Up Pompey

When I was a lot younger I was a guitarist in a rock band. We were touring in 1982, and one of our bookings took us to play in the main hall of Portsmouth Polytechnic. It was a time of great celebration in Portsmouth (known by sailors as Pompey), because the Falklands War had just ended, and all the naval warships were returning home. After the gig, the band went down onto the seafront for something to eat before the long trek home, and I decided I would try a doner kebab for the first time. So there we were sitting in the back of our Transit Van, perched on the speakers and amplifiers, chomping away in the dark. I wasn't aware that there were any rules to eating doner kebabs, so I just chewed away at the pitta bread. Suddenly I was aware of a burning sensation. In the dark, I found a pile of steaming hot meat, coleslaw and chilli sauce in my lap. I had eaten away the underside of the pitta bread, and it had all dropped out.

Look, it's no laughing matter. It could have been fatal - the lethally hot chilli sauce could have eaten right through the denim of my jeans and caused untold damage to my future prospects. Driving home from Portsmouth to Plymouth covered in grease and chilli sauce was extremely uncomfortable. Time has moved on. Portsmouth Polytechnic is now the University of Portsmouth, and I still play the guitar, but I now try to steer clear of eating doner kebabs, particularly in the dark in the back of a transit van.

I'm back in Portsmouth this week as an invited speaker at the university. I will be hooking up with old pals Emma Duke-Williams (world famous in Portsmouth for her portrait of me as 'multi-me') and Manish Malik (with whom I have just written a paper on Cloud Learning Environments). Remember 'Wisdom of Clouds'? - Manish wrote that as a guest blogpost. I will be speaking on the topic of 'Learning 2.0: Web 2.0 Tools in Education', which will essentially take the form of a workshop and seminar. The session will take place on Wednesday 31st between 15.00-16.30. There will be some games and exercises for people to do, and some questions and answers time too. I hope to explore some of the possibilities and potential of tools such as blogs, wikis, microblogs and aggregators, and will also explore mashups, social tagging, and concepts such as 'wisdom of crowds' and folksonomies. I'm going to try to place all of this in the context of higher education, student engagement and communities of practice. It will be a tall order, I'm sure, but I'm confident it will be OK. After all, I have survived a direct hit from a doner kebab, and that's serious stuff.

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