What can I say about Madchester? We are all having fun and we are all staying up late and tiring ourselves out as we squeeze the juice out of the conference. I'm at the 16th annual conference of the 16th Annual Conference of the Association for Learning Technology, and we have around 800 delegates here on the excellent inner city campus. It's just as well organised as previous events I have been to in Leeds, Nottingham, Edinburgh etc, and this year we are on the main University of Manchester campus (the last time we held ALT-C in Manchester we were located on the old UMIST site). It rained down buckets yesterday afternoon/evening, but the weather didn't dampen the spirits of this passionate and friendly crowd of individuals. Everyone I met, old friends and new (and I had too many conversations yesterday to shake a stick at) was positive and energetic and willing to learn new things about their chosen field of expertise - e-learning. Mike Wesch's opening keynote set the scene for the event, played out to a packed hall. We started 10 minutes late due to huge queues outside in the registration hall. Wesch gave a talk on how technology changes relationships and dwelt very much on previous talks I have seen him give on the 'whatever' disengaged youth culture, and concluded by remarking that we need to change the don't care attitude of 'whatever' into the 'we will do whatever is necessary' to engage young people in meaningful formal learning.
The delegate list at ALT-C is eclectic as ever. There are people here from just about every university in the UK and some from a lot farther afield. Meeting a number of people face to face for the first time, whom I already 'knew' online, was an interesting experience. Stu Johnson, Alan Cann, Martin Weller, Theo Keuchel, Oleg Liber, Brian Kelly, Jo Badge, Alex Mosely ... I have been in touch with all of them prior to this conference, but now I can put faces to names.
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