November 2024
#TURN 24 Berlin – impressions, ideas and learnings
Last week I attended the Turn conference in Berlin. First of all, I want to send praise to the organizers for the nice venue, tasty food, friendly and helpful staff and, of course, the interesting programme. In the run-up to the conference, I was not so pleased with the programme, since it contained – for my taste – too many AI-related contributions. However, I managed to evade those and participate in some really interesting sessions.
Here are some of my learnings and impressions:
Values are always present in higher education – whether we are consciously referring to them or not. It is necessary to put more focus on them – in teaching/learning scenarios with students or in our teams, within and outside of our institutions. I hope I will have the chance to dive deeper there in the future, I would love to develop a workshop or another format in which we get down to the nitty-gritty of the discussion about values, compare viewpoints, learn about other people’s and other culture’s values and try to find a good way to deal with controversies.
We cannot ignore emotions in teaching and learning. Especially with regard to highly emotionally charged discussions or, at worst, violent actions at campus that happen within the context of current political trouble spots. One possible way of confronting the problem could be to integrate more educational interventions about emotions in higher education. This topic will stick around and I hope I’ll find time and courage to continue exploring it.
I also participated in great sessions about open educational practices and the interplay of teaching and learning in higher education and education for sustainable development. And, of course, I also got some great off-topic tips and recommendations for podcasts, websites etc. during the coffee breaks.
My colleague Julia Weitzel was inspired by a session about podcasts and we had a quick first try with a micro audio recording (click below).
Now it’s time to process, browse through new material, develop new ideas….