Now I've had time to reflect upon the EDEN Conference in Napoli last week, I can report that it was a successful conference. I met some old friends and forged closer collaborations, and also met some new and interesting colleagues, whom I will be working with in the future - this a real strength of EDEN - bringing together e-Learning professionals and enabling them to network.
Although many of the 24 papers I attended were fairly average, some challenged and positively fuelled ideas for me. I'm thinking about the Web 2.0 sessions, which came under the heading of 'Emerging New Media and technology'. What was good about these sessions was that they all dovetailed into each other. Tom Wambeke's (KATHO, Belgium) session entitled 'Educational Blogging: in search of a general taxonomy', concluded that folksonomies were less hierarchical and more appropriate measures of blogs. Deborah Everhart (Georgetown University, USA) followed, with a session on social bookmarking, using Blackboard MLE tools. I followed as the third speaker, with my session on wikis and collaborative learning, and the session was capped off by an overview of social software from Antonio Huertas (Open University of Catalonia, Spain) who dealt with 'Wikis, blogs and tagging in education'. The session was packed with over 150 people in a room designed for 120. Obviously a popular session, which was gratifying for us as speakers, and the questions were relevant and searching. Kept us on our toes...
Other sessions dealing with Web 2.0 in this series proved equally popular, and the Sala Archimede was positively bursting at the seams. Papers on podcasting, mobile technologies and Multi-player Games along with a super paper entitled 'How to cope with the complexity of Web 2.0 environments' from Paula de Waal (University of Padova, Italy) kept the creative ideas and questions flowing, and sent the delegates away with new ideas and tips to try out with their own students. Next year's EDEN will be held between 11-14 June, in Lisbon, Portugal. I hope to see you there....
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