Pelecon flies higher

Those of you who have ever attended a Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference, or even followed from afar via the social media channels will know that Pelecon is an extraordinary event. Since attaining international conference status and extending its programme to 3 days, Pelecon has become one of the must-attend European learning technology conferences on the calendar. The event attracts learning technologists, lecturers, researchers, teachers, learning professionals, health and medical staff, private trainers, and just about anyone who is interested in the very latest in digital pedagogies, literacies and technologies. In previous years delegates have enjoyed listening to high profile and diverse keynote speakers such as Stephen Heppell, Keri Facer, Gilly Salmon, Graham Attwell, Sherry Terrell, Jane Hart, Josie Fraser and Alec Couros.

This year the conference takes place between 10-12 April. For 2013, we have lined up a veritable feast of leading speakers, all of whom are featured on the Pelecon conference website, and this year promises to push the boundaries even further than before.

#pelc13 is set in the delightful South West coastal English city of Plymouth. The surrounding Devon countryside is stunning as it unfolds in springtime, the towns and villages are steeped in history (the Mayflower Steps and Plymouth Hoe are a must for all tourists to visit) and the culture is rich. The Conference social events including a Wednesday evening Teachmeet, are guaranteed to be fun, entertaining and engaging.

This year the Pelecon Conference dinner will return once again to the visually stunning surroundings of the National Marine Aquarium. Located in Sutton Harbour in the historic Plymouth Barbican area, the Aquarium is the largest in the UK, and is one of the premier tourist attractions in the South West of England. Delegates who enjoyed the conference dinner at previous Plymouth eLearning Conference events in 2009 and 2010 were unanimous in expressing their praise for the evening.
The Dinner starts on Thursday evening, April 11th, at 7.30 pm with welcome drinks and an exclusive tour of the entire aquarium by official guides. Delegates can watch as the sun sets over Plymouth while fishing boats and other marine vessels arrive and depart from nearby Sutton Harbour. The three course dinner will be served in the Atlantic Reef area of the Aquarium, where diners can watch the sharks and other large fish swimming in one of the largest glass tanks in Europe, whilst they enjoy their meals. The company will be great, the food will be excellent, and the live music will be splendid. The price for the evening isn't bad either - at only £40.00 per head. The bar will be open until 11 pm, and then afterwards, the nearby Barbican and Coxside watering holes will be sure to offer a warm welcome to any delegates who wish to linger to explore Plymouth's nightlife a little more. The Conference Dinner has only one drawback - there will only be about 110 dining places available at the Aquarium, so please book your place for this exclusive event soon to avoid disappointment!

The Pelecon Conference organising committee look forward to joining with delegates at the Conference Dinner at the National Marine Aquarium. We hope you can attend the conference.

Photo by Jose Luis Garcia

Pelecon flies higher by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Digital Learnscapes

It's that time of the year again where we are planning for the Pelecon - the Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference - that we hold each year in April at Plymouth University. Pelecon 2012 was probably our best conference yet. Many have said that Pelecon events inspire and energise delegates and challenge perspectives on education, learning and development, and the role of technology. Others have said that Pelecon is one of the best forums for informal debate on the learning technology conference circuit. The Pelecon conference is for teachers and learning professionals in all sectors of education and training, and attracts delegates from all over the world. Pelecon 2012 was the seventh conference, and featured invited speakers including Alec Couros (Canada), Leigh Graves Wolf (USA), Helen Keegan, Simon Finch, Keri Facer, David Mitchell and Jane Hart. Pelecon 2013 will maintain the pace and dynamism of this year's event, and already several well known keynotes have been announced. Go to this link to keep up to date as we make further keynote speaker announcements over the next two weeks. The call for papers for Pelecon 13: Digital Learnscapes is now live, and is summarised below:

We live in a period of change and uncertainty. Many are bewildered by these changes and find it difficult to keep up, particularly in the education and training sectors. The ability to anticipate and prepare for change is the mark of innovative educators, as is the skill of harnessing new and emerging tools to promote good learning.

At Pelecon 13 we want to provide learning professionals with opportunities to explore, discover and discuss new approaches, new technologies and new ideas to enhance, enrich and extend their own professional practice. There will be particular emphasis this year on simulations and games, personal learning tools, new pedagogies and practices, learner and teacher voice, and digital literacies.

