The Pelecon flies again

We have enjoyed 6 successful e-learning conferences in Plymouth over the past decade. In recent years, the Plymouth e-Learning Conference (or PeLC) has grown from a small local one day teacher conference, into a large, international 3 day event which showcases the very best and latest in digital pedagogies. Over the years, we have welcomed a galaxy of world class keynote speakers, such as Stephen Molyneaux, Gilly Salmon, Josie Fraser, Stephen Heppell, Sherry Terrell, David White, John Davitt, Graham Attwell, Mike Blamires, Jane Seale and Mark Stiles.

Other who have presented papers and workshops at the event over the years have included James Clay, Miles Berry, Shirley Williams, Pat Parslow, Helen Keegan, Malinka Ivanova, Neil Witt, Carmen Holotescu, Mike Phillips, Doug Dickinson, Craig Taylor, Matt Lingard, Lyndsay Jordan, Bex Lewis, Andy Ramsden, Dan Roberts, Thomas Fischer, Doug Belshaw, Catherine Cronin, Richard Hall, Sharon Flynn, Mark Childs, Fiona Concannon, Thomas Kretschmer and far too many others to list here on this blog. We have also welcomed many student presenters over the years, and showcased our own Plymouth University robotic football team and vision immersion theatre. Most delegates who have attended will tell you that Pelecon is an exciting and inspiring conference at many levels.

The 2012 Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference (yes we replaced 'electronic' for 'enhanced' last year to reflect the shift in emphasis from tools to pedagogies) is number 7 in the series, and has been rebranded with a new logo and new website. This year's lineup of invited speakers is bigger than ever, as you can see from the picture above. Our four keynotes are Jane Hart, Alec Couros, Keri Facer and Simon Finch, and for the first time this year we also have 3 spotlight speakers in Leigh Graves Wolf, David Mitchell and Helen Keegan. Once again we are planning an evening Teachmeet, Student Voice Showcase and other shows that run parallel with the conference. One of our new ideas is to have a 'Failure Confessional' where we talk about what went wrong, and all learn from our mistakes. We also take over exclusive occupancy of the famous Glassblowing House restaurant on Plymouth's historic Barbican seafront for our social event on the second night of the conference. Many people have said that Pelecon is one of the friendliest conferences of its type, and this year's event will be no exception. With its idyllic setting 'twixt moorland and sea, wonderful weather (we have excellent connections) and the famous Devon cream tea (calorie free), what better place could you spend your time between 18-20 April this year? Full cost for the entire three day event is just £200. We hope to see you at Pelecon this year!

Visit the Pelecon website for further details.

Fishing boat image by Jose Luis Garcia


The Pelecon flies again by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

10Q: Helen Keegan

We are fortunate to have many innovators in education. In the primary (elementary) and secondary (high) school sectors some can be conspicuous, because through various Teachmeets around the world, and also online during Twitter #edchats, they make their work known to the wider community. In the post-compulsory sectors of education too, there is a lot of innovation and creativity, but sometimes this can go relatively unnoticed.

One academic who personally springs to mind when we talk about creative innovation is Salford University's Helen Keegan. I first met her at a conference in Italy several years ago, and we have been friends ever since. Every time I meet up with her I'm impressed by her energy and drive, and her ability to come up with new and exciting ideas on how to engage learners. In today's 10Q interview, Helen answers questions about her philosophy on learning, social media and her current projects in higher education, including alternate reality games:

Who are you?

I’m Helen Keegan a.k.a. heloukee (online), Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Social Technologies at the University of Salford. I’m based in Computing, Science and Engineering, so it’s a great place to be as I get to work with techie students, but nowadays I focus on the social and cultural aspects of technology. I’ve always worked across the University, and am now based at MediaCityUK, which is ideal as it’s a multidisciplinary campus. I like to work across disciplines as I think it’s important for learners to understand different paradigms/disciplinary perspectives/assumptions. My approach to learning and teaching starts from digital identity development – I encourage learners to position themselves in their chosen field while still in education, in preparation for their professional careers.

What inspires you most about learning?

