@timbuckteethnz

Well, here I am in New Zealand. Thanks to the crafty footwork of Robyn Pascoe (@serendipitynz) I'm here in Hawke Bay, Napier, to present the first keynote for the New Zealand Applied Business Education Conference (#nzabe10). It's a gathering of further and higher education business studies educators from all over New Zealand. Robin convinced conference organiser Professor Mark Neal (another Brit @markneal100) that I was just the kind of guy he needed. He asked her where she had met me, and she replied 'on Twitter'. Well, we finally met face to face last night for the first time in a Thai restaurant, in the excellent company of Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) who is also acting as a sort of minder for me. A lot of Kiwis (for that is what they call themselves) use the suffix 'nz' in the Twitter names. Perhaps I should do the same. Let's see - @timbuckteethnz. Er... no, perhaps not. Makes me sound as though I'm still jetlagged and snoring quietly in the back row of a cinema.

Anyway, I have just watched the sun rise over the placid bay and the photo above is one of the shots I took to capture the moment. New Zealand is certainly one of the most beautiful parts of the world, and it's also a happy place. Most of the people I have met so far have been bright, smiling and very friendly.

At the conference today I'm going to talk about - yes you've guessed it - social media and how it can, and will, transform many practices in further and higher education. I'm going to approach it from both perspectives - teacher and student. I want to highlight the problem that faces all teachers - how can we prepare young people for a world of work we cannot clearly describe? Change is rapid and merciless, and we simply cannot accurately predict what the job market will look like in 3 years time. All we can hope to do is examine the trends, and try to ensure that students are encouraged to be as flexible, creative and adaptable to learning as they can possibly be. It's learning to learn - and it's a lifelong deal. This means examining their expectations of education, and how this contrasts to what they actually need to succeed. How they manage their own learning through the use of social media will be important. So will the choices they make. I will discuss the range of new digital literacies they will need to acquire and master to survive. How will they make sense of their subject in an increasinglu complex connected world? How will they manage their impressions and maintain their digital identity? Avoidance of the time when they apply for their first job, and their potential employer checks them out on Google, and comes across Facebook pictures of them falling out of a nightclub at stupid o'clock - will not be standard recommended social media practices. Rather, it's a managed, professional and scholarly impression they need to garner in their personal shop windows we call social media.

So I'm enjoying my 2 days stay down here in the Hawke Bay area - and I will blog more from my tour of New Zealand as the days unfold.

@timbuckteethnz by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.