The Pelecon (brief)

It's all over for another year, but I really believe that this year's Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference fully lived up to its theme - create, connect, collaborate. Many blogs, videos, photos, tweets (at the time of writing almost 20,000 in less than 3 full days - here's the complete archive) and other content has been created throughout over the course of the conference. In brief, here are a few of the artefacts created: The Instagram collection of photos itself is richly representative of the event from start to finish. The Pelecon Flickr collection curated by Jason Truscott is even more detailed, as is the Pelecon Photo Stream. My colleague Oliver Quinlan did an amazing - nay Herculean - job, liveblogging every one of our invited speakers, and then posting them very quickly onto the web complete with many of the important links to video and other content each speaker presented. The failure confessional attracted a few delegates to spill the beans of their failures, and what could be learnt from them. All too often we celebrate success at conferences, but forget that we can also learn a lot from what went wrong. You can see some of the 'confessions' on the Pelecon YouTube channel.

More than 200 delegates throughout the three days enjoyed presentations that were fast moving, varied and challenging, and plenty of time and space for networking. As usual, Pelecon has proved to be a great place for making new friends and consolidating old friendships, sharing ideas, discovering new tools and technologies, and generally increasing the digital footprint of the technology enhanced learning community. Matt Lingard and his colleagues are crowd sourcing reviews from delegates for a special ALT Newsletter report. Others too, will be busy writing their blogs as they reflect on three extraordinary days. Search for the #pelc12 hashtag and you will find them.

I made the joke in my introduction that although most people think Pelecon is an international e-learning conference, for me it is actually an excuse to have a three day party with all my friends. And yet, in a strange way, it is actually true. It felt more like a party, a celebration - than it did a conference, because everyone was having such a great time, in excellent company, in a fabulous location, exploring, learning and discovering together. For me, from my perspective as organiser, Pelecon has been the best conference in the series. We are already planning next year's event, where we will aim to do even better. The eight Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference - Pelecon 13 will take place between 10-12 April 2013. We hope you will be able to come and join us.

Image by Jason Truscott


The Pelecon (brief) by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

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.

It's about the kids

The Plymouth e-Learning Conference (PeLC) is over for another year, but the memories and the reverberations will be there for a long time, methinks. Delegates from Ireland, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Turkey, Bulgaria, USA, Canada, Argentina, Oman, Austria, Lebanon, Italy and Australia, as well as from all over the UK, attended the event this year. I got the impression from all I talked to, that people were thrilled to be at the event, keen to engage with such a passionate and knowledgeable audience, and extremely excited to listen to our world class speakers, Stephen Heppell, John Davitt, Jane Seale and Shelly Terrell. The #pelc11 Twitter stream was alive and kicking long before the event started, with over 300 tweets before the conference started at 1pm.

The weather throughout the conference has been perfect, as we promised - clear blue skies and plenty of sunshine show the seaside city of Plymouth at its glittering finest. PeLC started with a free day, which welcomed children and their teachers from several local schools, and several more schools around the UK via technological means. One of the highlights of Day 1 was the student voice technology showcase, hosted by Dan Roberts, in which children from both the primary and secondary sector regaled the audience with their astounding and inspirational uses of digital tools in the classroom. The session prompted Matt Lingard to blog about how much the children had impressed everyone with their enthusiasm for learning. They were clearly very confident and extremely articulate, and seemed completely undaunted by their surroundings and audience. Children it seemed, were everywhere at PeLC on Day 1, playing with small humanoid machines in the Robot Show, trying their hand at Internet Radio broadcasting with the wonderfully entertaining Russell Prue, and sampling the excellent food in the main atrium of the Levinsky Building.
Another highlight of Day 1 was the evening Teachmeet where several teachers and many more student teachers were chosen at random to stand up for a few minutes to share their ideas and experiences on how to harness the power of learning technology.

Yet Day 1 really belonged to the children, and the conference reverberated with their energy. It was a joy to have them joining us at the conference, and we will certainly be planning more children focused events next year, because let's face it, our kids are not the future - they are the 'now'. (More reports from the conference later)

Images by Jason Truscott (More pictures of #pelc11 here)

 
It's about the kids by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Txt in line

Later today I'm travelling up to the University of Bath to meet up this evening with some of the other speakers at the 6th 'Let's Talk About Text' conference. The event takes place tomorrow, Wednesday 19th May, and I'm presenting the opening keynote speech. I'm actually a little regretful of the fact that once lunchtime comes around, I'm going to have to jump into my car and head over to Bristol Airport to catch a flight to Germany where I will be working on Thursday and Friday (More about that later in the week). But for the short time I'm in Bath, I hope to catch up with a number of old friends such as Andy Black, Nitin Parmar, Matt Lingard and Andy Ramsden.

My presentation, which I have embedded here, will hopefully set the scene for what I am sure will be another great event in the series organised by Txttools Ltd. Stephen McCann, Steve Sidaway and their team have put together an interesting programme which I;m sure the 50 or so delegates will find thoroughly engaging. My keynote will cover a range of issues around the use of SMS in education, including a brief history of human communication, from cave paintings to mobile phone texting, student expectations, cultural shifts, language change including 'squeezetext', the texture of language, and finally ... what the research has already shown us about the use of txt in higher education, good and bad. If you're at the conference on Wednesday, I'll see you there.

Everything you always wanted to know about text

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

'Txt in line' by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

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.