Transformation, empowerment and the unexpected: although learning what we’re ‘supposed’ to learn (I’m talking formal education here) can be empowering, the things that really excite me are often unexpected or accidental – I’m inspired by learners developing new ideas and understandings through making connections between seemingly disparate concepts and fields, and moving beyond their (disciplinary) comfort zone. While this is challenging it often leads to genuinely transformative experiences. Because I work with learners across a myriad of social platforms, I’m able to see them develop their ideas and their identities – both individual and collective - through time. This then drives the curriculum, which is ultimately inspiring: learners being able to confidently negotiate their own curriculum in collaboration with others. In terms of my own practice, students are my primary source of inspiration as reflecting on our learning journey and experiences pushes me to keep innovating. I’m also inspired on a daily basis by people I work with (especially Frances Bell, Ben Shirley and Cristina Costa) and of course my PLN (thanks to social media!).

What/who has been your biggest influence when it comes to learning?

I studied at the Royal Northern College of Music before going on to a degree in Linguistics, specialising in phonetics, speech synthesis and spectrographic analysis. During my time at the RNCM (1993-1995) I was involved in a Manchester-based multimedia collective. With a loan from the Princes Trust, we set up a studio with a 2-tonne acoustic dry room. We had a band (inc. 2 drummers – hence the dry room ;) and an orchestra. My visionary friend Carl Russell led the whole thing, although there were about 15 of us involved on a day-to-day basis. We did all sorts of live multimedia gigs with dancers, animation, video, poetry, classical music, dance music… it’s also how I got into building websites and programming (which led me through the study of Lingustics into Acoustics). It was completely informal, un-assessed, and gave me the opportunity to explore a range of disciplines (music, computing, writing, performing) and learn with a group of friends. It was a major influence on my beliefs with regards to interdisciplinarity, grassroots education and informal learning.

What does social media mean to you?

Connections and networks, serendipity and opportunity, creativity and a rapid flow/spread of ideas – energising and occasionally exhausting! In terms of my practice as an educator, I love the fact that learners can simultaneously be developing their knowledge and understanding alongside their personal portfolio and ‘professional’ online identities. They are able to make meaningful connections with others through expressing themselves as individuals and letting their personalities shine through; their opinions, interests, and activities outside of formal education. I get a real thrill seeing learners develop their digital identities and personal networks over time – I love the fact that the boundaries blur between education/industry, tutors/students, as they build their own networks and gain confidence in connecting with others online.

What is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG)?

An Alternate Reality Game uses the real world as a platform for a transmedia, interactive narrative, which unfolds according to player’s actions. Unlike video games, players don’t play as characters but generally play as themselves, interacting with the ARG designers as opposed to artificial intelligence. ARGs blur the lines between fantasy and reality, requiring collaboration and group problem solving in order to play the game. The overriding mantra for an ARG is This Is Not A Game, so it necessarily involves an element of deception.

 
How have ARGs featured in your work recently?

I recently ran a module as an ARG, as I wanted see if I could pique learners’ curiosity through introducing mystery and intrigue into their course. I worked with Hugh Garry (BBC) who had been involved with a few ARGs in the past, so his experience was invaluable. The students were fed clues in the physical world (within their scheduled classes) and also online, through blogs, Twitter, YouTube and Tumblr. It was quite intense, as we couldn’t control how students would react during the game, so there were a few tricky moments! The culmination of the ARG was the surprise public broadcast of their mobile phone films on the BBC Big Screen in the centre of Manchester – they were led to the Big Screen by a series of clues and puzzles that unfolded during the semester. It was an amazing experience! However, the jury is still out on ARGs – involvement and immersion bring the biggest rewards so there’s a risk of losing or excluding those who choose not to engage, and this was one of the biggest difficulties that we faced.

What other innovative technology supported projects have you been involved in?

