Turning up the volume

We have enjoyed an interesting, intense and invigorating few days at the ALT-C event in Leeds this week. It was wonderful to encounter face to face so many people who I have previously got to know on Twitter. The days were filled with papers and demonstrations, symposia and workshops, some excellent, some thought provoking, and a few that could perhaps do with a little more development.... 


There were some interesting new features at ALT-C this year too. A fair amount of my time was taken up working with James Clay and Darren Moon (LSE) on the live streaming TV channel ALT-C Live Beta, which I helped to present. Throughout the conference, a small studio was used to interview delegates, speakers and guests, and James occasionally foraged among the crowd during the breaks to capture some of the vox pop ambience of the conference. The results of these hours of live video will be available on demand very soon on YouTube for all to revisit. For now you can view some of the interviews on this site. ALT-C Live Beta was an experiment that I feel worked extremely well and one that I hope can be a feature at future events. The content from the interviews in particular is rich and varied, and worth a revisit, and I am sure it has already been instrumental in amplifying the conference. Congratulations to James and Darren for adding an extra new dimension to the conference, and thank you both for involving me.

On the final day of ALT-C, in the first session I was pleasantly surprised to see a room full of delegates attending my own future pedagogy session. On the morning after the Conference Gala Dinner - commonly referred to as 'the graveyard slot', you are lucky to have half a dozen resilient punters present. On this occasion, surprisingly, every chair was taken. Three papers were presented, and a lively discussion ensued. Below is my own slide presentation on group blogging, entitled Learning Together Online.

Learning together online

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Turning up the volume by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Broadband is a human right

The 2011 ALT-C Conference is being held at the University of Leeds on a campus that is as convoluted as the maze of arguments and discussions we are enjoying. This year's event is co-chaired by John Cook and Sugata Mitra, and the programme and as always, is packed with far too many choices, you are bound to miss something you would really like to see. Too much choice is not the only problem we have to face. Just trying to navigate your way around the Leeds campus to find the rooms can be difficult, and there is a lot of walking around outside, up and down many steps and slopes.  The intermittent rain showers don't help either, but as they keep telling me - it's grim up north. Finding your choice of sessions then, certainly requires stamina and tenacity. And we will need these in equal measure throughout the conference, because all of the sessions I have attended so far have sought to go beyond the run-of-the-mill conference papers of old, to challenge preconceptions, problematise old knowledge and generally rattle a few cages along the way.... of which more in later posts from ALT-C 2011.

Miguel Brechner's keynote this morning focused on the CEIBAL one-laptop-per-child project in the schools of Uruguay. Uruguay is only a small South American country, about the size of Wales, and with a small population, and in the past it has not been particularly well known for its educational achievements. But today the spotlight was well and truly on Uruguay. In a gently humourous style, and laced with football analogies (he delighted in reminded his audience that Uruguay had once beaten Brazil to win the Soccer World Cup), Miguel Brechner demonstrated how giving a free laptop to each child has liberated them to learn in their own way and in their own time. Children now really want to go to school he said, and are upset if they miss even a day. He showed how the education landscape has been changed in Uruguay, and how social equality is being achieved among the youth of his country. Clearly very passionate about his cause, Brechner argued that not only is access to broadband absolutely essential for education, in today's connected world, it should also be considered a human right. While many of us had heard these mantras before, given that Negroponte's vision has been in existence for well over a decade, we were all nevertheless impressed by the manner in which this project had been implemented, in humility, with a great sense of purpose and with an eye on the future for Uruguay's youth. 


In some ways, OLPC could be said to run counter to the ideals of Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall Project. OLPC is very focused on solo learning, where each child uses his laptop in his own way, and is more or less autonomous, against the Hole in the Wall project where learners work together around a social space which involves a single computer. The minimally invasive education of Mitra's work, when measured against the individualised and personalised learning approach of OLPC leaves a lot of questions open. What is the best way for children to learn? With a communal technology that forces social contact, or with individual technologies where social contact is optional? This has indeed been the subject of discussion throughout the day during the breaks. It would be good to get Sugata Mitra (who is here on Thursday) and Miguel Brechner together to debate this, to hear their respective arguments.


Broadband is a human right by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Doing the research

I have just been through an extremely busy two weeks, with seemingly endless bus, taxi and car journeys, 10 air flights and I don't know how many miles travelled. In 17 days I have been to Cork, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Heidelburg, Darmstadt, Weinheim, Worms, London and Leeds.

Thankfully, my trekking is over (at least for a while) and I can now sit back and reflect on what I have learnt from my 'research'....

Experimental research: Firstly, I have discovered that students enjoy wine tasting, but don't know how to do it properly (spit not swallow) and I have gathered the empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. The photos of our trip to a vineyard and the bumpy ride around the countryside on tractors (made in 1941), belching fumes (the tractors not the students) and towing wooden carts equipped with tables and copious samples of wine, constitute the raw data which I am currently scrutinizing. The participants (n=24) were divided into two groups - a control group (those who drank alcohol) and an experimental group (those who drank even more alcohol and can't actually remember what they did). A caveat applies to this experimental design however. Students should never be allowed to drive tractors, because they tend to crash them and cause varying amounts of collateral damage. There is also a confounding variable of alcohol intake which proportionately influences this effect (Worms, Germany).

