Overall Theme:

What Learning Means

Theme 1: Designs of Meaning

• 'New basics': what do you need to learn today?
• New tools for learning: online, multimedia and digitally mediated learning.
• Learning about technology.
• Crossing the digital divide.
• Reading and writing since the computer: the internet and multimedia.
• Literacy and literacies: new perspectives and approaches
• The visual and the verbal: multiliteracies and multimodal communications.

Theme 2: Designs of Learning

• Blurring the institutional boundaries: where will we learn in the future?
• New and old places of learning: home schooling, community schooling, charter schools, no school.
• New economy and future work: the nature of the learning organisation.
• Proliferation in the sites of learning: Lifelong and lifewide learning, from early childhood to retirement.
• Investment in education: public or personal economics?
• University education in transition.
• The changing shape of vocational education and training.
• Academic, workplace and community literacies.

Theme 3: Global Diversity, Local Diversity

• Identity, belonging and the cultural conditions of learning.
• Individual and social learning: tensions in a world of difference.
• Diversities in the classroom: cultural, gender, (dis)ability.
• International, global, multicultural and cross-cultural education.
• Equity, participation and opportunity: addressing disadvantage in education.
• Education for first nations or indigenous peoples.
• 'Mainstream' and 'minority': redefining the terms.
• Languages learning: 'foreign', ESL, bilingual, multilingual, global.

Theme 4: Learning Paths

• Pedagogies for a world in flux.
• Intelligence or ability, competence or capacity: what are the ends of education?
• Creating learning pathways: linking different institutional settings and institutional learning with community and 'real world' learning.
• Defining and measuring learning outcomes: dilemmas in assessment and evaluation Teachers' work: how is it changing?
• Educational leadership and management: how to create institutional change.