The first project I worked on as a researcher/developer still sticks in my mind. My brief was to develop a multimedia CAL package (yes, back in the olden days ;) to ‘teach’ principles of acoustics. I spent a lot of time talking to undergraduate students who were struggling with certain concepts/formulas, and decided to develop a series of simulations that allowed learners to play around with waveforms using sliders, getting instant audio-visual feedback – leaving out the maths (gasp!) until they developed a more kinaesthetic sense of what was actually going on. Learners were able to get a strong feel for things like additive and subtractive synthesis, before moving on to the actual formulas. Once they had a feel for waveforms – both visually and aurally – then the formulas made a lot more sense. Very simple really, but certainly helped learners overcome the mental blocks they had developed as a result of not getting to grips with the maths in the book and on the board.
Another ‘innovative’ project would have been ESMOS – a European project that I directed/coordinated from 2004-2007. The original bid focused on the use of VLEs to support international mobility students (work placements and study exchanges) and I was brought it to run the project once the bid had been successful. I changed the focus from VLEs to open blogs, wikis etc. – might not sound like much now, but it was pretty innovative at the time (2004), and also risky in terms of it being a European funded project as it meant a significant shift away from the original proposal. However, we pulled it off and made a real contribution to international student mobility support (social, pedagogical and cultural), which was recognised by the European commission and had considerable influence on many other projects.

More recent ‘innovative’ projects have included introducing reflective practice and digital identity development through social media into science/engineering in 2006, and getting video technology students in a science faculty to make short films using their mobile phones in order to open their minds to new aesthetics and challenge their rule-governed disciplinary assumptions.

What is your recipe for good learning?

From the content perspective: relevance, personal interest and meaning (also important to understanding learner motivations). I do think emotion is important. A relaxed, happy atmosphere helps people to feel at ease, although that’s not so say that we have to be happy in order to learn - but it does help if learners are enjoying the experience. Open and honest dialogue - admitting that we all mess up sometimes, we all have valuable experiences and thoughts to share, and can all learn from one another. An environment where people aren’t afraid to make mistakes - no fear of saying the wrong thing or ‘sounding stupid’. And last but perhaps the most important ingredients – curiosity, and asking questions!

If you could change anything in higher education, what would it be?

Two things: large class sizes and assessment regimes. This is a personal perspective and not always practical in a mass HE system, but the relationships I have with my students are incredibly important in terms of our learning (I’m including myself as a learner here, because I do expect to be challenged by, and learn from, my students). Sadly, the larger the group, the less likely we are to be able to get to know one another and for me this is one of the most valuable and rewarding aspects of learning and teaching.
My second bugbear is the modularised assessment-driven culture, as this does tend to stifle curiosity. So many learners are focused on what needs to be done to pass a module with a certain mark. It’s a strategic approach to getting a degree, but I’m not a fan of the industrial model of education and sometimes it does feel more like a production plant than a place for imagination and intellectual growth. I don’t believe we should abolish Universities. Universities and academic networks play a vital role in development through research, and linking research to teaching. However, I’m not a fan of corporatisation and get frustrated with the shift towards a consumer culture.

What is your vision for the future of learning?

Greater flexibility in terms of what, where and how we learn; access to information for all; a move away from assessment culture – greater emphasis on curiosity and enjoying learning for its own sake. Alternative forms of assessment and accreditation that allow learners to define their own pathways and form communities of interest/inquiry away from modules and levels. Finally, I’d like to see greater emphasis on critical media literacy, interdisciplinarity and epistemological awareness alongside disciplinary-specific knowledge and skills. Having an open and flexible mindset is becoming increasingly important when we’re living in a rapidly changing world.

Helen Keegan is an invited Spotlight Speaker at this year's Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference.

10Q Helen Keegan by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Imagined worlds

Here's my last post reviewing the new publication 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures'.

When we started out writing our chapter on cybercultures, Helen Keegan and I didn't know that it would eventually end up being the final chapter in the book. We first hit on the idea for the chapter while we were talking together at Online Educa - a conference held at the end of every year in Berlin. Because Helen lives in Manchester and I live in Plymouth, the best solution for our collaborative writing turned out to be Google Docs. It worked superbly. We wrote in different colours so we could track who was doing what, and eventually, the chapter was completed. We are very pleased with the result. Entitled 'Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures', chapter 17 focuses on the experiences found in technology mediated communication within virtual environments and we attempt to identify and explain some of the emerging practices, behaviours and self-representations. We pay particular attention to the 'imagined' elements of social networking services and multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs), and specifically on relationships:

It is often the fantasy component and the freedom to let one's imagination run riot that first attracts adherents. Imagined worlds facilitate a number of experiences that could never be conceived as possible in the real world, but they also mediate familiar experiences. One familiar feature of the human experience - friendship - is increasingly mediated through new technologies and social spaces. For some, even this fundamental human experience may need to be reconceptualized (p 262).

