The road is open

In spite of the trials and tribulations of international travel, I actually had a wonderful time in Elmshorn, Germany this week during the two day Moodlemoot event. I met a lot of smart people, and engaged in some very valuable conversations about learning, technology, culture and life in general. The Sounds of the Bazaar Internet radio guys were also present and I managed to squeeze in a live interview on Day 1 with Klaus Rummler on the 'future of learning', as we stood outside in the spring sunshine. My opening keynote focused on openness in education, and I made a call for more open scholarship and open educational practices. Because I was 'preaching to the converted' (the audience was made up of around 300 teachers and other professionals who were already sold on the idea of using open source tools such as Moodle and Mahara in their work), my presentation was very well received, and there were some excellent, thoughtful questions at the end. My slides are here.

It was also a great pleasure to hear two other keynote speakers, Martin Dougiamas, Moodle's founder, who spoke live via Skype from Perth in Australia, and Max Woodtli, a Swiss academic who spoke on 'Visible Learning' - highlighting the work of New Zealand academic John Hattie. Although Dougiamas's presentation was marred by technical difficulties, he was nevertheless able to make his point, via a series of technical illustrations, including the announcement that a set of new mobile phone apps for Moodle will be released in the coming weeks. Max Woodtli was more pedagogical in his focus, talking about the most effective approaches to securing good learning outcomes. Although he spoke in German, I had the excellent services of Stephan Rinke, translating simultaneously for me. Woodtli showed how through a vast range of metastudies ranging from primary to tertiary education research, distance education and online web based methods have no more impact than traditional teaching, and in some cases have poorer outcomes. It is only when teachers forge strong working relationships with their students, and promote the use of methods such as concept mapping, reciprocal teaching and other active forms of problem based learning, that learning outcomes are strong and long lasting. How we transfer those methods effectively into digital learning environments will determine the future of learning platforms such as Moodle, he said.

My thanks go to all who organised Moodlemoot, and in particular, Sigi Jakob-Kühn, who invited me to speak at such an enjoyable event.

Image source by Stephan Rinke

The road is open by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The road is endless...

It's official. Brussels Air sucks. I'm very disappointed in them, and if they were one of my students, they would get a big fat zero. I have to admit that the only thing with Brussels in front of it that I dislike more at the moment is sprouts. I have just arrived home after a horrendous 20 hours being trapped in transit. And it was all Brussels Air's fault. It all started when I left the German Moodlemoot (#mootDE11n) which I keynoted this week. T'was a great conference with plenty of good stuff to come away with (and this will be the subject of another post, later in the week). My keynote speech was entitled 'The Road is Open.' In hindsight I think I should have called it 'The Road is Endless.' Here's why ...

I arrive on time (actually in plenty of time) for my first homeward flight from Hamburg to Brussels. If we leave on time, I have almost one hour to get across the rabbit warren that is Brussels Airport to catch the Brussels Air connection onwards to Bristol, where my faithful car awaits me. We duly board the plane, and we wait. And we wait. And then we wait some more. No clear information is forthcoming about our delay. People are starting to get twitched. We are all getting numb bums. I feel like striking up a chorus of 'why are we waiting', but I'm not sure the Germans and Belgians around me will join in. After more than 40 minutes tied to the apron, and with no word of explanation as to why we are delayed, we eventually taxi, and take off toward Brussels. Apart from being elbowed in the head twice by the larger than average cabin crew, the flight is event free. But we are very late. By the time we arrive, I have less than 10 minutes to get across Brussels airport from Terminal B to Terminal A. Not a snowball's chance in Hell. I can't even get through the crowds and up the escalators in 10 minutes. I have been told that the best thing for me to do is to find the Brussels Airline Transfer desk. But where is it? It's like trying to find a straw in a needle stack. No one has met me to whisk me off to my connection, although they know I'm on the flight, and it's been severely delayed. After running around like a lunatic for another 10 minutes, I admit defeat, and ask some helpful airport personnel where the Brussels Airline ticketing desk it located. I'm pointed towards the ghoul-like security X-Ray people, who look straight through me. It's through there, they tell me.

I gaze at the scene in horror - there is a queue longer than the mausoleum line for photos with Uncle Mao. I throw my hands up in despair - my connection is now well and truly lost. Stuff this for a game of soldiers I think, and breathing silent oaths and trying to navigate around slow moving travellers, soaked in sweat and wheezing like a busted accordian, I finally manage to circumvent the huge security queues, by going back out of the terminal and then working my way in through the front of the terminal again. Are you following me? If you are, you're doing very well, but you're also soaked in sweat, muttering oaths, and desperate for a drink (of any kind). I spot the Brussels Airline ticketing desk, and once I get my breath back I tell them my sorry story. 'Hmm', says the woman behind the counter in a Hercule Poirrot accent, 'You have missed your flight'. Very helpful indeed. Like her Belgian countryman, she obviously has some detective training. Now for the bad news. There are no more flights today to Bristol. Or tomorrow for that matter. Can we get you a flight to anywhere else in England? Er, no, I need to get to Bristol, because that's where my car is parked. Well, all we do is get you on a flight to Paris in the morning, and then onwards to Bristol later in the day. Fine. I'll take that. I've already given up hope of getting back home today, but I don't wish to stay here in this crazy place any longer than I have to.