Social research: The research done naturalistically on the streets of Cork is worth a mention. The Irish are wonderfully friendly people who will do just about anything to help you out. So many times we were asked if we needed help, often we received it without asking, and once or twice we got help when we didn't need it at all. The taxi drivers were a real hoot, and the teachers in the school we visited were extremely dedicated professionals. Ireland's education system appears to be in good hands (Duglas and Cork, Ireland).

Experiential research. Feed enough 3 course dinners to a bunch of students and eventually they will get 'fed up' with it. That was the finding of the gastronomic reseach I conducted. Toward the end of the second week one of my student participants said he never wanted to see another 3 course dinner in his life. The Atlantis Project became known as 'Fatlantis' as we were all overfed each night due to the more than generous funding of 'Herr Oberst' Udo Bleimann (Ireland and Germany).

Cultural research: There is more fun to be had in Barcelona than you can shake a stick at. Making paella in a workshop restaurant, and then eating it. Strolling down Las Ramblas and gazing at the amazing architecture as you follow the footsteps of Antonio Gaudi, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miro - these are great memories of three days spent there this month. The summit meeting produced some challenging action points which will be published later in a respectable journal (Barcelona, Spain).

Corporate research: We visited SAP AG which was an excellent place to hang out for a few hours - it felt more like a university campus than a software company. It's one of the top multi-national software development companies and was recently voted one of the best places to work. The interviews we conducted with the Human Resources and Training personnel supported this as a viable claim. We could see why, and it was all I could do to prevent two of my group from absconding there and then (Walldorf, near Heidelburg, Germany).

Research into the spiritual domain: If you want to put the fear of God into your students, tell them they are going to be unreasonably charged by Ryan Air for overweight suitcases > 15 KG. They are observed to discard all sorts of stuff including toiletries, bottles of beer and hairdryers so they don't have to pay extra out of their meagre student grants. The study revealed that Ryan Air are not to be trusted though - the hidden charges they impose are ludicrous and they lack any consistency in their policies (Frankfurt Hahn Airport).

Research into e-Learning: Web 2.0 tools are being used for teaching in the physical sciences, and they are experiencing similar problems and successes as we have seen in teacher training. My keynote to the HEA Physical Sciences Centre conference at Leeds Metropolitan University was well received. I talked about some of the educational principles that underpin the use of wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools and there was much animated discussion.

And finally, some autobiographical narrative: I'm very tired, and I am losing my voice (blame the laryngitis fairy), and yet I'm strangely satisfied by the entire experience. I've learnt a lot, and all the travel, onerous though I found it, was worth it in the end. And the sleeping animal in the picture? That's me, that is.

Image source

Pineapple flavoured Leeds

Wow, that was quite a drive - 320 miles, done in 7 hours, but I'm now here in Leeds, for the ALT-C conference, and I'm sat trying out the Ethernet connection in my student room. I have a nice view from the fifth flooor out over the campus, with plenty of greenary and the big white tower glowering from the distance. I bumped into Jane Seale who had arrived just before me, and we made our way down to try to find registration. And got a little lost. Fortunately we were intercepted by Mark van Harmelen, (ALT's Director of Development) who showed us where to go.

The conference venue, what I have so far seen of it, is spacious, with a large balcony (registration) overlooking the dining area on one side and the Conference Exhibition area on the other. Great if you don't suffer from vertigo.

The parking here is difficult. I'm about a mile, three months and a weekend away from my digs, and it took all my remaining strength to trog my case over, and up 5 flights of stairs (there is no lift in the Henry Price Building, so Henry, you should be ashamed, whoever you are). I managed to spill a carton of pineapple chunks in the bag holding my cables during my slog over from the car park, and it went everywhere. I am now the only official ALT-C delegate with pineapple flavoured computer cables (make that Leeds). It's quite warm here as well, and to cap it all, I now have sticky pineapple juice all over my cables (see my earlier blog) where my pineapple carton burst Getting ready now for the pre-conference buffet which takes place at 18.30 tonight. I think I need a shower first though....

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....

It's your F-ALT

The preparations for ALT-C are nearly complete and we will all gather once again for our annual edu-knees-up in Leeds in a few weeks time. But running parallel with ALT-C this year is the Fringe ALT (or F-ALT). F-ALT will be serious fun, that is, fun with a serious undercurrent. We have been allocated space just off the main venue at the University of Leeds to conduct a number of events including WTF sessions on Microblogging, Second Life, Learning Objects, shoes, beer and all the other pressing concerns that reside in the tortured mind of the contemporary learning technologist. I hope to pitch my hat into the ring with an outrageous rant on the merits of EduPunk. (Well, Jim Groom is following me on Twitter, so I think I have something to say...)

F-ALT will also feature its own awards (The F-ALTies) where prizes will be awarded in a number of areas of activity, including: an award for the worst acronym for an e-learning project, the 'Not a Learning Object' prize and an award for the most pretentious blog post of the year (I am in the running for this one I think).

It will be a gathering of the clans for those learning technologists and academics who can stand the pace, and who don't mind laughing at themselves and poking fun at the establishment. I hope to see you there...