2008 Conferences Retro

I spoke at a number of high profile e-learning conferences over the year, and took part in some stimulating discussions and excellent workshops. Half of the joy of attending such events is the possibility of networking with like minded individuals, intelligent people with great ideas, and the chance to engage with them in sharing ideas and collaborating together beyond the event. Here are my top ten learning technology conferences of 2008 (look, I know it's eleven really, but whose blog is this anyway?):

10 = I was invited to keynote the Polish Virtual Universities conference in June and was flown out to Warsaw for a few days. It's a beautiful city, but there are parts of Warsaw, including the accommodation I stayed in, which left a little to be desired. The conference was all in Polish, except for the three keynotes, so I didn't get much from the event. Albert Sangra's presentation (Open University of Catalonia, Spain) was excellent, and we have since become great friends.

10 = I was also invited to keynote the one-day event held in Southampton University in January. The conference, focusing on e-learning for language teaching, was also keynoted by Jon Dron (Athabasca University) and I enjoyed his presentation and learnt a lot.

9 - As with last year, the ICL conference held in Villach, Austria was again an interesting one. Met old friends and made some new ones, and participated in several workshops and paper presentations. I gave a 3 hour pre-conference Web 2.0 workshop which almost 50 people attended. Conversation was lively and long lived. Web 2.0 is obviously still a hot topic amongst the education community. And the social event - a day trip to Venice - was an incredible experience. The 2009 ICL event will again be held in Villach on 23-25 September.

8 - My home conference, the 3rd Plymouth e-Learning Conference, held in April, was only a one day event, but was one not to miss. An excellent keynote by Mark Stiles was followed by many high quality papers from delegates from 20 UK universities, and a stirling demonstration of the Wii hack from our own team of Learning Technologists. And the Devon cream tea was also well received by all! Next year's Plymouth e-Learning Conference is a two day event, and is already shaping up to be bigger and better than 2008's, with as of today, more than 100 delegates already registered from 15 countries.

7 - The EduMedia conference, in the peaceful and majestic Alpine surroundings of St Virgil, Salzburg was a wonderful experience. I met some new friends and made some useful contacts, many of which will be pursued over the coming months. Even found time to make a short trip across the border to Germany for an excellent meal with friends. Next year's event Edumedia 2009 takes place in Salzburg between 2-3 June.

6 - In November, I left the damp and drizzly weather of the UK for a few days in Barecelona for the Open EduTech summit, hosted by the Open University of Catalonia. Not really a conference, more a meeting of minds, I was one of an invited group of 40 e-learning and open learning specialists who were brought together to discuss the future of open learning. A very stimulating event, tapas and drinks with new friends and old, and some great walks around the gothic quarter of Barcelona and up Las Ramblas were highlights of this event.

4 = At 4th equal - Online Educa Berlin is always a great experience. Always held in the crisp and cold pre-Christmas German capital, and is always massive. The presence of the edublogger community was stimulating, and our many informal meetings outside the confines of the main conference were memorable and fruitful. OEB 2009 will be held in December 2-4.

4 = In equal 4th place was the IFIP conference - ICT and Learning for the Net Generation - which was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in July (pictured above). In the extreme heat and humidity more than 120 delegates from around the globe came together to discuss a variety of digital learning contexts and e-learning methods. Social trips out and about were enjoyed by all, and the silubrious surroundings of the Saujana Hotel were unrivalled - one highlight was a moonlit dinner at the hotel poolside. An unscheduled stopover at a beach hotel in Sri Lanka on the way home capped the experience for me.

2 = The EDEN 2008 conference was held at the Belem Cultural Centre in beautiful Lisbon in June. I toured the city on the first day and was impressed by its beauty and majesty. The conference was also stimulating and enjoyable, and several of us introduced live blogging as a mainstream activity at EDEN for the first time. EDEN 2009 will be held in Gdansk, Poland for the first time, on 10-13 June. EDEN is an excellent conference for networking amongst distance education and e-learning professionals. It is fairly non-commercial (no vendors or exhibition to speak of), eclectic and fast moving.

