Pelecon flies higher

Those of you who have ever attended a Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference, or even followed from afar via the social media channels will know that Pelecon is an extraordinary event. Since attaining international conference status and extending its programme to 3 days, Pelecon has become one of the must-attend European learning technology conferences on the calendar. The event attracts learning technologists, lecturers, researchers, teachers, learning professionals, health and medical staff, private trainers, and just about anyone who is interested in the very latest in digital pedagogies, literacies and technologies. In previous years delegates have enjoyed listening to high profile and diverse keynote speakers such as Stephen Heppell, Keri Facer, Gilly Salmon, Graham Attwell, Sherry Terrell, Jane Hart, Josie Fraser and Alec Couros.

This year the conference takes place between 10-12 April. For 2013, we have lined up a veritable feast of leading speakers, all of whom are featured on the Pelecon conference website, and this year promises to push the boundaries even further than before.

#pelc13 is set in the delightful South West coastal English city of Plymouth. The surrounding Devon countryside is stunning as it unfolds in springtime, the towns and villages are steeped in history (the Mayflower Steps and Plymouth Hoe are a must for all tourists to visit) and the culture is rich. The Conference social events including a Wednesday evening Teachmeet, are guaranteed to be fun, entertaining and engaging.

This year the Pelecon Conference dinner will return once again to the visually stunning surroundings of the National Marine Aquarium. Located in Sutton Harbour in the historic Plymouth Barbican area, the Aquarium is the largest in the UK, and is one of the premier tourist attractions in the South West of England. Delegates who enjoyed the conference dinner at previous Plymouth eLearning Conference events in 2009 and 2010 were unanimous in expressing their praise for the evening.
The Dinner starts on Thursday evening, April 11th, at 7.30 pm with welcome drinks and an exclusive tour of the entire aquarium by official guides. Delegates can watch as the sun sets over Plymouth while fishing boats and other marine vessels arrive and depart from nearby Sutton Harbour. The three course dinner will be served in the Atlantic Reef area of the Aquarium, where diners can watch the sharks and other large fish swimming in one of the largest glass tanks in Europe, whilst they enjoy their meals. The company will be great, the food will be excellent, and the live music will be splendid. The price for the evening isn't bad either - at only £40.00 per head. The bar will be open until 11 pm, and then afterwards, the nearby Barbican and Coxside watering holes will be sure to offer a warm welcome to any delegates who wish to linger to explore Plymouth's nightlife a little more. The Conference Dinner has only one drawback - there will only be about 110 dining places available at the Aquarium, so please book your place for this exclusive event soon to avoid disappointment!

The Pelecon Conference organising committee look forward to joining with delegates at the Conference Dinner at the National Marine Aquarium. We hope you can attend the conference.

Photo by Jose Luis Garcia

Pelecon flies higher by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Create, connect, collaborate

With Pelecon (the 7th Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference) only a few weeks away, preparations are almost complete. We are very excited about this year's event, with its lineup of world class speakers. As many readers will already know, we rebranded the event this year. With a new logo and website, we are sure Pelecon will retain its reputation as a friendly and stimulating event that showcases advances in technology enhanced learning. We believe Pelecon provides an excellent meeting place for those involved in promoting the use of learning technology across all sectors of education and training. Set in an idyllic part of the South West of England, we hope Pelecon is now established on the annual international conference schedule. There is still plenty of time to register for the event, and a chance to hear firsthand the thoughts of leading thinkers in the field including Keri Facer, Alec Couros, Jane Hart, Simon Finch, Leigh Graves Wolf, Helen Keegan and David Mitchell.

Pelecon has some secret weapons. Our social media team of Oliver Quinlan, Edd Bolton and Jason Truscott have been hard at work behind the scenes creating a host of social media platforms to promote the pre-conference discussions and raise awareness of the event.

We set up a Pelecon Twitter account which is a regular broadcast channel for all the latest news and views on the conference as we draw closer to the day. The account already has in excess of 200 followers, and is growing its reach daily.

Our Pelecon blog already hosts links to abstracts of all of the accepted papers for the conference this year, and an open invitation for anyone to post comments and questions to any of the speakers at the event. We want to encourage dialogue before the conference starts. The Pelecon blog will also feature regular posts from the team, including interviews with speakers, news and other updates as the conference progresses.

The Pelecon YouTube channel features videos of previous talks given by our invited conference speakers, and other associated content related to the event.

We have a Pelecon Lanyrd site where you can see all those attending, and where those who cannot attend can track the conference as it progresses.

The Pelecon Flickr site hosts images of previous conferences, and has a facility for delegates to add further content from their own personal photo collections related to the conference.

