Blending in...

Finally back in the UK, and in my own comfortable bed tonight.... But on reflection, it's been a good week in Italy. I was mistaken for an Italian four times this week in Napoli. People kept coming up to me and gabbling away in Italian... it's like another country...or London. Perhaps I am blending in with the locals, or maybe it's because Italians are naturally friendly and don' care who they talk to ...? Here are 10 things you should do if you want to be mistaken for a local in Napoli:

1) Get a tan
2) Talk Italian (Although this is not entirely essential - I assure you I can't)
3) Always wear sunglasses, even at night
4) Talk with exaggerated arm waving and hand movements
5) Look nonchalent
6) Walk across the road without really looking (they will stop for you, or swerve to avoid you)
7) Ride a moped without a helmet on, but with at least one girl on the back
8) Don't drive a car, aim it
9) Drive with your horn, not with your brakes
10) Hold a mobile phone to your ear at all times, and a cigarette in the other hand

Paradise gained

EDEN conference day two, and a good start from one of our keynotes, the OU's Grainne Conole who spoke on the learner experience and raised several key issues of support, peer networking and 'net generation' response to new and emerging technologies.

Talks that have stood out above the rest are: Niall Sclater (Open University - check out his blog) who spoke about collaborative learning using wikis, Catherine McLoughlin (Australian Catholic University) on podcasting and its use to motivate distance learners and Gottfried Csanyi (Vienna University of Technology) who covered the topic of ICT and informal learning.

I still maintain that although the content at EDEN is improving year on year, there is still a quality gap - most papers were 'this is what we did, and this is how we did it...' - and little in the way of critical evaluation and research based analysis. Most people go to EDEN to network, and I suppose this is its great success story. More from the conference next week when I have had time to reflect a little more, and am a little less travel weary....

Flying Finn

To say I was impressed was an understatement. What a speaker - I have just come from the first series of keynote speeches that featured Michael G. Moore and Erik Duval. But it's not these two I want to eulogise over. If either has spoken first, they would have been deemed 'good'. But they had the misfortune to follow a prodigy. EDEN 2007's first keynote speaker, a 24 year old Finn named Teemu Arina, (Pictured Right) completely blew away the entire conference. Serendipic Learning (you know - what goes on in the third space) was one of Teemu's themes, and parasitic learning was another.

Teemu also traced the 'evolution' of man's learning development to our point in history with Homo Contextus. Never heard of any of these? Pity you wern't there then (so follow the links). I know it's not helpful, but how can I do justice to what Mr Arina said in a short blog like this. I think it's fair to say, having talked to quite a few delegates during the coffee break, that he left us all reeling with new ideas, thoughts and questions, and expertly set the scene for the whole conference. His speech was also McLuhan heavy, which is not a bad thing when repurposed in this context. Although the location of EDEN this year is pretty naff, the content, if it echoes on from this keynote, is going to be astounding....

Quote of the day: 'The future cannot be predicted, but it can be invented' (Denis Gabor).

See Naples and blog

Well, now I know the difference between a piazza and a pizza. Not a lot - they are both expensive and difficult to get through/across. Only difference is that a piazza is square and a pizza is round (except on EasyJet flights where they actually sell square pizzas - shame on them). Well, here I am in Napoli, home of the pizza, a place that is at once both beautiful and horrific. It's beautiful because the Amalfi coast, Vesuvius, Sorento, Capri, and the Bay of Naples are all naturally beautiful, scenic and the names evocative of romance and amore. It's horrific (at least where I'm staying, in and around Piazza Garibaldi) because there is garbage piled high everywhere you look, and hookers and addicts loitering on the seedy street corners outside my hotel. Must have chosen the wrong place to stay, and reminds me of a week I spent in Copenhagen a few years back.

I'm here in Napoli for the EDEN 2007 Conference, held at the Citta della Scienza (City of Science) which is not a city at all, more a repurposed complex of factory warehouses. It's ugly on the outside, very pleasant inside..... (don't). It took me over an hour to get there from the centre of Napoli today. I spent the day with my mate Palitha Edirisingha seeing the sights of Pompeii, before a long walk, dodging the taxis and scooters to the metro, a metro ride (where we were crammed like sardines inside an overheated and airless compartment for almost an hour) and then a bus ride (where we were crammed like sardines inside an overheated and airless compartment) for a few miles more. Citta della Scienza is 'off the beaten track' I would say, and many delegates arrived tonight for registration and the opening welcome party 'hot under the collar'. Not a good start, EDEN. Let's hope the content is a little better than the location.....

Saving face

A few days ago I set up my own FaceBook account. I already have 6 friends, all people I know in some way or another. 2 others have also tried to hook up with me, but I don't know them from Adam (who is also not one of my friends) so I declined the offer. You can't be too careful - they could be axe murderers or window salesmen or something worse.

Anyway - it's similar to other social networking spaces such as Bebo (which has a much younger user base) and MySpace (where age doesn't seem to matter - they take anyone). FaceBook seems to be for twenty-somethings, who are linked to a university, college or other youth fraternity. So why, I hear you asking, am I also on FaceBook, seeing that I'm ancient and decrepit and other perjorative, ageist terms (how dare you...). Well, have you ever heard of participant observation? Gotta be in it to view it...

I noticed one thing right away - students seem to prefer to communicate using FaceBook more than standard e-mail. They can say more, add their own views without fear of censorship, and embellish their comments with pictures, profanities, voting, interest groups, etc. On the University of Plymouth FaceBook network there were 6,890 members earlier this week. I checked again today and there are 7,012. About a quarter of the student population at Plymouth. Astounding growth. Let's watch and see what happens....

Back to Eden

I'm flying off to Italy (Napoli) next week to attend the 16th Annual EDEN Conference. I've never been south of Rome before, so I'm looking forward to seeing the Bay of Naples, Amalfi Coast and perhaps even making a day trip to Pompeii whilst I'm there. I will beg steal or borrow access to a networked pc during my time at the conference so that I can blog the latest news about what's being discussed and the issues of the day.

This year's conference promises to be another good one (last year over 600 delegates attended in Vienna, and the quality of the papers was generally fairly good), and I hope to meet up again with EDEN General Secretary Adras Szucs (pictured with me at EDEN Helsinki, in 2005). Michael Moore (Pennsylvania State University, USA), Grainne Conole (UK Open University) and Ge Daokai (President of China TV University - the largest university on the planet) are among the keynotes speakers. The conference is predominantly about distance education, and I will be presenting my own paper on wikis.

YZ on young shoulders....

It's been an interesting and busy week teaching here at the Technical University of Liberec, in the northern Czech Republic. Everything is different here to the UK including, mercifully, the weather (a balmy 28 degrees today). I need to be particularly careful with the keyboard I am using as it has transposed 'y' and 'z' keys. Cognitive load is more excessive than usual....

I have just finished a week teaching 20 German, Czech, Polish, and for the first time, Nigerian students. They are all very young and very enthusiastic and have been asking lots of questions, which makes my job easier, and paradoxically, harder. We have studied the psychology of interpersonal communication, with a section on Internet communication. I created a wiki for them on the spot, which you can visit at this link. It will be interesting to see if there are any cultural variations in the postings and discussions that take place.

Next week I'm back in dear old blighty, and then off to Napoli, Italy to present a paper at the EDEN conference. More later - now I'm off to let my hair down a little, before I catch my flight... Nashledanou....