Inspiring a generation

Many of us have watched in awe as the drama of the London 2012 Olympic Games unfolds. Emotions ebb and flow, and we find ourselves transfixed as we witness the triumphs and disasters of competition at the very highest level. The extraordinary skills, strength and stamina of the athletes has been compelling, exciting, inspirational. Many of the back stories emerging from the Games could be rewritten as screen plays for Hollywood movies, and indeed some may very well be. For teachers and educators there must be many lessons that can be learnt by observing the supreme dedication and commitment of the athletes as they compete for the ultimate prize - sporting immortality. Last week I read this piece from Learning and Skills Group Chairman Don Taylor, which set me thinking:

In women's volleyball, team GB beat African champions Algeria in its first Olympic victory. This is remarkable given that the team is 53 places below in the rankings. Even more extraordinary is that they did it with no funding. The team managed to fund its own way to London2012 through a combination of money making and cash saving schemes. The team is an inspiration to anyone facing budget cuts.

Yes, we do live in a time of economic uncertainty and austerity. It is a time where budget cuts affect many of our learning and development activities. School budgets are squeezed, and CPD suffers from cutbacks. One challenge in the coming months and years is to try to optimise learning in these stringent times. It's a time where we must try to maintain good learning experiences regardless of the economic difficulties. But this is not the main challenge. The main challenge has and always will be to inspire learners to reach their optimum level of achievement. Doctors save lives. Teachers make lives.

The theme of London 2012 is 'Inspire a Generation'. I am certain the London Olympics will do just that for the next generation of sporting heroes. But inspiring the next generation of learners has, and always should be, the ethos and ultimate goal for all educators, wherever they find themselves.

Image by Fotopedia


Inspiring a generation by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Many encounters

I had a very busy, and slightly bizarre day today filled with encounters. Started the morning off having breakfast with Informal Learning guru Jay Cross in the lounge of the K-West hotel, in Kensington, West London. On the way back to get my bags along the gloomy, strangely lit corridors of the hotel, I encountered one of the Jedward twins. Don't ask me which one it was, they both look and sound exactly the same to me. His big hair, glowing in the gloom like a strangely luminescent toilet brush, gave me a bit of a funny turn, I can tell you.

Made it across to Olympia 2 with Jay with the good offices of a friendly taxi driver, and met up with Donald H Taylor and his team. The one day Learning Skills Group conference (#lsg10uk) this year attracted 450 delegates, mainly from the corporate training sector. I bumped into several Twitter buddies face to face for the first time, including Karyn Romeis and Phil Green, and others I had met before including Barry Sampson and Jane Hart. I sadly missed Jay Cross's keynote, because I had to travel across town to Oxford Circus to meet up with Ali Hughes and Derek Wenmoth (Core Ed team) who wanted to discuss the content of my upcoming keynote in Christchurch for the uLearn Conference in October. I spent a very pleasant hour with them both in Caffe Nero, before we all had to depart for our next meetings.

Back again at Olympia, I enjoyed a pleasant buffet lunch and a chat with a number of delegates, before doing my own workshop session entitled: Collaborative and Co-operative Learning: The How and the Why, in which I covered a whole range of ideas with about 85 delegates on competition, collaboration and cooperation (I used the analogy of the London marathon for this), creativity, Web 2.0 tools (I demonstrated the wisdom of crowds, folksonomies and social tagging through a number of 'get out of your seat' activities which seemed to go down well) and problem based learning. As usual, there was not enough time toget through all the materials I had planned, and then it was a quick dash by taxi, across London and down to West Sussex, where I managed to get my Gatwick flight to Valencia.

On the plane I encountered my old friend Paul Clarke and his wife, who are also here in the Barcelo Hotel in Valencia for the EDEN Conference (the picture above is of the stunningly designed centre for arts and sciences complex, which is just across the road from the hotel). We arrived together (I have shared taxi cabs with Jay Cross and Paul Clarke on the same day and in two separate European cities - how about that?) and then in the hotel lobby as we were checking in, along came Michael Moore to greet us. I also bumped into Morten Flate Paulsen in a cafe this evening.

Tomorrow is the reception evening for the 3 day EDEN Conference which I will be reporting on in this blog. Stay tuned - or whatever they say, in this web enabled world...

Image source

Many encounters by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.