There is even a Pelecon official Facebook event page (but we won't talk too much about that...) and a LinkedIn page too!

The official hashtag for the conference is #pelc12 which is already being used in the run-up to the event. There are also session specific hashtags such as #TMpelecon which will be used during the Pelecon Teachmeet.

We think we have the social media angle well covered for the conference, but if you think we are missing a trick, I would like to hear from you.


Create, connect, collaborate by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Wise crowds (and stupid mobs)

I'm reading James Surowiecki's excellent book 'The Wisdom of Crowds' at the moment. I was particularly taken by his introduction in which he relates the story of Sir Francis Galton, and his discovery, against his own assumptions, that collective intelligence not only exists, it is generally correct in its judgements. Galton's experiment was based on a 'guess the weight of an ox' competition in which 800 people participated. His statistical analysis of the results showed that as a collective mean score, the people guessed accurately to within one pound of the actual weight. This discovery of the people's collective ability ('democracy' as he called it) to make decisions that are of the most benefit to the people, attracted me for a number of reasons. Firstly, Galton made his discovery in a farm show in Plymouth, England (my home town). Secondly, Galton was one of the UK's first psychologists (I trained as a psychologist too), and although I disagree profoundly with many of his ideas about intelligence, which led him to champion eugenics, I can't help but admire the way he trailblazed his ideas about human behaviour, forensic psychology and statistics long before other, more famous psychologists. Thirdly, his scientific integrity is inspirational. Against his own deep seated beliefs, and in opposition to his previous scientific studies, the results of his 'West of England' regional fare research showed that in fact, when a crowd is asked to make a decision, they usually get it right.

James Surowiecki goes on to argue that the principles behind this idea can explain everyday activities including the stock market, democratic voting processes, gambling and even the fact that when you go the a convenience store at 2 am for a carton of milk, there is one there waiting for you. The wisdom of crowds even explains the phenomenon of Web 2.0 and social networking tools, and specifically, as we have long understood, it defines why web services such as Wikipedia and Google Search have become so popular and accurate over the last few years. Surowiecki argues that in many cases, the judgements of larger diffuse crowds of people is actually more accurate than the decision making of smaller, more elite groups. I have clung to this ideal in the development of many of my recent teacher education programmes, into which I have incorporated collaborative and co-operative online tools such as wikis, so that students can create, share and negotiate their learning related content.

If you haven't read Surowiecki's book yet (it was first published in 2004), do try to get hold of it. You can purchase it quite cheaply on Amazon (another wisdom of crowds example) and I promise you, it is a very good read. It's also, dare I say it, an effective foil to Andrew Keen's book 'The Cult of the Amateur' which warns against the dangers of Wikipedia and similar web repositories, describes what I can loosely term as 'stupidity of mobs'. If anyone has read both books and cares to provide a valued judgement on them, the comments box below is ready for you...

Image source

Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Community, privacy and identity

Day one of the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference was very successful, and as usual, a very very long day. Our keynote speaker Josie Fraser did not disappoint with an eloquent account of communities, privacy and identity on the web. Josie talked about a number of potent issues around engagement with social media, and cited a number of key contributions to our understanding from the likes of danah boyd, Scott Wilson and Nicola Whitton. The ensuing question time lasted a full 30 minutes, during which we explored these issues thoroughly. Time does not permit me here to go into details, but a fuller report will follow, and there are of course, other, much more erudite commentators than me blogging as we speak. I will try to find their links and join them to this post.

Numbers of attendance at this year's event are slightly down on last year, with around 140 delegates present. Highlights so far have included two visits to the Vision Immersion Theatre, and excellent sessions, from amongst others, Simon Finch (Northern Grid for Learning), Dan Roberts (Saltash.net) and Tony McNeill (Kingston University). It's unfair perhaps to single these out, because the standard of papers and presentations at this year's event have been particularly good, but for me, trying to get around to all the papers, these three stood out as exceptional in both content and impact. More on this also when I have more time...

Today, Day 2, is dawning bright and clear, and the weather will hold. We are all looking forward to our second keynote speech, from Dave White, and various discussions and papers from delegates. We will close off today with a streamed plenary session where Josie Fraser, Dave White, Thomas Fischer (Erlangen-Nuremburg University, Germany) and I will tackle questions from all-comers. Should be fun.

Taking steps

It's jolly decent of the IGI Global folks to promote my blog and academic profile right here on their home page. Several of my chapters have appeared in recent IGI books, and I'm getting some visitor traffic from their website direct to my blog now. They have an acceptable (won't scare the kids or evoke emetic responses) picture of me up on their site, and a nice resume of my academic activities. I would like to point out one thing however. My workplace - the University of Plymouth - is not located in the USA, it's in England.

