Identity play

I have just spent a very interesting two hours with members of staff and researchers of the Open University of Catalonia today here in beautiful Barcelona. Tomorrow I will be giving the opening keynote at the 8th International Seminar on Teacher Training, but as a precursor, I was invited to meet some of the OUC team. And so I sat and talked in a relaxed but thoughtful atmosphere with some impressive young academics earlier today. We discussed a lot of issues related to distance education and technology mediated learning, including digital identity, social media and open scholarship. Many of the ensuing discussion and questions kept me on my toes, and provoked us all to reconsider our roles as educators in the digital age. It was digital identity though, that most of the group were interested in, and kept returning to talk about.

One of the things the group wanted to discuss was this blog and the way I use it to not only disseminate my ideas, but also as a tool for research. We talked about taking risks, and playing with digital identity. Do we present ourselves differently online to real space? What do we share on the web and what should we keep private? We analysed why I had posted yesterdays story about my Silver Wedding Anniversary, and what were the potential issues with such a public performance of a personal celebration. Someone also wanted to know why I displayed badges on my blog. I responded that it is a measure of peer esteem, which may help some readers to determine whether a site is trustworthy or not. Alternatively, I display them because I am grateful to my own academic community for the way they continue to support this blog (and others) by continually returning to read more. When they vote for my blog as one of the best (and competition is very stiff now, with many excellent e-learning blogs out there), then I feel my work and effort has been worth something.

So, when I returned to my hotel just now and found another award badge waiting for me to display on my blog - this time from the e-Learning Council - it was a welcome addition to the peer reviews I have already received. Thank you to everyone who voted to place me among such an illustrious company. Here's the full list of the top ten (it's actually a top 11).

1. Jane Hart
2. Elliott Masie
3. Cathy Moore
4. (tie) Harold Jarche
4. (tie) Jane Bozarth
5. Steve Wheeler
6. Tom Kuhlmann and Dave Anderson
7. Clark Quinn
8. Clive Shepherd
9. David Kelly
10. Tony Karrer

Perhaps the display of these badges adds something to my digital identity? Who knows...


Identity play by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital futures

I'm off to the beautiful city of Barcelona tomorrow afternoon to participate in this year's Open Ed Tech Summit. It's the second in the meet ups, which draw around 40 international open learning and distance education experts from around the world. I documented Open Ed Tech 2008 post-event on this blog (See Muy Caliente). This year's event will be an intensive 48 hours of discussions and social events, all organised by the Open University of Catalonia. If it's anything like last year, we are all in for a stimulating, tiring but extremely enjoyable time together. The brief for Open Ed Tech 2009, written by Larry Johnson of the New Media Consortium is as follows:

The Scenario: Creating the University of the Future

You have been invited to serve on an international panel of experts advising the rector of a new university that will be established in the developing country of Futurolandia. Your invitation issues from the Ministry of Education and indicates that you are part of a handpicked team — a team that is meeting in person today to perform its task.

This university is meant to be the first of its kind, and will be established free from preconceptions or official constraints about how it will operate. Its mandate is to provide an excellent education in an environment of open access, built on four key ideas:

1. Access to high-quality education should be available to all, and open content is a key part of providing such access.

2. Informal learning and mentoring are effective and well-proven approaches to engaging with youth and stimulating critical thought.

3. Personalized learning is critical to student success, but will require learning standards that allow students to continue their learning where ever life takes them.

4. Tools such as digital video, mobile devices, social media, and the global network all have important roles in learning and should be available to all learners.

The rector has been asked to prepare a proposal addressing how the university will achieve this vision, and sees these ideas as core requirements for the institution she wishes to create. As part of the international expert panel, your task is to assist the rector by identifying ways to support each of the four requirements, examining the pros and cons of each proposed strategy, and presenting a summary of your team's recommendations to the rector, point by point.

We will of course publish our results in due course, just as we did for our 2008 Summit: What does it mean to be educated in the 21st Century? (pdf file)

Muy Caliente

The weather this week may have been cooler than I have experienced during my previous visits to Spain (usually I'm there in the summer when the sun is a raging demon in a brazen sky) but the company was 'hot and cooking'. It was a priviledge to rub shoulders with some extremely smart and knowledgeable people drawn from diverse backgrounds. The Open University of Catalonia staff (Eva de Lera and Albert Sangra in particular should be singled out) pulled off an amazing logisitical feat to bring almost 40 people together in one place for the Open EdTech Summit this week. We met up at the well appointed Hotel Catedral, deep in the atmospheric gothic quarter of Barcelona, and attendance was by invitation. The attendance/contributor list reads like a 'who's who' of innovators and champions of open learning.

Although we spent less than 48 hours together, the experience was intense, and the outcomes will no doubt be far reaching. Our task was to divide into four groups of around 8 members, and each tackle a set of issues which would ultimately produce 5 good ideas, and another 5 'interesting' (read crazy) ideas which would inform the future of open learning, open technology and open content.

Memorable moments for me included working alongside people like Paul Kirschner (Open University of the Netherlands) Paul West (Commonwealth of Learning, Canada) and Debby Knotts (University of New Mexico) as we grappled with innovative ideas and argued over concepts and theories of e-learning. I bumped into Brian Lamb for the first time and we shared a rant on Edupunk over a few jars. There was also an informal on the hoof chat with Neil Selwyn (Insititute of Education) as we passed through the old roman walled area of Barcelona under a full moon. I enjoyed intelligent and sometimes hilarious conversations with the likes of Sugata Mitra (University of Newcastle), Mark Bullen (University of British Columbia, Canada) and Vijay Kumar (MIT) - who gave everyone of us a free copy of his Opening Up Education book. Ishmael Pena and Tom Caswell were new contacts who I am certain I will continue to maintain contact with, even if it's only on Twitter.

I will leave the summarising of the event to Ismael Pena (Open University of Catalonia) as he is far more eloquent (and probably more concise) than me. His summary can be found on his ICTlogy blog. Oh, and of course, there is now a Twemes site which holds a growing set of images captured during those 48 hours, and other artefacts of the event for all to enjoy. If there is another event planned for next year, I aim to be there, believe me.