We go on to discuss a number of experiences such as 'virtual promiscuity', weak and strong social ties, the clash of old and new media and the implications on formal learning, and discuss the breaches in cultural boundaries that have been caused through liberalized social media such as YouTube ('Star Wars Kid' for example) and Facebook. We also compare the popular digital clan cultures of Flickrites and Facebookers. We conclude with a discussion on how shifting perceptions of privacy, identity and ownership as well as friendship are being redefined due to the imagined worlds we inhabit for increasing proportions of our time.

Retro ALT-C

For those who attended ALT-C 2008, and for those who didn't but wished they had, a report on the conference has just been published, nicely capturing the mood, highlights and reflections of the event. Thanks go to Matt Lingard and his team, Athina Chatzigavriil and Kris Roger, who have done a great job conveying the atmosphere and ambience of a very diverse and enjoyable conference. The report is a good read, and comes complete with photos from several sources, including one from our very own Helen Keegan. Look out for the Learning Technologist of the year award presentation - Josie Fraser - and then tell me whether she looks bemused, triumphant, or .... something else. There is also a nice section on the ALT Fringe (F-ALT) events that punctuated ALT this year for the very first time, and some reflections on that astoundingly good Gala dinner at Headingly Cricket Ground. Enjoy reading the report, and then get ready for ALT-C 2009, to be held at the University of Manchester, in September.

A little bit of culture

I am really pleased that I was able to finish off the final editing and proof reading for the new book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures' which has now gone to press. A whole host of people have contributed toward the 17 chapters in the volume. The publishers, Information Age, who are based in the USA, Greenwich, Connecticut, are already publicising it on their website, and I have seen some of the cover artwork, so publication is imminent. Here's the blurb (wot I wrote meself):

As the title indicates, this book highlights the shifting and emergent features that represent life online, specifically in and around the territory of e-learning. Cybercultures in themselves are complex conglomerations of ideas, philosophies, concepts, and theories, some of which are fiercely contradictory. As a construct, "cyberculture" is a result of sustained attempts by diverse groups of people to make sense of multifarious activities, linguistic codes, and practices in complicated and ever-changing settings. It is an impossibly convoluted field. Any valid understanding of cyberculture can only be gained from living within it, and as Bell suggests, it is "made up of people, machines and stories in everyday life." Although this book contains a mix of perspectives, as the chapters progress, readers should detect some common threads. Technology-mediated activities are featured throughout, each evoking its particular cultural nuances and, as Derrick de Kerckhove (1997) has eloquently argued, technology acts as the skin of culture. All the authors are passionate about their subjects, every one engages critically with his or her topics, and each is fully committed to the belief that e-learning is a vitally important component in the future of education. All of the authors believe that digital learning environments will contribute massively to the success of the information society we now inhabit. Each is intent on exploration of the touchstone of "any time, any place" learning where temporal and spatial contexts cease to become barriers to learning, and where the boundaries are blurring between the formal and informal.

And here's a taste of the contents:

Foreword, Howard Rheingold. Introduction, Steve Wheeler. PART I: DIGITAL SUBCULTURES. Learning in Collaborative Spaces: Encouraging a Culture of Sharing, Steve Wheeler. Mobile Subcultures, John Traxler. Podcasting: A Listening Culture, Palitha Edirisingha. The Emergence of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Learning Cultures, Mark A. M. Kramer. PART II: ROLES AND IDENTITIES. Identity in Cyberspace, Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold. Digital Tribes, Virtual Clans, Steve Wheeler. Gaming and the Network Generation, Nicola Whitton. Creating an Online Course Generational Community, Leon James. The Social Impact of Personal Learning Environments, Graham Attwell. PART III: CYBER PERSPECTIVES. Emerging Online Practices: An Endo-Aesthetic Approach to E-tutoring and E-learning, Viv Tucker. Cyberculture and Poststructural Approaches, Ken Gale. Cyborg Theory and Learning, Vasi van Deventer. Transfer Through Learning Flexibility and Hypertextuality, Gorg Mallia. PART IV: NARRATIVES AND CASE STUDIES. Cybercrime in Society, Steven Furnell. Language Evolution in Txting Environments, Tim Shortis. The Cultural Impact of E-learning and Intranets on Corporate Employees, David Guralnick and Deb Larson. Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures, Steve Wheeler and Helen Keegan. Author Biographies. Index.