2 = ALT-C 2008 which took place at the University of Leeds in September has my vote for joint second place. Although the accommodation was basic, the venue was great, and there were some memorable papers and workshops, including an inspirational keynote speech by Hans Rosling. Most memorable event was the Web 2.0 Slam workshop where James Clay, Joss Winn and I created a comic YouTube video about gender and the digital divide. Best outcome of the event was the inception of the Fringe (F-ALT) organised by some of the edublogger community. Long may it continue at all future events! ALT-C 2009 will be held in Manchester, 8-10 September.

1 - My number 1! The best conference by a country mile in 2008 was Handheld Learning, which took place in London in October. I attended Handheld as a non-speaking delegate. Doesn't mean I didn't talk to anyone, because there were many very useful conversations. No, I went along with no pressure, because I had no paper to present. The event had something for everyone, including Nintendo Wii games to play, superb staging and lighting, excellent organisation, great catering, friendly crew, a specturm of papers and workshops which ranged from entirely practical to challengingly academic and above all, an extremely eclectic mix of delegates drawn from every single sector of educational practice, and a great venue - The Brewery in the East End of London. Congratulations go to Graham Brown-Martin and his team for organising such a memorable event - I definitely intend returning for Handheld Learning in 2009 (5-7 October).

Interview with a ...

Just been interviewed by two groups of people, both on video. Cristina Costa did a brief interview with me based on my recent Web 2.0 research and the forthcoming Plymouth e-Learning Conference which can be found at the Pontydysgu site. Also met three lads from the University of Umea in Sweden who pounced on me for some vox pop. You can view that interview here. Getting ready now for my afternoon breakout session at Online Educa Berlin. I will be speaking in the Web81 session, chaired by Dai Griffiths, and shared with Peter Sloep, where I will be talking on 'Learning 2.0: How students are using social software in their learning'.

Official twit

I'm here in Berlin for day two of Online Educa where there are 2064 delegates from 91 countries. After the Germans, the Brits are by far the largest delegate contingent with almost 300 members (hurrah!!) Yesterday was frenetic to say the least. From a very early start to a very late end, concluding with another Edublogger meeting, there was so much to see, do and enjoy. There were several highlights in the day, including a live radio podcast by Pontydysgu team including Graham Attwell and Josie Fraser (who grabbed me for an impromptu interview in front of a few hundred people who were all patiently queuing for their coffee at the break. (pictured above, Josie interviews George Roberts from Oxford Brookes University). Several interesting conversations developed throughout the day, and I seemed to bump into just about everyone I had met previously at other events around the globe over the previous 18 months. Educa is like one massive people aggregator.

One of the best sessions I attended was the breakout session entitled 'MUVEs for the 21st Century', which in some ways was a follow up of last year's session we did as the Second Life team. Chaired by Shirley Williams (Reading University) and presented by a host of stars including Steven Warburton (Kings College London) and Graham Hibbert (Leeds Metropolitan University), it was a tour de force of all the latest activities and research into immersive and virtual learning environments. Themes included design issues, formal and informal learning and digital identity (avatar design). I was roped in to act as 'official twit' for the proceedings, and must have sent around 150 tweets out during the two hour session. I think I lost about a dozen followers as a result (I guess they resented what they considered to be spam) but gained an awful lot more on Twitter.

The evening was capped by the edublogger meeting where we discussed microblogging in all its guises. Issues included the question: Is microblogging eroding people's use of Facebook and other social networking tools, what can and should Twitter be used for, and networking through microblogging. I will say more about today's events when I have had a chance to catch my breath...