The deadline for submission of workshop, paper and demonstration proposals is January 25, 2013 and you can submit your abstracts here. We invite submissions from primary, secondary and tertiary education, as well as from learning and development and other training sectors. Just to whet your appetite and pique four interest, below is a teaser video made by our very own maestro Dr Jason Truscott. We hope to see you at the Pelecon in April!




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

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.

Create, connect, collaborate

With Pelecon (the 7th Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference) only a few weeks away, preparations are almost complete. We are very excited about this year's event, with its lineup of world class speakers. As many readers will already know, we rebranded the event this year. With a new logo and website, we are sure Pelecon will retain its reputation as a friendly and stimulating event that showcases advances in technology enhanced learning. We believe Pelecon provides an excellent meeting place for those involved in promoting the use of learning technology across all sectors of education and training. Set in an idyllic part of the South West of England, we hope Pelecon is now established on the annual international conference schedule. There is still plenty of time to register for the event, and a chance to hear firsthand the thoughts of leading thinkers in the field including Keri Facer, Alec Couros, Jane Hart, Simon Finch, Leigh Graves Wolf, Helen Keegan and David Mitchell.

Pelecon has some secret weapons. Our social media team of Oliver Quinlan, Edd Bolton and Jason Truscott have been hard at work behind the scenes creating a host of social media platforms to promote the pre-conference discussions and raise awareness of the event.

We set up a Pelecon Twitter account which is a regular broadcast channel for all the latest news and views on the conference as we draw closer to the day. The account already has in excess of 200 followers, and is growing its reach daily.

Our Pelecon blog already hosts links to abstracts of all of the accepted papers for the conference this year, and an open invitation for anyone to post comments and questions to any of the speakers at the event. We want to encourage dialogue before the conference starts. The Pelecon blog will also feature regular posts from the team, including interviews with speakers, news and other updates as the conference progresses.

The Pelecon YouTube channel features videos of previous talks given by our invited conference speakers, and other associated content related to the event.

We have a Pelecon Lanyrd site where you can see all those attending, and where those who cannot attend can track the conference as it progresses.

The Pelecon Flickr site hosts images of previous conferences, and has a facility for delegates to add further content from their own personal photo collections related to the conference.

There is even a Pelecon official Facebook event page (but we won't talk too much about that...) and a LinkedIn page too!

The official hashtag for the conference is #pelc12 which is already being used in the run-up to the event. There are also session specific hashtags such as #TMpelecon which will be used during the Pelecon Teachmeet.

We think we have the social media angle well covered for the conference, but if you think we are missing a trick, I would like to hear from you.


Create, connect, collaborate 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.

PeLC is reborn!

It may have escaped your attention, but the Plymouth e-Learning Conference has been repurposed. Now in its 7th year, the event has been evolving steadily, from a one day local event for teachers in 2004 into the present 3-day international learning technology event. PeLC was long overdue for a face-lift and a new identity.

Firstly, we looked at the name. We took the decision last year that the 'e' in the name was a bit of a nonsense. It didn't mean that much anymore. There was no point in using it to represent 'electronic', which in itself is a little passe now. But there was also no point in removing it, because the 'e' was a significant part of the identity of the conference. So we decided that the 'e' actually stood for enhanced. So there you have the new identity - it is now officially the Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference or PELeCON. There is more than a tip of the hat here in the direction of the Pelican Fringe - the PeLC Fringe Website from 2009.

In the past, the conference has attracted delegates from all over the world, from Canada to New Zealand and all points in between. We have had a prestigious list of prominent keynote speakers over the years too, including, in chronological order, Stephen Molyneaux, Gilly Salmon, Mark Stiles, Graham Attwell, Mike Blamires, Josie Fraser, David White, Stephen Heppell, John Davitt, Jane Seale and Shelly Terrell - a kind of who's who in e-Learning. I promise that the PeLC 2012 keynotes will add further to the roll of honour.

As you can see, the conference has also been rebranded. The logo above is the new graphic we will be using on all our publicity, products and events in future. PELeCON also has its own Twitter account (@pelecon), which you can follow to keep up to date with the latest news from the conference and its community. And finally, we have a completely new website at this link. Visit the site to read all about the conference themes and call for papers, submit your proposals (open on November 11), find announcements of keynotes and special events, book your attendance, submit your proposals, book exhibition space, read about the social events and find local accommodation. This blog will also carry more news in the coming weeks as the planning of the conference begins to gain momentum, culminating in the full three day international event next year, on April 18-20. I hope to see you there.


PELeCON is reborn! by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.