The Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre recently hosted the EduTECH conference. Billed as 'Australia's largest education technology event', EduTECH brought together thousands of delegates representing teachers and leaders from across every aspect of the Australian education system.

So, what happens when you put over 2000 people who have the power to effect change in a room with some of the most celebrated minds in education theory? You get some big ideas...

How should we approach teaching?

The opening keynote was given by Daniel Pink, former speechwriter for Al Gore and author of several books regarding motivation. Pink laid out the results of university studies that had measured engagement and motivation in both work and learning environments, with some interesting results:

Students who are offered a reward for producing creative work are less likely to return to that work when no reward is offered

Artists tend to produce more creative work when they are not making commissioned work, as they are free from constraints and expectations

Presenting teachers with financial rewards for raising test scores had no corresponding result in teacher effectiveness

Pink went on to explain what DOES motivate us - autonomy, mastery and purpose - and challenged everyone in the room to create learning experiences that offered these to students. He closed by offering examples of companies that flourished by providing their employees time to be creative and self-directed.

The notion of providing learning experiences that mimic 'non-commissioned work' was echoed by Ewan McIntosh, CEO of the NoTosh consultancy firm. McIntosh highlighted some key characteristics that businesses in the creative and technology fields want from future employees; curiosity, willingness to 'find a way', and the ability to find problems as well as solve them. This led to a discussion of using the design thinking process popular in creative fields to approach classroom learning.

The idea McIntosh offered that really resonated was a new taxonomy for questions in the classroom; are the questions 'Googleable' or 'Non-Googleable?' With the internet making so much information available to anyone with a web browser, it is the ambiguous 'Non-Googleable' questions that can lead to rich classroom discussion and require students to examine their learning, rather than just collecting and presenting facts.

I also have to mention a piece of low-tech 'hardware' that I glimpsed during this talk - Thinking Dice. Oversized dice that have Higher Order Thinking questions on each side, these seem like an amazing way to generate robust discussion in classrooms in an engaging and interactive fashion.

Who owns the learning?

"Technology" Alan November declares "is currently being used as a $1000 pencil". November is one of the gurus of technology and education, and he has a bone to pick with the way it is currently being used. He discussed how modern schools were failing to use the technology that they had available by simply reproducing the lessons, assignments and assessments that existed in the pre-digital world. Some of the alternative ideas he put forward included:

Enabling students to understand their teacher's learning process through sites like online bookmarking tool Diigo.com

Reconfiguring the first week of school to establish global connections using free VOIP technology like Skype

Rethinking day-to-day classroom activities and 'flipping' the classroom via online video to place the onus for learning directly on students

Another concept November asked us to reconsider was the idea of 'digital literacy', a term usually connected to students effectively using a set of digital tools. November came at this from another angle - the notion of digital linguistics. He demonstrated using search operators to generate Google results far more nuanced than many people thought possible, and interrogated URLs to reveal hidden details about 'trusted' online sources.

Finally, November also raised an idea about assessment that generated a susurrus of excitement and apprehension; deliberately setting exams so challenging that students must use the internet, which asks them to display digital literacy in an assessable context and demolishes the 'memorise and regurgitate' model of test-taking we're all familiar with.

Coming at the problem from another angle was Gary Stager, who sits somewhere between enfant terrible and agent provocateur on the spectrum of teacher educators. Moments before Stager started his talk, I heard a delegate remark "we're seeing speaker after speaker talking about 21st century teaching using 20th century technology". Stager must have been listening - he opened by providing an email address you could ping to get a set of digital notes for his talk, which removed the need for text-heavy slides.

Stager is an active proponent of maker culture - a recent-ish evolution of DIY culture which marries technology with a hands-on, craft-based aesthetic - and made frequent references to Maker Faires and Make Magazine as opportunities for students to reclaim a sense of invention in learning.

Stager also argued for minimalism in both creating and undertaking projects with students. His suggestions included creating learning prompts that had both brevity and ambiguity to "leave room for student creativity", and offered a lean project design model of "Think - Make - Improve". He also did something I've never heard another teacher do - refer to the young people he works with as 'colleagues' - which has forced a small paradigm change in the way I consider my students.

Part 2 of this article, Education opportunities and the NBN at EduTECH, can be read here.

William Cohen is a secondary teacher living in Sydney. He is the National Education Content Manager for Red Apple Education and travelled to EduTECH as a delegate and speaker.