Living in the future

Berlin in December, with all that snow? It was quite magical. And a little scary, perhaps. Spare a thought for all those who attended the Online Educa Conference this year, and then found themselves stranded in Berlin because the snow had closed aiports across sub-zero Europe. I was one of the lucky ones. I made it back from Berlin to Bristol airport with only an hour or so of delays. I arrived back home at around 2 am this morning. Others are still in Berlin, waiting for their flights to be rescheduled, and the weather doesn't look as though it is going to let up....

But travelling to OEB10 (for that was the official hashtag) was worth the risk. It was worth it because Berlin is a great city, and the location for the conference - the Hotel Intercontinental - is an excellent venue. The company was great too. I met up with many, many old friends, and made some great new ones too. Some, such as Clark Quinn and Chahira Nouira have been familiar Twitter buddies for some time, but to meet them in person was, as always, a very great pleasure. I was also the man responsible for connecting together two of the luminaries of the learning world during the Educa speaker's reception. Here's the picture of the first meeting of the guru of informal learning, Jay Cross, and the prime mover behind the Horizon Report, Larry Johnson. It's an honour to know and have conversations with such wonderfully intelligent, influential and passionate people. One of the keynote speakers on Day 1 asked us if we were disappointed in the future. Shouldn't we by now be living on the Moon, and travelling around using personal jetpacks? Well, the keynote speakers on Day 2 brought us back down to earth with a pragmatic look at how technology is being used to support and enhance learning.

Larry Johnson's opening keynote had many of the OEB delegates smiling and murmering their praise - his photographic images were breathtaking, evocative, emotional and engaging, and were fitting embellishments to his narrative. Larry talked eloquently and movingly about his own family - from his grandparents to his granchildren (pictured left with an image of his mother and grandson) as he traced the history of technology down through the years. Our perceptions of technology, he told his audience, are not the same as those of our children. Many used to gather around the television to share events as they happened as broadcast by the news networks. Now, says Larry, we are the network. We are the ones who create and distribute the breaking events from around the world. His optimistic perspective on the future sees young people and older ones too, populating shared digital spaces, learning from each other as a living network.

Josie Fraser's keynote followed, focusing on the needs of young people in a digital age. Josie, who in 2008 was awarded the UK's Learning Technologist of the Year award, is these days discovered as the e-Learning Strategist for Leicester City Council. She concentrated on digital literacies, and argued that they are vital because they extend beyond the functional into the socio-cultural in their influence. Josie also dealt with issues of e-safety and digital identity, applying danah boyd's categorisations of digital affordances, including scalability, persistency and searchabillity to illustrate how images, text and sounds can work for good or for bad. These features, she argued, brought many challenges to schools in the digital age. Josie also sees an optimistic future despite the challenges we are facing. Larry Johnson has a favourite phrase: 'I love living in the future'. OEB showed us many glimpses into this future. I don't think we will be too disappointed.

Living in the future by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Dead personal

Since I posted the 'Two fingered salute' earlier this week several people have asked me what I meant by 'personal web'. I was also asked why I didn't use the term PLE (Personal Learning Environment). The two are not to be confused. The authors of the 2009 Horizon Report (I cannot recommend this document highly enough) succinctly define the personal web as "a term coined to represent a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it". The report goes on to define personal webs as self created and consisting of online tools that suit each individual's unique preferences, styles and needs. Sound like a PLE? Almost, but not quite.

I deliberately avoided using the term PLE because I believe the PLE extends beyond personal web tools to encompass other tools and resources, such as paper based resources and broadcast media such as television and radio, as well as conversations with other people and so on. Having said that, each and every one of the above could be mediated through web tools, but they are not exclusively so.

At its core, the personal web is also very proactive: The Horizon Report gives an excellent, if somewhat idealised conceptualisation of the personal web: "Using a growing set of free and simple tools and applications, it is easy to create customized, personal web-based environments — a personal web — that explicitly supports one’s social, professional, learning and other activities via highly personalized windows to the networked world. Online material can be saved, tagged, categorized, and repurposed without difficulty..." I know there is a problem here, and this has been pointed out by some of those who have responded to my Two fingered salute post. It is this: Not everyone has the skills to use, or is willing to use the web tools that are referred to above. For those who don't, the institutional VLE (or perhaps no web based use at all) is an option.

This may sound like a climb down from my position on the death of the VLE, but It is not. I have always believed in a hybrid solution and indeed use one in my own professional practice, but for the sake of the polemic momentum, I'm advocating that institutions seriously reappraise their use of the VLE (read 'managed learning environment'). Much of it is dross, creative thinking is stifled, true collaboration is constrained, many students hate it, and many of the staff are not all that keen either (because it creates a lot of hard work with very little pay-off). The institutional VLE cannot by any stretch of the imagination, be perceived as a personal web - it is often too sterile and homogenised - but it can be a useful, safe and content rich starting point for those who are embarking on learning through the web.

The debate on the future of personal webs, VLEs and PLEs will continue online no doubt, but we also intend to conduct a face-to-face dust-up at ALT-C in Manchester this September. There should also be plenty of opportunity during the Fringe (F-ALT) sessions - see the F-ALT website for more details on these informal discussions.

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On the Horizon

The 2009 Horizon Report, the annual report on the state of play of learning technology, predicts that there will be three key horizons of important development in the near future. In the executive summary the report authors suggest there are six technology groups we should watch:

In the first adoption horizon we find mobiles and cloud computing, both of which are already well established on many campuses — and still more organizations have plans in place to make use of these technologies in the coming months. Institutions at the leading edge of technology adoption are also already applying the two clusters of technologies we have placed on the mid-term horizon, geo-everything and the personal web. All four topics on the first two horizons are already in common use in other sectors, including entertainment, commerce, and the world of work. The two technologies placed on the far-term horizon, semantic-aware applications and smart objects, are not yet commonly found in an educational context, although research is being conducted in both areas and the rate of development seems to indicate that these topics are well worth watching.


This is much in keeping with the views of many leading experts in the fields of e-learning and m-learning, so it comes as no surprise. I even suggested something very similar in my recent blog post entitled e-Learning 3.0. What is important though, is that we appear to be moving more quickly toward the use of personal web type learning environments, where the use of mobile, handheld and semantically enabled 'smart' technologies will play an increasingly important role in all sectors of education. We will now wait to see 'when', not 'if', these applications become mainstream in education.


Johnson, L., Levine, A., & Smith, R. (2009). The 2009 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.


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