Austrian society for informatics and organized by IFIP Technical Committee on education. The conference entitled “Empowering Learners for Life in the Digital Age” gathered attendees from 31 countries.
During the conference it was confirmed that we face new disruptions and that there is risk that learners and teachers will get “lost in disruption”. Thus, it is important to empower learners. The conference attracted more than 150 attendees to hear 3 keynotes: Mireille Bétrancourt (Switzerland), Gerfried Stocker (Austria) and Amina Charania (India), 62 presentations and 2 symposia.
“Empowering Learners from the Digital Age” was addressed from 3 perspectives:
- Media and information literacy. Citizens’ life should not be driven by technology. Citizens should be able to master technology
- Digital agency. Citizens should be autonomous, creative and able to take initiative
- Computational thinking. We face complex problems and computer science has a lot to bring for addressing these problems
These perspectives are also challenges and teachers are key factors in this regards. Their confidence in using digital technology should be improved.
The LIP was heavily involved in the conference. Eric Sanchez co-chaired the conference with Cathy Lewin (UK) and Maud Plumettaz-Sieber participated to the doctoral consortium. Three papers were presented. Two of them are selected for publication in the post conference book to be edited by Don Passey (UK) and Rosa Bottino (IT) and published by Springer.
. Sanchez, E., Müller, S., Kramar, N., Widmer, A. Paukovics, E. Students (2018) Conducts during a Digital Game-Based Museum School Visit. OCCE 2018 (25-28 June 2018)
. Djelil, F., Sanchez, E. Investigating Learner’s Behaviours when Interacting with a Programming Microworld. An Empirical Study Based on Playing Analytics. OCCE 2018 (25-28 June 2018)
. Plumettaz-Sieber, M. (2018) Teaching Computer Science with Games. Toward Knowledge Institutionalization. OCCE 2018 (25-28 June 2018)