Go Wesch young man

Everyone today was impressed by Michael Wesch's keynote speech to the Online Educa Berlin conference this morning. Wesch is considerably younger and more dynamic than I expected. He also comes across as self-effacing and certainly does not play up to his image of mover and shaker of the social media scene. Wesch spoke under the title of 'The Crisis of Significance and the Future of Education'. Wesch is probably best known for his YouTube videos including the oft used and quoted 'The machine is Us/ing Us'. I have used the video myself on several occasions because it says it all - we are teaching the web and in doing so, making knowledge and creating new learning possibilities. This was the theme of Wesch's talk - he regaled us with his hilarious experiences working in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, whilst at the same time convincing us that we are in a time of tension between the old traditional approaches to learning and the new ways students learn today. He quoted YouTube as a classic example of the ever increasingly primacy of user generated content. YouTube has broadcasted more content in the last 6 months, he claimed, than ABC has in 50 years. And all this without having to pay any producers or directors! The new mediascape is creating new possibilities, he said, and if we don't grasp these possibilities, we lose the opportunities.

Wesch set the tone for the conference, and to be fair, although the other speakers would have been fair to middling in any other context, they paled into lesser significance in comparison to Michael Wesch's masterly performance. As I write this blog sat in the Marlene Bar, I can hear people around me still enthusiastically discussing his ideas. I'm off now to sit in a breakout session to see what else I can learn that will inspire me today...

.. And now a word from our sponsors

It's bitterly cold here in Berlin, but the snow has gone from the ground and the skies here today are a clear pale blue. I'm sat in the Marlene Bar of the Hotel Intercontinental just before the start of day one of the Online Educa Berlin conference. After wading my way through a couple of dozen German policemen, I made my way into the main reception of the conference...

The first thing you notice about Educa, is that it is shamelessly commercial. Most of the space of this huge event is taken up with exhibition and vendor stands, more than 120, and everyone, it seems is trying to flog you something. I have just opened my delegate pack and out popped no fewer than 19 flyers and brochures from sponsors, around an inch thick. They are discarded on the side without me reading any of them - oh woe to the rain forests! Oh, and this wireless link is brought to you courtesy of Adobe....

Last night I spent a very enjoyable hour or so with some of the more notorious Edubloggers including Josie Fraser, David White, Dirk Steiglitz, Graham Attwell and George Roberts. We chewed the fat over the future (or not) of VLEs, residents and visitors, social software and German caberet. Yep, we aren't completely boring.

I will report back on some of the sessions here today and tomorrow as they take place and try to bring you some interesting images from the event. There is also at least one Twemes site hosting images, tweets and blog postings for the event. For now, I'm off to try and avoid the vendor stands and find the sessions.

Germany calling...

Berlin beckons again next week - it's the end of the year, and it's time for OEB! Online Educa Berlin is without doubt the largest e-learning industry conference in Europe, and some would argue, the most influential. For many, OEB is the uber-conference for e-learning. For me it holds many memories of speaking to large and appreciative audiences, the remains of the Berlin Wall, the Checkpoint Charlie museum, Christmas markets, Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz, Ka De We, and the Brandenburg Gate. The first time I attended OEB was in 1997 when it was still quite small at around 1000 delegates. The city (and in particular, Potsdamerplatz) was still under construction after unification, and the whole place was one big builkding site. 'Ich liebe Berlin', I gabbled excitedly in fluent German to the taxi driver. In response he said 'It will be nice when it's finished...' I will be there again next Wednesday for another dose of sardonic German wit.


Here are some of the OEB 2008 organising committee's aspirations for delegates:

• Prepare yourself for Generation Y. Debate and discuss the impact and needs of a generation who grew up with the Internet.


• Have a closer look at the value and importance of open educational resources. Get in touch with innovative thinkers and promising initiatives.


• Change your mind about content creation.


• Learn more about virtual worlds and user-generated content in education.


• Join the debate on Web 2.0 and social networking.


• Experience new possibilities with sophisticated learning management systems.


• Move on with mobile learning and check out pioneering tools and applications.


• Explore new ways of storytelling and videos in learning.


