Cooking in Catalonia

So here is the evidence you need. It's a picture of the langoustine and mussels paella I helped create for the hungry 30 or so participants of the 2nd Open Edtech Summit in Barcelona earlier this week. We were all invited to a workshop in the evening where we cooked our own 3 course Catalonian dinner.

This paella was one I made as a member of a small group which included Mark Bullen and others. We had a great time cooking it, and an even better time eating it afterwards. Other dishes created included the traditional potato and onion Spanish omelette and a cold tomato soup served with garlic and herbs. The entire meal was accompanied by a large amount of Spanish red wine, which of course was essential to keep the cooks on track during the preparation phase.


But we had also been cooking up some ideas for the future university right through the day. In four groups, we discussed a number of ideas about what the future university might look like and what recommendations we might make as a group of e-learning and open education experts from around the world. We posted almost 50 recommendations from which as a group we then voted for the 8 most important. Four that stood out for me all focus on Web 2.0 and personal technologies:

1) Annote, index and share rich media content.

2) Move to a paradigm of mobiles as personal learning environments

3) Enabled cultures of sharing

4) Extend multiple digital literacies.

These were the action points the group reached a consensus on as some of the most important general points most universities should consider as important. Others included the recommendation that the future universities base their award of credentials on outcomes rather than 'seat time' and that we should encourage risk taking leadership. The sound bite of the day (and there were many) was that 'teaching is a push technology, whilst mentoring is a pull technology'.

There are obviously many implications from this short list, and over the next few months you will see plenty emerging from the full list which has been captured as a result of the summit meeting. We will publish a document similar to the Open Edtech Summit document published in 2008: What does it mean to be educated in the 21st Century?