Second Life at Educa

Second Life is much in evidence at Online Educa Berlin this year, much as I expected. Not only was our panel session - along with Helen Keegan, Graham Attwell, Steven Warburton, David White and Dai Griffith - very well attended with almost 300 delegates present in Potsdam I - but yesterday, an inspiring keynote by Sian Bayne, of the University of Edinburgh, demonstrated clearly to all those present how SL could be successfully deployed to create purposeful and open virtual learning spaces for Higher Education. Bayne was eloquent in her description of the process, highlighted many of the pedagogical issues that had emerged from creation of the space, and even demonstrated a live in-world visit.

Other sessions have also featured Second Life and have focused on other Multi-User Virtual Learning Environments - World of Warcraft has been featured, and the delegates here are under no allusion that MUVEs and other 3-D Virtual worlds are going to be hot agenda items for future e-learning conferences. Our little team are certainly planning some more jaunts into this field and will be preparing papers for other events in the coming year.

Chalk and cheese

The dialogue is hotting up here at Online Educa Berlin. Yesterday there was a clash of opinion between two of the keynote speakers. Andrew Keen, author of the infamous anti-Web 2.0 book Cult of the Amateur, failed to make many friends with his somewhat embittered attack on bloggers, Wikipedia and user generated content. As I have said before on this blog, there is irony in his statement that user generated content is simply a whole load of monkeys with typewriters - he publicised his own blog during his talk. Looking distinctly nervous prior to his presentation, once up on his hind legs, he launched into a diantribe against 14 year olds whose opinions are valued equally well as Harvard professors. He urged delegates to determine the difference between opinion and established truth - whatever that is. Andrew was clearly here to sell his book - he shamelessly mentioned it no fewer than a dozen times during his half hour speech, and immediately left for a book signing session.

By complete contrast, Graham Attwell, who stepped in at the last minute to replace a keynote speaker who failed to turn up, launched a blistering attack on the perspective of Andrew Keen. Self proclaimed as Andrew Keen,s nightmare, Attwell argued that the wisdom of the crowd is exactly that - knowledge that can be trusted because so may individuals are involved in the process of editing and strengthening the content on Wikipedia and that there are expert blogs out there that are trustworthy. If we fail to capitalise on Web 2.0, said Attwell, then we would miss a huge opportunity to transform learning and bring it screaming into the 21st Century.

I will leave you to decide who you think is the chalk, and who is the cheese....

Ich bin ein Berliner

I love Berlin, and cannot believe it has taken me so long to come back here. It is truly magical at and around Christmas time, with many of the trees in the streets lit up with lights. I am at Online Educa and have just witnessed one of the best keynotes I have ever seen. Let me attempt to encapsulate some of the content from the first session.

The first keynote was presented by Professor Sugata Mitra, seen above left, who is an Indian national who now works at the University of Newcastle. He reported on a 5 year long and ongoing project to place computers in Indian villages. He set up videocameras to record children as they interacted with the computer and each other, in what has been dubbed the Hole in the Wall project. Amazingly, he showed evidence that not only do the children teach themselves to use the computers, they also learned English as a result of their use of browsers such as Google. To cap it all, he amazed the 2000 plus delegates with the question - does language matter... and showed evidence that not only had the children learnt to speak English - they had also learned complex and difficuly concepts such as genetics, and could answer questions when prompted.

More to follow as time and space allow, but for now, goodnight from a very chilly and festive Berlin!

Making a MUVE

If it's Wednesday, it must be Berlin. I'm off in a few hours to catch that old orange and white bird again, this time to the heart of Germany, to speak at Online Educa Berlin. It's been over 8 years since I last spoke at Educa, when I gave a live demonstration of the then fairly new web streaming kit that multimedia company PictureTel had introduced. I did a live video link to London and spoke about the pedagogical potential of the system. On a wing and a prayer, the whole session went perfectly - and delegates crammed into the room to see it and ask questions. And of course, streaming media and videoconferencing are now a part of the fabric of many education institutions.

Online Educa is a much bigger affair now than it was in 1999, and most probably the largest e-learning event in Europe. I'm on a specialist invited panel with Graham Attwell, Steve Warburton, Helen Keegan and David White, all of whom are probably a lot more expert than I in the ways of Second Life. But, I will give it my best shot, and tell those assembled about our sexual health education and public information SIM. We will of course, be talking about whether MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments), like previous innovations, will one day become common place in education. Time now to make a MUVE...

A greek tragedy

I'm afraid for me ICODL has been a bit of a damp squib. Greece brought the world the marathon, tragedy and democracy. This conference has all three.