• Get serious with game-based learning.

OEB is always staged in the crisp, urbane and cosmopolitan surroundings of the Hotel Intercontinental, next to the famous zoological gardens, deep in the Tiergarten area of Germany's glittering, burgeoning capital city. Just down the road around Kurfurstendammstrasse, are the Christmas markets, and of course the cafes, bars, boutiques and theatres. I love going there for the conference (2008 will be my sixth visit) not necessarily for the papers or workshops, although some of these can be attention grabbers. Nor for the keynotes, although some of those I have witnessed have been among the most inspirational speeches I have ever heard (I will not miss Michael Wesch at this year's event - here's his latest YouTube video). All the corporate types will be there - you can tell them by the expensive suits they sport - to peddle their wares and convince you that their VLE package or software solution is the best on the market. But it's not them I am there to see either, even though I will shamelessly grab some freebies.

No - I go because of the opportunities for networking... there are so many smart and creative people to meet and discuss ideas with, and so many wonderful, atmospheric venues in which to meet. The Marlene Bar last year was an excellent place to just sit, chill (yep, it's Berlin just before Christmas, and that's cold by any standards) and chew over some new ideas whilst excellent live music is played and the iconic image of Marlene Dietrich glowers smokily over the proceedings. OEB is over in a flash each year - but during the intense two days, many contacts are made, new friendships and valuable partnerships forged.

If you are in Berlin and attending OEB next week, and we bump into each other, will you do me a small favour? Please explain to me why a face to face conference is called 'Online...?'

Going for the hat trick

This year I'm going for the hat trick - speaking at the three most prestigious e-learning conferences in Europe (in my opinion at least, so don't go writing in). It will be the first time I have submitted and had papers accepted for EDEN (Lisbon), ALT-C (Leeds) and Online Educa (Berlin) all in the same year, so I'm quite pleased.

To celebrate this, I am posting my PowerPoint presentations from these conferences and others up on Slideshare just in case anyone wants to view them again. The EDEN presentation, on blogging as a teacher mentoring tool, and the ALT-C presentation, on my 5 stage wiki activities model are both up already. The Online Educa (Berlin) conference presentation will be posted nearer the date (mainly because I haven't created it yet). Also up are presentations I did in Salzburg for Edumedia, and my Edupunk presentation for F-ALT, which has already posted 200 views (That's me in the picture above, at F-ALT - a great action picture taken by Josie Fraser).

I hope my ramblings and jottings are useful to somebody out there.

Thanks for the memories

There is an old saying that you shouldn't look back when you are ploughing a field. Hmmm.... It's a good job that I'm not ploughing a field then, isn't it...? So at the top end of the year I can look back on 2007 with some fondness and think, wow, how good a year was that? So here are just a few of my highlights:

Best conference of the year: Without doubt it would have to be Online Educa Berlin, where I learnt so much, heard so many good papers and keynotes, and met so many great people. Second prize is shared by ALT-C (Nottingham) and Bazaar (Utrecht).

Best keynote of the year: Had to be that of Teemu Arina, the Finnish wunderkind, who regaled us with his clear thinking and prescience at EDEN in Naples.

Best device of the year: The iPhone of course - a gadget that I am not getting tired of.... and I've had it for almost a week now!

Best new buddy for the year: Well, I have made several new friends, all of whom I met this year, and all of whom I am now working with/collaborating with in some way. So let's see ... Marco Kalz (met him at ICL in Austria), Helen Keegan (on a bus going to the Eden conference, Italy), Gorg Mallia (ICICTE Heraklion and cartoonist extraordinaire), David Guralnick (ICL Austria), Graham Attwell (ALT-C Nottingham and all over the place ever since!), Josie Fraser (ALT-C Nottingham), Piers MacLean (ICICTE) and Cristina Costa (ALT-C Nottingham) all spring to my mind as people who have enhanced my year and given me much food for thought and a lot of laughter.

