Living in the future

Berlin in December, with all that snow? It was quite magical. And a little scary, perhaps. Spare a thought for all those who attended the Online Educa Conference this year, and then found themselves stranded in Berlin because the snow had closed aiports across sub-zero Europe. I was one of the lucky ones. I made it back from Berlin to Bristol airport with only an hour or so of delays. I arrived back home at around 2 am this morning. Others are still in Berlin, waiting for their flights to be rescheduled, and the weather doesn't look as though it is going to let up....

But travelling to OEB10 (for that was the official hashtag) was worth the risk. It was worth it because Berlin is a great city, and the location for the conference - the Hotel Intercontinental - is an excellent venue. The company was great too. I met up with many, many old friends, and made some great new ones too. Some, such as Clark Quinn and Chahira Nouira have been familiar Twitter buddies for some time, but to meet them in person was, as always, a very great pleasure. I was also the man responsible for connecting together two of the luminaries of the learning world during the Educa speaker's reception. Here's the picture of the first meeting of the guru of informal learning, Jay Cross, and the prime mover behind the Horizon Report, Larry Johnson. It's an honour to know and have conversations with such wonderfully intelligent, influential and passionate people. One of the keynote speakers on Day 1 asked us if we were disappointed in the future. Shouldn't we by now be living on the Moon, and travelling around using personal jetpacks? Well, the keynote speakers on Day 2 brought us back down to earth with a pragmatic look at how technology is being used to support and enhance learning.

Larry Johnson's opening keynote had many of the OEB delegates smiling and murmering their praise - his photographic images were breathtaking, evocative, emotional and engaging, and were fitting embellishments to his narrative. Larry talked eloquently and movingly about his own family - from his grandparents to his granchildren (pictured left with an image of his mother and grandson) as he traced the history of technology down through the years. Our perceptions of technology, he told his audience, are not the same as those of our children. Many used to gather around the television to share events as they happened as broadcast by the news networks. Now, says Larry, we are the network. We are the ones who create and distribute the breaking events from around the world. His optimistic perspective on the future sees young people and older ones too, populating shared digital spaces, learning from each other as a living network.

Josie Fraser's keynote followed, focusing on the needs of young people in a digital age. Josie, who in 2008 was awarded the UK's Learning Technologist of the Year award, is these days discovered as the e-Learning Strategist for Leicester City Council. She concentrated on digital literacies, and argued that they are vital because they extend beyond the functional into the socio-cultural in their influence. Josie also dealt with issues of e-safety and digital identity, applying danah boyd's categorisations of digital affordances, including scalability, persistency and searchabillity to illustrate how images, text and sounds can work for good or for bad. These features, she argued, brought many challenges to schools in the digital age. Josie also sees an optimistic future despite the challenges we are facing. Larry Johnson has a favourite phrase: 'I love living in the future'. OEB showed us many glimpses into this future. I don't think we will be too disappointed.

Living in the future 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.

Hot, Cross and bothered

We are cooking here in Salzburg. The weather is just as warm and humid as it was yesterday. But we are cooking in another way too. We have just enjoyed a very good and very interesting opening session at Edumedia 08 here in Salzburg. Jay Cross has just spoken about informal learning and made some interesting and thought provoking points. He tells the story of how an American professor told two groups of students to read a paper in preparation for an examination. He also told the second group that the paper was controversial and not to be trusted. On average, the second group of students scored higher grades. His conclusion - uncertainty creates better learning engagement.

Jay made the point that with the exponential rate of change in the world, particularly in technological terms, knowledge is rapidly and continually going out of date. He argues that instead of teaching students knowledge and content, we should be training them how to adapt to changes instead. The connections, he remarked, are more important than the nodes. In other words, people communicating with each other in conversation and collaboration is more important than content. Content becomes important to the students when they generate it themselves. Then it becomes personal and personally relevant. Presenting challenges, said Jay, is more effective than offering solutions.

To the left is a picture (courtesy of Stefan Karlhuber) of me with Jay Cross, Graham Attwell and Marcus Specht, in an unconference mode. I have had a devil of a job Twittering from the conference though, as you will see if you have tried to follow my comments. The connection from my iPhone to the network has been atrocious, and I am hot and bothered by this, because I have lots of thoughts, and cant get them posted very easily. Graham Attwell and Mark Kramer have both had much more success, the rotters. Graham tells me he used Skype, and it worked a lot better than my iPhone....

Oh, and I was mentioned in dispatches. My photo (taken last night by him in the beergarden) was featured in one of Jays slides. Makes me feel a little better...

EduMedia in the Alps

Its all quite beautiful here up in the middle of the Austrian Alps. I am in Salzburg to speak at the EduMedia conference this week. The weather is hot and sunny and the birds are singeing in the trees. The theme of this conference is Self Organised Learning in the Interactive Web. I have already enjoyed some interesting and stimulating conversations with the likes of Jay Cross (USA), Mark Kramer (Austria) and Wolfgang Greller (OU Netherlands) and I am looking forward to listening to the first keynotes in approximately 10 minutes time. Jay actually did a video interview of me over breakfast which he says he will post up on his website later on. Hope I dont have egg on my face....

I will try to blog and twitter from the conference as the sessions go on, but network connections here are a little flaky at times. More later, including some stunning photgraphs of the area....