Plymouth Rocks

Well, now that the dust has settled on this year's Plymouth e-learning Conference, it is time to reflect. The verdict was that Plymouth rocks! It seems from the many positive comments we received that it has been a great success. 80 delegates attended the event today, to hear Professor Mark Stiles give a keynote on the tensions between institutional and student control over learning. Over 25 papers, demonstrations and workshops were also presented (Jackie Sitters, above, presents a paper on wikis in higher education), featuring Second Life, blogs, wikis, webcasting, handheld and mobile technologies, and there were lunchtine demonstrations by BlackBoard and our own home grown Leatning Technologist team. The latter was something of a triumph, because the LT team were able to present a neat version of the Nintendo Wii surface hack, which impressed a lot of those present.

Left is a picture of the final plenary where Ray Jones (University of Plymouth), Helen Keegan (University of Salford), Mark Stiles (University of Staffordshire) and I took part in a panel session. We answered questions from the delegates on the semantic web, plagiarism, sustainability and the future of e-learning, as well as revisiting issues such as ownership and control, formal vs informal learning and transparent vs opaque technologies. We are already planning next year's event which will take place over two days, on 23-24 April 2009. There will be at least two keynote speakers, a social event and conference dinner. Some photos from the day are available for viewing on Flickr.

Whose Sandpit and Whose Toys?

We're all set for the Plymouth e-Learning Conference tomorrow at the University of Plymouth. The weather here in Plymouth is glorious today with clear blue skies and a very comfortable temperature of 16 degrees. Mark Stiles will be presenting his keynote tomorrow, so for those who can't make it to the event, here's an extract:

Whose sandpit? Whose toys?

The need to repurpose education in the face of a changing world offers those working with technologies to support and enhance learning a range of opportunities hitherto unknown. The range of technologies is bewildering with social and mobile technologies, personal web-based tools and corporate systems all having things to offer. However who chooses the systems in any given context is also changing fast, with agendas like life-long learning and work-based learning introducing ever more stakeholders into the learning experience, and individuals being increasingly able to "opt-out" of using institutional systems.

How will institutions cope with this "new world" where not everything is under the control of the institution and increasingly both staff and students can "do their own thing"? A conflict of control between the individual and the corporate is growing, and the danger of innovation being stifled by the drive for "corporate regulation" is very real. The answer will be found in policies - but what policies are needed and who will frame them?

No doubt several people will blog about the event, and I may even Twitter some of my own comments during the day, if I can find space to draw breath....

Plymouth e-Learning Conference

There's still time for you to submit a paper or workshop proposal for the Third Plymouth e-Learning Conference. Deadline for submission of abstracts (200-300 words) has now been extended to 31st January. The themes of the conference and paper submission details can all be found on the conference website. The keynote speaker for this year's event which will take place in Plymouth on 4th April, is Professor Mark Stiles from Staffordshire University.

It's a small and intimate conference, but in previous years has attracted delegates from all over the UK and farther afield, who were willing to engage in lively debate and explore new territories around e-learning. The event will take place in the stunning new Roland Levinsky Arts Faculty building (pictured) and there will be a large space available for exhibitors and vendors. I hope to see you there, but get your proposal in soon!

Reporting research

Last year I was asked to convene a research network for the Faculty of Education here at the University of Plymouth. I was given a small amount of money to promote a culture of research within the field of e-learning. Tomorrow I will be reporting on progress to the 'top brass' during our Faculty research day, and will tell them that we now have 30 members (mainly academics and researchers from education, but also from 3 other faculties, and several learning technologists and computer professionals). We are planning our e-learning conference for April next year, and I have booked Professor Mark Stiles (Staffordshire University) as our keynote speaker, after we met up at ALT-C 2007. The group has produced an impressive output of papers, book chapters, journal articles and a book, and I have arranged a series of research seminars featuring internationally recognised speakers including Mike Sharples, John Traxler, Steven Warburton, Avril Loveless, Palitha Edirisignha, Jane Seale and Steven Furnell.

I'm also going to talk about the six research projects we have started since the group formed, including our Second Life project for which we recently received a free one year land grant. The details of all of these activities and outputs can be found on the group's wiki space. This coming year is going to be very busy (but I guess it keeps me off the streets...)

Web 2.0 will eat itself

My new best buddy James Clay has posted the link to the video created for the Web 2.0 Slam Performing Innovative Practice Workshop at the ALT-C conference here in Nottingham earlier today. It's hosted on YouTube right here and shows the delegates in their small groups performing their own vignettes and parodies of Web 2.0 tools. We laughed until we stopped - a bit like our trip out to the Jongleurs Comedy Club last night (sponsored by our kind friends WIM-Bah! Thank you Bob Mills!) where we laughed until we ached.

Well, already there has been a lot of interest in the Web 2.0 Slam workshop, and a fair amount of blogs and other sites are carrying it. I know my blog hits have gone through the ceiling. Web 2.0 has a habit of looking back in on itself, and reflecting its own capabilities and characteristics. Talking to Mark Stiles tonight over dinner, it appears that Web 2.0 may not exist at all, and if it does, it's in danger of disappearing up its own backside. Or maybe it will simply eat itself. Whatever it is, now all we have to do is try to catch a little of it and make it work for our students...

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....