Let's start with the venue - an interesting one. The 'Multicenter Appollon' does just what it says on the tin. It's an old refurbished factory deep in the heart of an industrial suburb of Pireaus. The taxi driver was confused - didn't know where it was, and circled around endless narrow backstreets hanging with washing and riddled with alley cats, navigating hair-raisingly around double parked cars, and narrowly avoiding pedestrians. Eventually he drew us up outside a large square two storey building. 'Here!' he gabbled in fluent English (better than my Greek... 'afta!'). We paid him and walked straight into a Post Office. Hmmm ... more confusion. 'Round the back' we were told, we would find the exhibition and conference centre. We walked into an area of controlled chaos and found ourselves at the registration desk for the conference venue, in amongst about 300 ancient sculptures on plinths, and dozens of paintings hanging from the walls.

The conference eventually started. Its title: 'Forms of Democracy in Education: Open Access and Distance Education' was promising, but that's where it ended. The first 2 keynotes and most of the welcomes were delivered in speed Greek. Then Alan Tait (UK Open University), followed by Michael Moore (Penn State University), gave a couple of retrospectives on distance education. Michael also talked about his new museum of the history of distance education which he has established in Second Life. 'There's not a lot there at the moment' he declared, but more would be added he promised. Presumably when distance education gets some more history in.... Call me cynical, but although I think retrospectives are OK in small doses (I have one of my own for Tim's sake), I would rather look forward to what is happening now in, dare I say it - e-learning - than gaze at the covers of old books that were published 20 years ago. I like Alan and Michael a lot, and greatly respect their vast experience and achievements, but tragically, their keynote speeches both failed to grasp the opportunity to spell out a new agenda of democracy and freedom in learning.

Paul Clark (UK Open University) gave a speech that was more in keeping with current events in e-learning, and he opened the debate on social software and its potential to transform educational experiences. Democratic forms of learning are premised on openness and freedom of speech - wikis and blogs and other Web 2.0 software have it in spades. The rest of the conference, I'm afraid, was organised badly with sessions going on from 0900-2015 each day (a real marathon), the content was generally very poorly presented, and throughout most of the 14 papers I listened to on the first day, I was left with a single question... so what? Over two thirds of the papers were in Greek, and the rest were in broken English. I eventually lost heart. My own paper was scheduled in a session of 6 papers starting at 1830. 'It's the graveyard slot' moaned my co-presenter Mark Townsend. He was right. Needless to say, very few people were still around at this time, as most had gone off to get their souvlaki and chips.

To cap it all - and here, non-smokers will cringe - the whole place was continually filled with a fug of cigarette smoke - there was no designated smoking area in the centre, because smoking was allowed just about anywhere. Not a breath of fresh air for an asthmatic (me) but party time for all the chain smokers on the delegate list.

I will go back to Athens again one day, but it won't be for ICODL.

Greece monkey

I'd forgotton just how chaotic Athens is! It has been 19 years, 6 months and 14 days (approximately) since my last vist here, and they still haven't repaired that old building on top of the rock. There are cars everywhere, double and even triple parked, and they come at you from all angles, complete with hordes of mopeds that sound like a demented swarm of wasps. Packs of dogs (friendly mostly) roam the streets or kip out on the sidewalk, and people just step over them. There are unguarded potholes and excavations everywhere you walk, so you need to keep your wits about you, and your nostrils are continually assailed with several aromas all at one time.

I'm staying in the Port of Pireaus (pronounced 'Pirry Ass' by the locals and they should know) and the weather is clear, blue skied and about 18-20 degrees - very pleasant after 6 degrees at Gatwick yesterday. It's like a British summer (remember those?) I love the Mediterranean style of life - old boys sat out in ricketty chairs playing with their worry beads, ornate wrought iron roadside barriers, the trees heavy with oranges, greenery down every street I walk, and the laissez faire attitude of everyone - 'no problem'....

I'm here to speak at the ICODL conference (on Open and Distance Learning), which opens tomorrow in some strange part of Athens that no-one seems to know the location of. My colleague Mark Townsend from the University of Plymouth will be flying out to join me tonight, and there's safety in numbers. The hotel clerk last night was very surly, didn't crack a smile, and ignored most of my questions. There's going to be a battle! Going off now to spy out the best and most rustic tavernas... Κύριε ἐλέησον!

The old and the new

I'm flying out to Athens this afternoon in a big orange and white bird, to attend the International Conference on Open and Distance Learning (ICODL) which is being hosted by the Hellenic Open University and the University of Cyprus. Keynote speakers include Michael Moore, Alan Tait and Paul Clark, all veterans of the Distance Education model of learning. It may turn out to be a clash of the old and the new.

