EduGlu Sandbox

I’m now back from the Eden 2008 conference and wanted to just look back at the conference – reflecting on the sessions I was involved with and picking up on a couple more of the sessions I attended. Obviously a key reason to go to a conference is to have the opportunity to present on aspects of your work – to publish it and to get valuable feedback from peers. It’s also a chance to hear what others are doing, to pick up new ideas, to compare what you are doing with contemporaries.The keynotes (should!) shake things up a bit, give you new insights into current research challenges and make you look at things a little differently. But for me probably the most valuable part of conferences is catching up with old friends and colleagues and meeting new ones. So I thought I’d dedicate this post to some of the folk (old and new) I met at the conference. So here we go a quick gallop through some of those I took pictures of……(their institutions are in brackets as you can see there was a fairly large OU contigent!). The first is of Tony Walton (OU), Kiki Clark (OU) and myself at the conference dinner. Tony and I delivered a paper on aspects of our SocialLearn project, Martin Weller unfortunately wasn’t able to be at the conference. The second is of Paul Clark (OU), who is also involved in our learning design work and helped with the workshop we ran at the conference (an interesting experience running a hands-on workshop in a room with no computers and no internet connection!!). Both the learning design and SocialLearn presentations are on slideshare.The third picture is Andreia Santos (OU) who is one of the researchers on our OpenLearn project. The fourth is Jen Harvey (Dublin Institute of Technology), an old friend – amongst other things Jen and I produced an online evaluation toolkit along with Martin Oliver years ago. The next is a great picture I think of Uwe Baumann (OU), Mirjam Hauck (OU) and Steve Wheeler (Plymouth University). Mirjam coordinated an excellent and very active blog throughout the conference and Steve was one of the most prolific contributors.  The next (the guy in the suit!) is someone new to me, Paulo Moreira (University of Minho) who is doing some really interesting work with Compendium, so I plan to read his paper in the proceedings and find out more. I missed his session unfortunately, but it sounded really interesting – he ran it totally as a pre-recorded video conferencing session in Flashmeeting – beats ‘Death by Powerpoint’ anyday!! Finally it’s Andreia again, with Dominic Newbould (OU) and Dawn Leeder (Cambridge University). Dominic and Andreia are doing some work in Brazil in a few weeks time and Andreia plans to show them CompendiumLD which will be great. Dawn, amongst other things is involved in the Reusable Learning Objects CETL. What for me were the highlights? I certainly enjoyed the keynotes I have already blogged about. Also there was some very interesting work being done by Priitt Tammets from Estonia, who presented a paper ‘Modelling the learning and teaching process in web 2.0 environment with a workflow language’. They have developed a visual representation tool for design, so there seems to be a lot of synergies with the work we are doing. He talked about some of the general theory on cognitive processes – left/right brain stuff and the difference between visual and other forms of representation. Their work is based on an existing Process modelling language – newYAWL (based on Petri nets). He talked through an example of the work they have been doing as part of the iCamp project (EU-Funded FP6). He said a prototype was available at http://graffeltoia.com/stencils/360, but the link doesn’t work for me!  However, I’ve just googled him and found that his masters’ thesis on this work is online.There were lots of good sessions, not surprisingly, on web 2.0 stuff – too many to blog about. I chaired a session which included a number of good papers. Sarah Guth from the University of Padova in Italy, talked about the innovative ways in which she is using web 2.0 tools in her teaching. This included a scaffolded introduction to the use of different tools such as Youtub,e, flickr, blogs, wikis, podcasts etc with the students actively constructing their own personal learning environment with these tools. They were encouraged to reflect on the relevance of the tools for their learning and to consider how these might be harnessed to enable them to interact and communicate on a global basis. The second part of the course built in this with the students interacting with another cohort of students in the states. She had devised a number of nice exercises to really get the students to address and reflect on cultural differences - such as the use of a rapid word association game which vividly demonstrated inherent cultural assumptions and the way these are instantiated in everyday language use. Jenny Kilgrove (University of Edinburgh) talked about an impressive quantitative study she has been involved with which analysing data from across 14 years associated with an MBA at Heriott Watt university. Amongst the questions they were exploring were issues to do with multi-culturalism, different learning strategies, the impact of good instructional design, and student progression.Bill McNeill (The College of Estates Management, UK) talked about ‘Time Poverty’, arguing that time is a critical, but limited resource for students, more so with today’s students than ever before. He critiqued the various assumptions that were generally made about time allocation and workload for students arguing that these models were woefully inadequate in today’s rich multi-media learning contexts – he cited examples such as the well know and tried and tested models for reading speeds (200 words/page which decreases depending on the difficultly of the text and the level of language proficiency,  online reading slower by 25%). But how can one really quantify participation in a forum, a blog, a virtual world? What is the cumulative effect of participation across a variety of media and communication channels that is the norm now for most students? He supplemented his argument with survey data from his own students who were asked about their work, life, study balance and who cited the following in decreasingly order of impact as being factors which negatively detract from study: time, workplace, personal, domestic, distance learning, natire of the degree course being studied and assessment. Finally Marit Greek talked about a study she and her colleagues have been involved with at Oslo University College in Norway trying to assess the factors crucial for the development of successful design in elearning.  She argued that there was a complex relationship which spanned the general organisational structures and support mechanisms of the institutions, the skills set of the teachers down to the way that the curriculum was designed and delivered. My pictures of Bill and Marit were too dark unfortunately.

So overall a good conference - great conversations, nice setting and I’ve come away with some good ideas. But it’s nice to be home! ;-)