The desk clerk gives me a voucher to stay for the night in the Sheraton hotel, and an evening meal voucher. OK, things are looking up a little. Jolly decent of them. She also gives me a breakfast voucher but tells me that as the hotel doesn't open for breakfast until 0600 and my flight also goes at 0600, it may not be of any use. She hands it to me anyway. Gee thanks. I wend my weary way across to the hotel, have a shower, go down to get my evening meal and then crash out on the bed. Don't ask me how I slept. I don't know. I am unconscious until my alarm shocks me awake at 0500.

I'm back in the terminal, having made my way yet again through passport control and the dreaded X-Ray security queue and I'm sat waiting at the gate again, on time. I board the Paris flight, which is completely full, mainly with passengers of the Gallic persuasion. There's not a siege free dans le entire plane. Merde. It's deja vu. Once again there is a long delay, and then we taxi out ready to take off. Then ... the pilot speaks over the intercom in French. It sounds serious. His French speaking audience groans out loud. What could have happened to make them groan? My mind races - has Edith Piaf been raised from the dead? Perhaps they forgot to load the moules et frites for the in-flight menu? Maybe Nicolas Sarkozy has banned the mini-skirt? Then the pilot says it all again in English, and it's my turn to groan out loud. I should have known. There is a problem with the instrumentation and we need to return to the stand. 30 minutes later, after a lot of faffing about and yellow jacket engineering types gesticulating in and out of the cockpit, another announcement is given. We are all to disembark because this plane is not going anywhere. Brussels Air regrets ...le blah blah blah... but safety first, etc. OK, good call.

We are told to report to the Brussels Air ticketing desk to rearrange our flights. We all pile off the plane and make our way up the stairs (the escalator also has technical faults) and are back in the Brussels Airport terminal again. I'm about 10th in the queue for the Brussels Air ticketing desk, and with 150 people descending it is chaos of almost biblical proportions. There are exactly two desk clerks. To deal with 150 people. And each query takes around 10 minutes to solve. After 90 minutes, standing about with my legs gradually giving up the ghost and feeling totally dehydrated, it's my turn and I am told that there are no direct flights to Bristol, but would I like to fly to another English airport instead perhaps? Here we go again...

Eventually I am promised a flight to Birmingham airport, and a ground transfer to Bristol aiport where my car awaits... I could go on and on, with this saga, but I won't. Suffice it to say, I got to Birmingham, and the taxi was waiting for me. The driver got me from Birmingham to Bristol airport in just over 2 hours, where my car awaited me. I'm back home now, after just over 20 hours of travel. I could almost have walked the distance in that time. But I tell thee this for nowt. If you think international travel is glamorous, you are out of your tiny mind.

Image source: Fotopedia

The road is endless... by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Educate the world, don't just feed it

Some of my Twitter buddies have reminded me today of the torrid picture that was taken of me jokingly emulating Edupunk Poster Boy Jim Groom. There's an image of me floating around the web with 'PUNK IT UP' on my knuckles. I guess it's timely, because I travel to Hamburg tomorrow to keynote the German Moodlemoot conference (#mootDE11n) on Thursday, and one of the key themes of my speech will be 'do it yourself' education, the ethos of edupunk. My title is 'The Road Ahead is Open', and I will cover a spectrum of open approaches, including open learning, open educational resources, and the open bricollage approach espoused by Levi Strauss. Ultimately, the entire speech will boil down to a plea for people to adopt an open scholarship approach to their learning and teaching.

Open Scholarship, as I have previously suggested, is much more than a term denoting open practices. Open Scholarship is a way of life, based on the belief that to share your ideas is much better than to hoard them. It's also about opening yourself and your ideas up for constructive criticism, so that in receiving feedback from your PLN, you will learn and grow together. Let me ask you this: What possible purpose is there to hide knowledge away from people who need it to survive and make their lives better? Stephen Heppell, in the 2011 Plymouth e-Learning Conference stunned us all by declaring that around half a billion children in the world (like the ones in the picture above) are outside of education, and don't have a hope of even seeing the inside of textbook, let alone a classroom. And yet all it would take to educate the lot of them would be 5 billion US dollars. It got me thinking. There are a few super-rich people in the world who have this kind of money, and more, in their personal fortunes. Certainly, many of the banks or corporations around the world are rich enough to have this kind of cash to spare. But how many of them would be willing to stump some up to educate our world?

Several years ago, we all gave money to a world wide appeal to feed the starving of the world. The 'Feed the World' campaign was a triumph of compassionate fund raising, but it simply solved a problem in the there and then. Poverty and starvation still exist and although we can't cure it, we can educate people who are in poverty if we simply share the wealth and knowledge about.

It doesn't take a genius to work out that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you show him how to fish you feed him for life. In many cultures, if you educate a man, he is self sufficient. Yet if you educate a woman, you educate an entire family. How are we going to meet the challenge of this century? The challenge to educate people out of poverty? Open scholarship will go a long way to resolving that one, because if everyone shares what they know, and we don't greedily hoard that knowledge away, or capilulate to the invasion of the edubusinesses, the world will be a far more equitable place.

Educate the world, don't just feed it by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.