Summit to look forward to

I'm flying off to Barcelona in a few weeks - I have been invited to attend the Open EduTech Summit at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya by Professor Albert Sangra, whom I last met when we both presented keynote speeches at the Polish Virtual Universities Conference in Warsaw, back in June. UoC have booked me in for three nights at the Hotel Catedral, 5 minutes from las Ramblas and the Cathedral, Gaudie's unfinished masterpiece. I'm going to be talking about best practice in Web 2.0 for education at the event - the blurb runs like this:

"A small group of around 30 open, educational and technology experts will get together to share best practices, as the basis for discussions to help identify future education and technology needs and trends for next-generation educational and learning environments. The meeting’s main objective is to build a community by bridging communities (technology, pedagogy, policy) and provide an opportunity for collective collaboration. Some of the sessions will be videotaped and shared with the community. The Open EdTech meeting will also generate a white paper that targets the big challenges discussed during the meeting. The Open EdTech meeting aims to become an annual meeting, hosted by one the meeting’s participants, to ensure that continuity is brought to the discussions".

These are lofty ambitions indeed, and I feel flattered to have been invited to attend as one of the 35 or so e-learning 'experts'. A look down the list of others invited reveals some very big names, and then there is little old me in amongst them, feeling like a chihuahua in with all the Rottweilers. It will be interesting rubbing shoulders with the likes of Sugata Mitra (Newcastle University), Neil Selwyn (University of London), Mark Bullen (British Columbia), and Vijay Kumar (MIT) and I am certain I will learn a lot from them. These blog pages will be the first to know...