Flop of the year: Had to be ICODL in Athens, which proved to be a bit of a disappointment in many ways.

City of the year: Stockholm was great (for one night only) in April, Utrecht was great to wander around in the dark, and Frankfurt was ace (in October), but the prize for this year has to go to..... Bella Napoli!

Best food: Again, sorry all you other cities - you did your best, but it's Napoli that has the best food and restaurants.

Best experience of the year: Speaking to almost 300 people on the topic of Second Life at Online Educa in November. Large screen technology and safety in numbers comes to mind (there were 6 of us on the panel). Second prize goes to the visit I made with my mate Palitha Edirisingha to Pompeii in June, just prior to the opening reception at the EDEN conference.

Funniest event of the year: The ALT-C social event at Jongluers Comedy Club in Nottingham. We laughed until we got thrown out. Second prize goes to the farce of a speech by Andrew Keen at Online Educa. Never heard such crap.

Best group of the year: The prize goes to the Bazaar bunch who are the most intellectually stimulating group of people I have come across. That's us pictured above. Glad to know you all guys! (And Freefolio is a cool idea! - Thanks)

Caledonian Academy blog

One of the best and most comprehensive series of reports I have come across about this year's Online Educa Berlin conference can be found at the Caledonian Academy blog. Written by staff at Glasgow Caledonian University, previous contributions have been contributed by the likes of Colin Milligan, Allison Littlejohn, Kathy Trinder and their colleagues. The most recent postings contain some analytical and perhaps even forensic accounts of the parallel sessions, workshops and keynotes at Educa courtesy of blogger Anoush Margaryan. Well done folks - good reading!

Clark is not Keen

I'm back home from Online Educa Berlin, and it's time to reflect. Germany was a lot of fun, cold, festive and ... well, Germany. I'm left wondering though who this woman is everyone keeps talking about - anyone know anything about Alice Klar...?

Anyway. In comparison to all the other conferences on elearning and ICT I have been to this year, Educa just has to be the best. It had everything - an excellent environment for relaxing, thinking, discussing and networking (the Hotel Intercontinental on Budapesterstrasse must be one of the best and most expensive venues for a European elearning event), great social events, and an excellent line up of sessions. With over 2000 delegates at this year's event, it was also packed with diversity, both culturally and in terms of alternative perspectives. The content in most of the sessions was stimulating, challenging and in some cases absolutely inspirational.

I'm referring in particular to a keynote session on the final day of Educa, presented by Donald Clark (above), who was articulate, humorous, and at times, deeply profound in his analysis of the process of learning. He began by debunking many of the established and commonly accepted learning theories espoused by the likes of Benjamin Bloom (Taxonomy), Robert Gagne (Stages model) and Abraham Maslow (Hierarchy of needs). Maslow's model is particularly popular in the corporate training sector, said Clark, because most people like to put pyramids on their PowerPoint slides. Glib, perhaps, but also inherently true when faced with the oversimplification of Maslow's model. (Don't forget that Carl Rogers onces stated that we don't have to work our way through all of Maslow's hierarchy - some people can self-actualise instantly). Clark also launched into learning style theories by the likes of Kolb and Honey & Mumford.

By far the most delicious experience for the audience however, was Donald Clark's response to the earlier keynote by enfant terrible Andrew Keen. How the two differ in their approach! We should all feel insulted, said Clark, by Keen's dismissal of bloggers and wikepedians as merely 'monkeys with typewriters'. There were audible gasps when he labelled Keen 'an idiot', but I think the gasps were of admiration rather than surprise or outrage. Donald Clark was simply articulating what many people were thinking. 14 years olds have as much right to post internet opinions as Harvard professors, we heard him say. And social software is not about making money, but about liberating learners to contribute their own content to the mix.

But... 'get a grip, Andrew!' was perhaps the most apposite soundbite of the day...

