Peak practice

I have made it up over the Alps by train into the sleepy Austrian town of Villach, where we hold the annual Interactive Computer Aided Learning Conference (ICL). The train had the old style compartments, and I managed to blag an entire compartment to myself. We are in the Karenthia part of southern Austria, on the Italian/Slovenian border, and it's all very pretty, with the grandeur of the mountain peaks all around us, and the ponderous river Drau meandering slowly by.

Every year the ICL conference seems to be veering more toward e-learning and away from computer science, which I think is a good thing. We need to concentrate more on the learning and less on the technology - more on the pedagogy and less on 'this is the technology and this is what it does'. There are some excellent special tracks at the conference this year. At this conference, thanks to the good offices of Martin Ebner and Sandra Schaeffert, we have a complete stream of papers on mashups in e-learning, and I'm looking forward to hearing some of them. There is also a section dedicated to e-portfolios and Personal Learning Environments this year, which is a welcome addition to the conference programme. Serge Ravet is heading up that special track. I will try to get to some of the sessions and report back on what is being talked about. The full conference schedule is up on line.

My own session today is a 3 hour marathon on microblogging, and in particular, Twitter and its use in teaching and learning. I have 52 delegates signed up for it, and although it's supposed to be a pre-conference workshop, it's in the mainstream programme - the first time this has happened I think. As usual, I will try to report as much as I can from this event, and keep you posted on all the important issues being discussed.