Punk it up

I'm getting ready for the 310 mile drive up to Leeds tomorrow to participate in ALT-C 2008. I'm going to be speaking in the main conference about some of the research we have been doing in Plymouth on wikis in teacher education. I'm also speaking in the fringe event F-ALT entitled WTF Edupunk, where I will try to show how the punk rock ideology has parallels with contemporary thinking about going outside the walled garden of the institutional VLE to use free, open content, social software tools. The movement behind this idea is referred to by many as Edupunk. I make no apologies to Jim Groom or anyone else for repurposing the idea behind his poster boy image (above) because that's what punk is all about - do it yourself!

There is a growing consensus that punk philosophy can and indeed, does, have a resonance with those in universities and colleges who are considered mavericks. I have never used my university VLE for a number of reasons, preferring instead to use a variety of tools, websites and methods that in my opinion, work better. Just about anything a VLE can do, social software can do better, with the possible exceptions of surveillance and control (and even those are debatable). Joining me for the presentation at this fringe session will be Helen Keegan and Graham Attwell, and we hope that there will be some lively debate on this thing we call edupunk.... Punk it up!

Looking forward.... to ALT-C

So many things to look forward to next week at ALT-C 2008 at the University of Leeds, although I don't relish the long drive up from Plymouth. The conference promises to be the best yet, if the pre-mailed abstracts and research proceedings books are anything to go by. I'm looking forward to the workshops in particular, including the sessions on Web 2.0 - 'It's a Web 2.0 world out there' (James Clay) and 'Learning about the Digital Divide' (Frances Bell, Helen Keegan, Josie Fraser et al). From such presentations come a host of new ideas, and better still, an energising to go off and try out some new things you hadn't considered before.

There are already success stories before ALT-C has started. Take a look at the Crowdvine site the ALT team set up and you will see that there are already over 340 members (well over half of the 600 plus delegates who are booked into the event). I have already made contact with a number of people I am intending to meet, including one of the keynote speakers, Itiel Dror (Southampton University) and Mark van Harmelen (ALT Director of Operations).

Then of course, there is the Fringe ALT-C event - or F-ALT, as it is being called. There are a limited edition F-ALT badges designed by Josie Fraser that are being given away to the first 50 people who sign up to the F-ALT Wetpaint wiki site. When I looked just now there were already 36 people registered, so be quick if you want a badge! Yes, there is plenty to look forward to....

5 get a MUVE on

Well we did it. And it worked. Last time I was that nervous was when my (first) wife kept me waiting at the altar for 20 minutes over the odds, while her chauffer searched for a place to park. We are still married 22 years later, don't worry. Today was a technological success, where we linked 5 people together using Elluminate and managed a slightly flakey audio system in a very large and echoey hotel ballroom in Kuala Lumpur. I also did a successful in-world demonstration of Second Life for the LYICT Conference delegates here in Malaysia.

Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu) moderated the panel session from his eyrie in Bremen, Germany, whilst David White came in from Oxford to talk about design issues in SL, Helen Keegan spoke from Salford about augmented reality and mixing SL and real life, and Steven Warburton, who was in London, gave a presentation on the barriers to collaboration and participation in MUVEs. They all got up at a sickeningly early hour to participate due to the time zone difference. And it couldn't have gone any better, thanks to stirling support from the local technical team here in Kuala Lumpur.

Thanks to all concerned, for making this a memorable and enjoyable experience. A lot could have gone wrong, and I was a little worried about it, I admit. But is shows that you can take risks and it sometimes pays off. Next time, perhaps we will use Second Life as the presentation platform. When we have plucked up enough courage....

SL in KL

This is going to be quite a challenge, but we don't back down from them do we? I will be chairing a live demonstration and panel of Second Life in Second Life at the IFIP ICT and Learning for the Network Generation Conference in Kuala Lumpur on Monday (7 am GMT). The panel session will feature several friends from our previous bash at Online Educa Berlin last November. Steven Warburton (Kings College London), Graham Attwell (Pontydysgu), Helen Keegan (University of Salford) and David White (University of Oxford) will all be presenting as their avatars - and very colourful they all are too - and we will be using the JISC Emerge Island as our venue. I will appear as my new and improved avatar also - and although there are many technical issues to contend with and several things that could go disasterously wrong, we are going to take the risk and push the technology to see what it can do...