Second Life at Educa

Second Life is much in evidence at Online Educa Berlin this year, much as I expected. Not only was our panel session - along with Helen Keegan, Graham Attwell, Steven Warburton, David White and Dai Griffith - very well attended with almost 300 delegates present in Potsdam I - but yesterday, an inspiring keynote by Sian Bayne, of the University of Edinburgh, demonstrated clearly to all those present how SL could be successfully deployed to create purposeful and open virtual learning spaces for Higher Education. Bayne was eloquent in her description of the process, highlighted many of the pedagogical issues that had emerged from creation of the space, and even demonstrated a live in-world visit.

Other sessions have also featured Second Life and have focused on other Multi-User Virtual Learning Environments - World of Warcraft has been featured, and the delegates here are under no allusion that MUVEs and other 3-D Virtual worlds are going to be hot agenda items for future e-learning conferences. Our little team are certainly planning some more jaunts into this field and will be preparing papers for other events in the coming year.

Chalk and cheese

The dialogue is hotting up here at Online Educa Berlin. Yesterday there was a clash of opinion between two of the keynote speakers. Andrew Keen, author of the infamous anti-Web 2.0 book Cult of the Amateur, failed to make many friends with his somewhat embittered attack on bloggers, Wikipedia and user generated content. As I have said before on this blog, there is irony in his statement that user generated content is simply a whole load of monkeys with typewriters - he publicised his own blog during his talk. Looking distinctly nervous prior to his presentation, once up on his hind legs, he launched into a diantribe against 14 year olds whose opinions are valued equally well as Harvard professors. He urged delegates to determine the difference between opinion and established truth - whatever that is. Andrew was clearly here to sell his book - he shamelessly mentioned it no fewer than a dozen times during his half hour speech, and immediately left for a book signing session.

By complete contrast, Graham Attwell, who stepped in at the last minute to replace a keynote speaker who failed to turn up, launched a blistering attack on the perspective of Andrew Keen. Self proclaimed as Andrew Keen,s nightmare, Attwell argued that the wisdom of the crowd is exactly that - knowledge that can be trusted because so may individuals are involved in the process of editing and strengthening the content on Wikipedia and that there are expert blogs out there that are trustworthy. If we fail to capitalise on Web 2.0, said Attwell, then we would miss a huge opportunity to transform learning and bring it screaming into the 21st Century.

I will leave you to decide who you think is the chalk, and who is the cheese....

Ich bin ein Berliner

I love Berlin, and cannot believe it has taken me so long to come back here. It is truly magical at and around Christmas time, with many of the trees in the streets lit up with lights. I am at Online Educa and have just witnessed one of the best keynotes I have ever seen. Let me attempt to encapsulate some of the content from the first session.

The first keynote was presented by Professor Sugata Mitra, seen above left, who is an Indian national who now works at the University of Newcastle. He reported on a 5 year long and ongoing project to place computers in Indian villages. He set up videocameras to record children as they interacted with the computer and each other, in what has been dubbed the Hole in the Wall project. Amazingly, he showed evidence that not only do the children teach themselves to use the computers, they also learned English as a result of their use of browsers such as Google. To cap it all, he amazed the 2000 plus delegates with the question - does language matter... and showed evidence that not only had the children learnt to speak English - they had also learned complex and difficuly concepts such as genetics, and could answer questions when prompted.

More to follow as time and space allow, but for now, goodnight from a very chilly and festive Berlin!

Making a MUVE

If it's Wednesday, it must be Berlin. I'm off in a few hours to catch that old orange and white bird again, this time to the heart of Germany, to speak at Online Educa Berlin. It's been over 8 years since I last spoke at Educa, when I gave a live demonstration of the then fairly new web streaming kit that multimedia company PictureTel had introduced. I did a live video link to London and spoke about the pedagogical potential of the system. On a wing and a prayer, the whole session went perfectly - and delegates crammed into the room to see it and ask questions. And of course, streaming media and videoconferencing are now a part of the fabric of many education institutions.