The conference blurb states:
'Distance education is one of the most talked-about topics today in higher education and corporate training. This conference, which will provide the latest information on distance education programs, processes, packages, and protocols, is geared to both experienced professionals and interested newcomers to distance education and online learning who hail from a variety of work sectors, including higher education, continuing education, business, government, professional associations, and nonprofit organizations'.

Well, I'm not so sure that distance education is still a viable term, with so much blurring of the boundaries between home, work and school. Is there any 'distance' worth talking about any more? Technologies are becoming ever more personal, pervasive and ubiquitous, and a great deal more transparent, and I'm wondering how long we will continue to talk about a paradigm which may have seen its day. Never the less, I'm going with an open mind, to hear what people are saying, to see if there is anything new in 'distance education'. I'm also presenting my own paper on e-learning to support nomadic forms of learning where students enjoy the same quality of provision, screen topography and equivalency of support, wherever and whenever they are. Will report from the conference when I get the chance.

Trains and planes ...

I'm off up to Birmingham tomorrow, to meet with the rest of the Programme Committee for ALT-C 2008. Next year's ALT Conference will take place between 9-11 September at the University of Leeds. It's already shaping up to be a good conference, with keynote speakers including:

• David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for One Laptop per Child, and Head of the Future of Learning Research Group at MIT Media Lab;
• Dr Itiel Dror, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southampton;
• Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation.

You can download a flyer for the conference here. Tomorrow, we will begin to choose the theme speakers for the event, and go through the protocols for reviewing papers, workshops, etc. I hope the train ride back home will be more comfortable than last year - got back to Plymouth, collapsed with chest pains and ended up in hospital! (Between you and me, I think the buffet car may have had something to do with it....).

I had to take a month off work, which I couldn't afford to do this time... I'm off to speak at ICODL in Athens on Wednesday where I will meet up again with my old friend Michael Moore, and when I'm back from that conference, I have a day off (which I will need to spend in Oxford, on the ALT-J Editorial Board meeting). The very next day I'm flying out to Berlin to speak at Online Educa. Too much flying about. I'm tired just thinking about it.

Mind your language

Never ceases to amaze me how the web can be searched to unearth all sorts of curios. I recently discovered several reviews of my scribblings in other languages, but there always seem to be words that don't translate. Here's a Finnish review of the paper I presented at the EDEN conference in June:

Steve Wheeler kuvasi tulevaisuuden opiskelua käsitteellä ”Nomadic Learning”, missä opiskelija vaeltaa digitaalisissa maailmoissa kehittäen omaa osaamistaan vapaasti saatavien resurssien avulla yhdessä toisten opiskelijoiden kanssa. Käytössä ovat Web 2.0:n sosiaaliset työkalut, jotka mahdollistavat rikkaan ja dynaamisen oppimisympäristön. Yliopisto-opiskelijoilta kerätyn palautteen perusteella Wiki-työkalu edellytti tavallista tarkempaa kirjoittamista, kriittistä tietoisuutta ja vahvaa keskittymistä opiskeluun. Siksi työkalu koettiin varsin vaativana ja toisten tekstin muokkaaminen nähtiin usein ongelmallisena.

I was also amazed to see that my blog from yesterday was translated into German and up on the web within a few minutes of me posting mine. It's translated as:

Lernen mit ' e: Veröffentlicht... und unzerdrückt (Learning with 'e's: Published ... and unjammed)

...and my final sentence on what my avatar is doing when I'm not in SL goes:

'Erhält mich denkend..., was meinen Avatara tun in SL tut, wenn ich nicht dort bin, ihn in der Überprüfung zu halten??' (Avatara hmm? well, ich weiss nicht...)

A recent paper I co-wrote for a Brazilian Medical journal was translated from English into Portuguese and the title now reads: 'A cultura colaborativa e a creatividade destrutiva da web 2.0: aplicativos para o ensino da medicina'. Well... I'll take their word for it, but they might be laughing at me behind my back and it could all be a load of rubbish...

One of the best things I found on the Web when I first started out was Alta Vista's Babel Fish online language translator. I know it has since been surpassed by a number of other web tools, and it often wasn't grammatically accurate, but it still made me think of Star Trek and the universal translator device. Be great to have one of those, so that I could at least understand the computer techies here at my university. Also interesting to think that 87 per cent of web pages in the known universe are in English (or an American version of it).

Now who's going to translate this blog entry?

