A chair on its last legs

Yep. It's conference season again.

I have spent most of the day (and all of yesterday and the weekend) reviewing papers for a variety of conferences, and it's beginning to take it's toll. I will probably wake up in the middle of the night tonight, and reach out into space, to try to click the send button on my umpteenth e-mail. I'm fed up telling someone that their paper has been rejected, and I'm sorry and all that, but there it is. Or that it has been accepted, but can they ammend it so that it has Harvard referencing, double line spacing and finer detail about the research method that was used .... oh ..... and there's a punctuation mark missing. Each conference has its own particular online submission and reviewing systems are set up differently, and each password and username pairing is different and has to be remembered. My head is swimming. To be honest, I'm knackered.

I'm taking time out to write this blog post so I don't go completely stir crazy - it's a brief moment of respite. The conferences in question are the Plymouth e-Learning Conference 'Digital Learning: Repurposing Education' (for which I am the chair - one with only two legs, and these are my last by the way), the Joint Open and Working IFIP conference 'ICT and Learning for the Net Generation' (for which I am an editor) and the AICT Conference on Advanced Telecommunications (for which I am merely a skivvy).

<<Phew>>.

Once I have put these to bed, another lot will come along. Next I will be looking forward to reviewing a shed load of papers for ALT-C 2008: 'Rethinking the Digital Divide' when the doors shut on submissions later this month. And then there's ICICTE 2008 with it's deadlines also fast approaching.....

I probably won't sign up for any more conference committees for a while. Is there a tall building around here anywhere....?

Thanks for the memories

There is an old saying that you shouldn't look back when you are ploughing a field. Hmmm.... It's a good job that I'm not ploughing a field then, isn't it...? So at the top end of the year I can look back on 2007 with some fondness and think, wow, how good a year was that? So here are just a few of my highlights:

Best conference of the year: Without doubt it would have to be Online Educa Berlin, where I learnt so much, heard so many good papers and keynotes, and met so many great people. Second prize is shared by ALT-C (Nottingham) and Bazaar (Utrecht).

Best keynote of the year: Had to be that of Teemu Arina, the Finnish wunderkind, who regaled us with his clear thinking and prescience at EDEN in Naples.

Best device of the year: The iPhone of course - a gadget that I am not getting tired of.... and I've had it for almost a week now!

Best new buddy for the year: Well, I have made several new friends, all of whom I met this year, and all of whom I am now working with/collaborating with in some way. So let's see ... Marco Kalz (met him at ICL in Austria), Helen Keegan (on a bus going to the Eden conference, Italy), Gorg Mallia (ICICTE Heraklion and cartoonist extraordinaire), David Guralnick (ICL Austria), Graham Attwell (ALT-C Nottingham and all over the place ever since!), Josie Fraser (ALT-C Nottingham), Piers MacLean (ICICTE) and Cristina Costa (ALT-C Nottingham) all spring to my mind as people who have enhanced my year and given me much food for thought and a lot of laughter.

Flop of the year: Had to be ICODL in Athens, which proved to be a bit of a disappointment in many ways.

City of the year: Stockholm was great (for one night only) in April, Utrecht was great to wander around in the dark, and Frankfurt was ace (in October), but the prize for this year has to go to..... Bella Napoli!

Best food: Again, sorry all you other cities - you did your best, but it's Napoli that has the best food and restaurants.

Best experience of the year: Speaking to almost 300 people on the topic of Second Life at Online Educa in November. Large screen technology and safety in numbers comes to mind (there were 6 of us on the panel). Second prize goes to the visit I made with my mate Palitha Edirisingha to Pompeii in June, just prior to the opening reception at the EDEN conference.

Funniest event of the year: The ALT-C social event at Jongluers Comedy Club in Nottingham. We laughed until we got thrown out. Second prize goes to the farce of a speech by Andrew Keen at Online Educa. Never heard such crap.