Online Educa is a much bigger affair now than it was in 1999, and most probably the largest e-learning event in Europe. I'm on a specialist invited panel with Graham Attwell, Steve Warburton, Helen Keegan and David White, all of whom are probably a lot more expert than I in the ways of Second Life. But, I will give it my best shot, and tell those assembled about our sexual health education and public information SIM. We will of course, be talking about whether MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments), like previous innovations, will one day become common place in education. Time now to make a MUVE...

Trains and planes ...

I'm off up to Birmingham tomorrow, to meet with the rest of the Programme Committee for ALT-C 2008. Next year's ALT Conference will take place between 9-11 September at the University of Leeds. It's already shaping up to be a good conference, with keynote speakers including:

• David Cavallo, Chief Learning Architect for One Laptop per Child, and Head of the Future of Learning Research Group at MIT Media Lab;
• Dr Itiel Dror, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Southampton;
• Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institute, Sweden, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation.

You can download a flyer for the conference here. Tomorrow, we will begin to choose the theme speakers for the event, and go through the protocols for reviewing papers, workshops, etc. I hope the train ride back home will be more comfortable than last year - got back to Plymouth, collapsed with chest pains and ended up in hospital! (Between you and me, I think the buffet car may have had something to do with it....).

I had to take a month off work, which I couldn't afford to do this time... I'm off to speak at ICODL in Athens on Wednesday where I will meet up again with my old friend Michael Moore, and when I'm back from that conference, I have a day off (which I will need to spend in Oxford, on the ALT-J Editorial Board meeting). The very next day I'm flying out to Berlin to speak at Online Educa. Too much flying about. I'm tired just thinking about it.

High level talks

I'm sat in an office on the top floor (18th) of the Attenborough Building, here in the heart of the University of Leicester. There are spectacular views over the city from up here, or there would be if I could see past the scaffolding and netting that is covering most of the building. Leicester is suffering from the same syndrome as many other universities throughout the UK at the moment. It seems that every university I visit is in the process of being rebuilt, refurbished or repurposed. The University of Plymouth is probably the university with the most building at the moment. Millions have been spent in the last 2 years to create buildings on the main campus so that we can 'pull our horns in' and close down all our external sites. Anyway, back to Leicester...

I'm here as guest speaker for the Beyond Distance Research Alliance - an influential group of academics and professionals from several UK universities who meet to discuss research around e-learning, distance education and learning technology - the group is led by Professor Gilly Salmon. She will be at the talk, as will Professor David Hawkridge, whose work I read during my teacher training days. In my seminar today I will be presenting some recent research I have been doing with my team on wikis as collaborative learning spaces. I've also promised to briefly discuss Second Life as a 3D wiki - but I won't give too much away, as I'm saving the best for Online Educa in Berlin next month. I don't think I have ever given a talk at so rarified an altitude, although my trip to the skyscarpers of Frankfurt a few days ago gave me some useful training...

Sounds bazaar

I am featured on a podcast this month which is hosted by one of the busiest men in e-learning: Graham Attwell. It's called Sounds of the Bazaar and it looks like it's been going for a while, because this is edition number 14. The podcast lasts approximately one hour and is reminiscent of a vox pop radio show. My interview is about 7 minutes long, and is one I did with Graham about the University of Plymouth's Sexual Health SIM in Second Life while we were at the ICL conference in Austria last month. You can even hear the coffee machines in the background...

There are some interesting features from other speakers on this podcast, including interviews with Stephen Downes and Ruth Rominger and reports from conferences. Graham does a good job as host of the show, and draws you into the content with his easy going, westcountry burr. Have a listen - the entire contents are also featured on the British Institute BILD site. Graham and I will also be speaking on a specialist panel called 'No Life in Second Life?' at Online Educa Berlin next month. With us will be Dai Griffiths, David White, Helen Keegan and Steven Warburton. Hope you can make it...