When I went to the USA for a trip about 10 years ago, a young lad asked me where I was from. I said 'Plymouth.' 'Gee', he replied, 'is your home town named after the one we have in Minnesota?' 'Er...', I said, slightly nonplussed, 'I think Plymouth, England was first by one or two years...'

Look, if you're ever in my neighbourhood, I will take you to the very spot where the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for the New World in the Mayflower in 1620. Well I would, if I was of the female variety. (It's no more than a mile away from where I'm sat typing this. It's in the ladies toilet of a Barbican pub about 30 metres back from the so called Mayflower Steps). The picture above is of the fake steps, which were put there to thrill the tourists. They can't possibly be the original steps, because back in the time of the Mayflower, the water was several metres back from where it is today. All that remains of the original steps (so I am told) is a flagstone on the floor of the ladies lavatory in the Admiral MacBride pub.

See? You get an education coming to this site! Oh, and by the way.... this is my 500th blogpost. Ain't I the busy one, huh?

Image source

Limitless learning

We're holding another conference in Plymouth next year! The theme for the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference is Learning without Limits - we will address the notion of anytime, anyplace learning. The conference will highlight the growing number of contexts in which learning can take place, and how technology is playing its role. PeLC10 will take place on April 8-9, 2010 in the iconic Roland Levinsky Building on the main University of Plymouth campus. We will focus on the challenges and opportunities brought by formal and informal learning, social networks and personal technologies, mobile learning and innovative on-campus education, virtual and real teaching & learning scenarios, and how teachers and learners are harnessing the power and potential of new and emerging technologies. Our two keynote speakers are Josie Fraser and Donald Clark - the conference website holds further details of costs, joining instructions etc.

As in previous years the conference welcomes proposals for papers, workshops, symposia and demonstrations from across all sectors of education and training, focused on topic areas such as:

Emerging Learning Technologies
Classroom Learning Technology
New Pedagogies and Practices
Mobile Learning, Ambient and Pervasive Technologies
Games for Learning
3D Multi User Virtual Environments
Social Web and Social Networking
Multi-Media
Digital Literacy
Digital Identity

We hope to see you in Plymouth for 2010. The deadline for proposals (300 word abstracts) is 15th January. Get your proposal in soon, and .... book early!

Join the Pelican Fringe

Image Source

The 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference

The 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference (8-9 April, 2010) will examine the theme of e-learning in a time of change, and will challenge notions of traditional boundaries, learning spaces and roles. We will focus on new practices, new technologies, new environments and new learning. There will be primary, secondary and tertiary education threads. We invite papers on the digital divide, e-learning methods and case studies, mobile and pervasive technologies, digital games, multi-user virtual environments, informal learning, new classroom technologies (PDAs interactive whiteboards, etc), personal learning environments, visual media (videoconference, digital photography), e-portfolios and social software (wikis, blogs, podcasting, etc). The event will once again be held in the spectacular Roland Levinsky Building, on the University of Plymouth main campus.

At the 2009 event over 200 delegates from 17 countries participated over the two days, which saw 2 keynotes, and more than 80 demonstrations, papers, and workshops. Our keynote speakers for the 2010 event are Josie Fraser and Donald Clark.

Josie Fraser is well known in the field of social media and learning, and writes regularly about her research on her blog SocialTech. Josie spreads her time and energy across a wide variety of social media/networking spaces, where she can be found experimenting with all manner of emerging technologies. At the ALT-C 2008 Conference, she received the prestigious Learning Technologist of the Year award and continues to be at the forefront of learning technology development. At this year’s conference Josie will talk about how social media can be used to liberate learners and how we might attain learning without limits in a truly anytime, anyplace context.

Donald Clark was CEO and one of the original founders of Epic Group plc, which established itself as the leading company in the UK e-learning market, floated on the Stock Market in 1996 and sold in 2005. Describing himself as 'free from the tyranny of employment', he is now a board member of Ufi (LearnDirect), LINE Communications, Caspian Learning, Brighton Festival, and a school governor. He has produced over 40 papers, dozens of book reviews and many articles on e-learning. Donald has also won many awards for the design and implementation of e-learning, notably the 'Outstanding Achievement in e-learning Award'. He is a regular speaker at national and international conferences and has won Best Speaker awards at several conferences. Donald is also a regular (and controversial) blogger on e-learning!

On behalf of the local organising committee, I invite you to join us in April 2010 for what promises to be another excellent, enjoyable and thought provoking event.