Best group of the year: The prize goes to the Bazaar bunch who are the most intellectually stimulating group of people I have come across. That's us pictured above. Glad to know you all guys! (And Freefolio is a cool idea! - Thanks)

Cooking in Greece

It's a sweltering 37 degrees plus here in Heraklion today, and it's Sunday, a day of rest. I have seen several bearded Greek Orthodox priests milling around in their black robes and pillbox hats, and wonder how they keep cool. The heat is bearable if you can find periodic shade, but we're all cooking here. I guess you could say that we are the Sunday roast... The conference closed yesterday and ended with a Greek night. The remaining ICICTE conference delegates (those whose heads weren't hammering a Cozy Powell solo) have just returned from a short trip out to visit the ruined palace of Knossos. It's a site that has seen earthquake after earthquake, but each time, the palace was rebuilt using the technology of the time. They simply built over what went previously. Then it fell to complete ruin and was buried and only excavated again around 1878. Now it's a visitors centre, and it's crawling with tourists.

It is so easy to focus on the ruins when you go to Knossos - that's what most people go there for. But I was reminded by a colleague that the palace was originally purposed so that people could look out and enjoy the stunning scenery that surrounds the site. So that's what I did - looked out. And it was beautiful. So often, when we repurpose new learning technologies and build them onto the old ones, we tend to look inwards at what they are and what they can do. Instead, we should be looking outwards, through them, so seeing how we can use new technologies to communicate with each other and share our ideas better. I'm flying out tomorrow, and will be glad to get back home, but it's been an interesting and rewarding experience here in Crete.

ICICTE 2007 Heraklion

Well, here I am sat in the foyer of the Atlantis Hotel, in Heraklion Crete, and at the end of the second day of the ICICTE Conference. It's been an interesting day with two stimulating workshops and several interesting papers. The first workshop was conducted by Henk Eijkman an Australian staff developer at the University of New England who spoke on the subject of Web 2.0. He got us running round the room doing many exercises and discussion around the idea of using Web 2.0 social software in the classroom. We all came away with several new ideas about how to use wikis, blogs and a host of other tools to enhance and extend the learning experience.

ICICTE kicked off yesterday with a keynote from Professor Rob Koper of the Dutch Open University, who inspired us with a report on TENCompetence - a European funded project that taps into the use of e-learning to create and maintain new competences for the workplace. More on this later, when I have had time to reflect on the enormity of what he is proposing....

Tonight several of us went out to sample the traditional Greek fayre (Souvlaki, Choriatiki, stay off the Raki), and the balmy climate of this region. Tomorrow I will be giving my own paper after lunch, entitled: 'Learning with 'e's: Defining e-Learning in a Knowledge Economy'. I hope to promote some healthy discussion on exactly what e-learning is, and the boundaries within which is can be defined. More on this also later... In the meantime, it's now 11.30 pm local time, so I'm off to bed. Kalinihxta!

Greece is the word

Kalamera! I'm off on my travels once again next week, back to the Mediterranean again - to the beautiful Greek island of Crete. I'm speaking at the International Conference on Information Communication Technologies in Education (ICICTE) Conference and I'm looking forward to hooking up again with old friends and also meeting some new colleagues. My paper is entitled 'Learning with 'e's: Defining technology supported e-learning within a knowledge economy', and I hope to generate some debate about the evolving nature of e-learning.

The keynote speaker is Rob Koper from the Open University of the Netherlands. He is the director of learning technologies, and leads a team of 40 researchers. The Open University is based in Heerlen and Maastricht, down in the extreme south of Holland, and it's an old stomping ground for me... I went to school there between 1971-73.

We will be staying at the Atlantis Hotel in Heraklion, and the conference will be located in the hotel, which means no long distance travel to get to the venue, like we had to in Napoli.... Forecast for next week is blue sky (thinking) and temperatures up to 33 degrees. I will blog about the conference when I can, if I don't get thermal shock.