You are welcome to join us in world to take part and quz the panel as we explore some of the pedagogical, social and psychological issues that arise when Multi-User Virtual Environments are used for formal and informal learning activities.

...Connected Cultures

This is the fourth and final part of the Introduction for the forthcoming book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', which will be published later this year. It is an edited volume with contributions from a number of leading practitioners and thinkers in the field. The Foreword is by Howard Rheingold.

In the final section of this volume, Part 4, we present four case studies drawn from contrasting training and learning cultures, examining the cultures of corporate e-learning, cybercriminality, language evolution and social networking.

David Guralnick and Deb Larson represent the corporate training sector view in chapter 14. They write from the perspective of the company employee and explore the cultural basis of corporate e-learning. Guralnick and Larson describe the current state of employee cyberculture and propose that companies would be far better off using a strategic design approach to e-learning and corporate intranets, one based on helping employees and engaging them in their work. By doing so, companies will be able to integrate technology into employees' work lives in a way that improves their performance and boosts their morale and commitment.

Steven Furnell’s chapter ‘Cybercrime in Society’ presents a disturbing account of the current risks and threats to e-learners, and society in general from a number of criminal activities, including malware (viruses), hacking, and identity theft. There is a suggestion throughout that a criminal culture exists alongside other cultures within online life, waiting for the opportunity to transgress by exploiting network weaknesses. Through this chapter, Furnell provides a timely wake-up call for any user of the Internet who believes themselves to be safe, and suggests ways in which we can all protect ourselves from the more unsavoury elements of the online culture.

The penultimate chapter by Tim Shortis offers an explanatory framework for the re-spellings associated with new technology text formats such as email, internet chat, SMS text messaging and instant messaging. He considers some of the features and patterns of British adolescents’ uses of such writing and technology enabled semiotics. Shortis argues that technology has encouraged an extended set of orthographies which users draw upon to inflect their purposes and project their identities. He holds that such re-spelling is not a new phenomenon. Shortis goes on to consider the contextual pressures which act on users’ choices and argues that technology has re-regulated what counts as spelling, which challenges the official educational discourses of literacy, particularly where they apply to orthography.

The final chapter in this volume is entitled ‘Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures’. It was written as a collaborative project between Steve Wheeler and Helen Keegan who used Google docs to write together across the distance. In this chapter they present perspectives on cyber cultures as ‘imagined worlds’ in education and focus on how emerging online social spaces impact upon individual perceptions and practices. Wheeler and Keegan pay particular attention to the social networking and multi-user virtual environment cultures, where imagination is unleashed, but where friendship can be superficial. They focus upon old and new media cultures and the shift in perception over issues such as ownership, intellectual property, copyright, personal identity and privacy. The chapter examines cultural values such as privacy, identity and ownership and highlight two 'digital clan' cultures – FaceBookers and Flickrites. They analyse some similarities and differences in an attempt to explore how tribal cultures develop around and through imagined worlds.

Such a spectrum of perspectives on cyberculture must hold something for everyone. It is our hope that readers will find the ideas contained within the book challenging and inspiring. Ultimately, we hope that teachers and lecturers and indeed all those involved in education will be able to take at least some of these ideas and apply them to their own professional practice. The result, we trust, will be a better understanding of the practices and processes that are inherent in online life, and that this better understanding will ultimately encourage better teaching and learning.

Meme: Passion Quilt

Right. It's an interesting challenge and looks a little like a chain letter, but here goes. Mike Hasley, of TechWarrior Blog, has laid down a challenge for me and 4 others to add to a collection of photos that represent our passion in teaching/learning. I have to tag it 'Meme: Passion Quilt' and post it on a blog, Flickr, FaceBook or some other social networking tool with a brief commentary of why it is a passion for me. I suppose it's quite appropriate for me to be taking part in something with the tag of 'passion' on Good Friday of all days.

So, above is my picture taken from a tour of South African township schools in 2004. I came out of the school and was instantly surrounded by dozens of school kids, all eager to talk to me. They were such great kids, full of energy and all desperate to learn something new. I showed them my digital camera and took some shots of them. They were probably still talking about it for weeks afterwards. The title of my photo is: 'A Passion to Show'.