Published ...and unjammed

Very pleased to see that our article on Second Life for medical education has finally been published today in Health Information and Libraries Journal. Seductively entitled 'Second Life: An overview of the potential of 3-D virtual worlds in medical and health education', it was co-written with Maged Kamel Boulos (my mate from the Faculty of Health and Social Work, here at the University of Plymouth) and one of our graduated students Lee Hetherington, whose VNEC (Virtual Neurological Education Centre) project features heavily in the article. We also discuss the learning and teaching potential of SL and how it can be harnessed by medical and health educators (and indeed any other teachers) who want to give it a bash. One thing we didn't mention in the paper is our Second Life sexual health project, which is going from strength to strength, but was born too late to feature. That project will be discussed in future papers - (promise).

I hadn't expected the paper to be published until next month, but that's the beauty of online publishing, as I said in my previous blog 'publish and be jammed'.

I have several other e-learning articles on the boil, but it will be a long time before some of them see the light of day, as they will probably be published on printed paper and take an absolute age to appear... Ah well, I guess if there's a world wide power outage, people will still be able to read the articles ... if they are in daylight. Gets me thinking ... what does my avatar do in SL when I'm not there to keep him in check??

At the bleeding edge

Came across an interesting blog on mobile technologies today, called Learn on-the-go. Whilst the title of the blog might be a little twee - (I had disturbing visions of someone reading a book on the toilet) - the content is pretty good, with a review of Marc Prensky's keynote address at the recent Handheld Learning 2007 conference held in London. Whilst not entirely glowing about Prensky's 'Keeping up with change' speech, even labelling him as 'obselete' at one point, this blog writer has some interesting things to say about mobile learning, change management and technology in general...

Here's a top quote from the blog:

'While slower, less progressive educators may still be comfortably exploring e-learning on learning management systems or off CD-ROMs (or, indeed, still doing chalk-and-talk), educators investigating mobile learning are very much at the cutting edge of educational innovation, along with other educators investigating other areas such as the use of social web tools for education, and the use of virtual worlds as learning environments.'

Well, yes, I agree - change is always with us, and shift happens. And I have to nod in agreement that the bleeding edge of learning technology is found in the study of ambient forms of learning, along with 3-D virtual worlds and social networking tools. I'll be bookmarking this blog and paying a return visit or two.

Not a peep

It was nice to get a mention in this week's Times Higher Education Supplement. The THES has a regular tongue-in-cheek section called Peep's Diary, which reports on all things quirky, humorous and slightly 'out of left field'. This week it chose my recent blog entry 'Crossed Lines' about US teachers using FaceBook and the potential for 'dodgy' scenarios to develop. Well, there's a lot in the press about FaceBook and other social networking tools these past few days, and not all of it is positive. It's a shame the spotlight has been turned onto the negative aspects of FaceBook. Y'see, I still think there must be some constructive ways to use FB and other social tools directly to support learning and teaching - but no-one has yet reported any uses directly to any of my online questionnaires. I would love to hear from teachers or faculty about their experiences, good or bad. If I'm proved wrong about FaceBook, you won't hear a peep from me...

News at blogspeed

This just in from WebProNews....

'Old media is epitomized by no news source more than the Associated Press. Literally thousands of journalists are employed around the world to bring current event coverage to readers of thousands of newspapers and their online sites. In the pre-Internet days the AP had little competition beyond a few other news syndicators like Reuters and UPI. The AP's world has now changed forever with the advent of blogs and news aggregation sites. Blogs are the new "AP" journalists and aggregation services which started with NewsLinx.com in 1996 and which now include Google News, Topix, Techmeme, WebProWire and the new Blogrunner have made the AP much less relevant.

'There are now tens of thousands of bloggers around the world providing coverage and analysis of current events too! It comes down to why pay when you can get the news for free. The AP is scrambling to remain needed in this fast paced up to the second blog news world. As reported and analyzed by WebProNews, the AP is suing Moreover for of all things... linking to AP stories. Does the AP not realize that winning this suit would result in less readers of their stories? The old news order is dead, the AP will have to adapt or die.'

News ends.......................?

A moving experience

My life is in boxes. Just like a Likert scale questionnaire. I am moving today from a communal office space into a basement office on another part of the campus. My soon to be ex-office is piled high with packing cases containing everything I need to survive a day in the office (and some things I don't need, but have kept anyway, just in case). The move is good and also bad. It's good because there will be less distractions but it's bad because I won't be able to mingle with colleagues as easily. It's a fine line, but social networking is delivering the same problems online. How many FaceBook, Bebo, MySpace, Flickr or (perish the thought) SagaZone (for the over 50s) accounts should I have? How many is it feasible to maintain? How do I stop social networking taking over my life? And why the hell am I writing this blog when I should be packing? (**call it a displacement activity**)

So at the moment my life is in boxes. Some of them are cardboard, others are made out of electrons viewed through flat screen technology. By the end of the week, most of the cardboard boxes will have been unpacked. It will be an infinitely harder job to unpack the electronic ones...