Now I have to tag five other friends to see if the meme spreads... Helen Keegan, James Clay, Graham Attwell, Josie Fraser, and Andy Pullman.

Magnificent seven?

It was good to read the Josie Fraser interview today featured on the blog Information World Review. With the strapline "Information professionals guiding you to the best bits of the blogosphere", it's one not to miss for all those who want to know the latest on the practice and art of blogging. Josie is well known for her work in learning technology, and has also run the influential EduBlog Awards for the last three years. It's an annual bash that celebrates best blogs, most influential blog posting, coolest educational wiki, etc, you get the drift....

Best of all, I have been mentioned in dispatches..... Josie lists my blog as one of her top seven favourites, and I find myself in the elevated company of Graham Attwell, Helen Keegan, Steven Warburton, Scott Wilson, Frances Bell and Brian Kelly. Wow - are we the magnificent seven already? If so, I'll be the one who gets shot dead whilst being distracted by a small and demanding child.

Seriously, I'm deeply honoured to be included in such distinguished company. Keep up the good work Josie, and when this year's Edublog Awards come around, I hope there's a new category for the blog containing the most dots ...............

Sounds bazaar

I am featured on a podcast this month which is hosted by one of the busiest men in e-learning: Graham Attwell. It's called Sounds of the Bazaar and it looks like it's been going for a while, because this is edition number 14. The podcast lasts approximately one hour and is reminiscent of a vox pop radio show. My interview is about 7 minutes long, and is one I did with Graham about the University of Plymouth's Sexual Health SIM in Second Life while we were at the ICL conference in Austria last month. You can even hear the coffee machines in the background...

There are some interesting features from other speakers on this podcast, including interviews with Stephen Downes and Ruth Rominger and reports from conferences. Graham does a good job as host of the show, and draws you into the content with his easy going, westcountry burr. Have a listen - the entire contents are also featured on the British Institute BILD site. Graham and I will also be speaking on a specialist panel called 'No Life in Second Life?' at Online Educa Berlin next month. With us will be Dai Griffiths, David White, Helen Keegan and Steven Warburton. Hope you can make it...

Wham, Slam, thank you m'ams

I thought Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan and Frances Bell caught the mood of the ALT-C conference today with their excellent workshop this morning entitled: 'Web 2.0 Slam'. In it they worked through a number of salient issues about the use of social networking technologies, including privacy, identity, communication and copyright. (That's me pictured with Helen doing a Web 2.0 Slam on social tagging using bits of crumpled up paper ... yes it really was that mad). The audience was encouraged to participate, and each small group was asked to create a 90 second 'slam', about some aspect of Web 2.0.

The wiki resulting from this session can be found here on Helen's blog. Thanks for an excellent, well worked and thought ptovoking session ladies!

The tension grows...

It's been a morning of tension. Several of the speakers were visibly nervous as they approached the daunting task of encapsulating the conference for a group of worldly wise tech savvy academics and practitioners. I for one was glad to be sat in the audience (I had Mark Stiles and Helen Keegan for company and camouflage...)

Michelle Selinger's keynote this morning set the scene for the ALT-C 2007 conference. The 'corporate backpacker' (Mike Sharples' description not mine) took a global perspective on e-learning, giving us all a break-neck world tour of e-learning initiatives. She talked about the tensions between informal vs formal learning, north vs south, schools vs higher education and cultures vs economies. There followed an insightful presentation covering the problems, solutions and caveats of implementing digital technologies in education. Perhaps Michelle's most memorable comment related to the imposition of technology expectations upon cultures that would not or could not countenance them. She named it 'technology dissonance' - and cited the example of university campuses in the Far East that would find videoconferencing unworkable when they only have 1 Mb of data coming into the campus.

The themes for ALT-C were also introduced, each with their own 'tensions'. Each can I think be summed up in a dichotomy... Designing learning spaces = formal vs informal; Large scale implementation = simplicity vs complexity; Internationalism = imperialism vs multiculturalism; and finally, the Social network generation = user-control vs institutional control.

The tension(s) will not ease... this conference will reveal them all, and leave us with more questions than answers I think....