MoLeNET Conference 2010

QEII Conference Centre

Sleeping has never been one of my favourite pastimes…  I know that our bodies and brains are supposed to rest in order to rejuvenate but I’ve always found sleeping to be such a waste of time and a bit of a chore.

So, having gone to bed at around 1am – I was up again at 4am to get ready for the MoLeNET Conference & Awards, which this year was held at the QEII Conference Centre in London.  The taxi was on time and so was the train (5:25am)

2 hours 10 minutes passed by so slowly, especially stopping at such delightful provincial towns as Runcorn, Stafford, Crewe and Milton Keynes… but fear not  I arrived in London 3 coffees later and after some deliberation took the tube to Westminster.

The MoLeNET conference had a definite tinge of sadness about it this year – I guess due to the lack of funding of worthwhile research by the current government.  However, we made the best of a depressing situation and put on a decent display of mobile learning practice and pedagogy.  It’s great to see how people are tackling what are fundamentally the same issues in so many different ways.

MoLeNET 2010_1

I was privileged to have addressed the conference by giving an insight the the thin.clusion project and had a conference stand (in the corner – was that deliberate?)  I must admit, I wasn’t really prepared to speak to the entire conference – I thought it was going to be a small session…

I’m really proud to have had so many people interested in the project and I’ve now been approached by a few different JISC representatives, to do Case Studies about LODs.

So, the whole conference went well – it was very different to the conferences I’d been to before as a delegate… it’s a shame, because I was on my own, that I didn’t get time to go and look at other stands and chat to anyone away from my stand.

I came away knowing that the 19 hour round-trip had been worth it, even though the

weather had been cruel (I was soaked through trudging around London) – there’s a lot to be said about paying £70 more to get home early, rather than waiting for the first off-peak train at 19:05.

Oh, the joys of Nuneaton station in the dark autumn rain…

Anyway  – I got home, sat down – reflected on the day and couldn’t really believe it was a year ago that we’d gone down to the LSN to pitch or project…

Check out my conference photos

or my audio blog – Setting up for MoLeNET Conference

thin.clusion

looking forward to…

I’m really pleased to have been invited on James Clay‘s next Podcast (April 21st), along with David Sugden… I think we’re going to be discussing something about online safeguarding/online persona.

Also had a request to perform/do a Pecha Kucha at the JISC North West annual event in June.  I’m looking forward to that.  I’m also going to be on a stand with KGV and also working on our own BSFC stand – so that’ll be a busy day.

In between these events, I’m putting a couple of presentations together for our next BECTA TEN mini-network meet-up in London.  Going to be presenting on Moodle and also on using Apple PCs for music, podcasts, video, etc.

reasons to be cheerful, part III

This is a follow-on from my post about the BECTA ‘Time to Innovate’ Conference 2010.

Reasons to be cheerful, part I

OK, I’ve slept on it – perhaps I came to the conference full of optimism due to the success and scale of the 2009 BECTA conference?  Perhaps I was interpreting ‘time to innovate’ as a call to arms – “be innovative with learning technology”!  Perhaps I was feeling good because we’ve been part of BECTA TEN Phase 1 & 2 and we have a MoLeNET Phase 3 project, and also had good case studies written about our effective practice with technology.

Reason to be cheerful? I know that we’re on the right tracks and are committed to utilizing learning technologies for all the right reasons.  I’m lucky that I’m allowed space, time & funding to be innovative in my job role.

Reasons to be cheerful, part II

It was interesting that James Clay posed a question to the conference Q&A panel, on the lines of – ‘How can we innovate, learn and progress, if funding streams, statistics and OFSTED, etc. penalize innovation?’ correct me, if I totally misrepresented that, James There were also some good Tweets within the conference stream which were still questioning and challenging, rather than just (virtually) nodding along with what the speakers had to say.

Reason to be cheerful? People are still prepared to be innovative and challenge the conventional.  I’ve always worked to a personal maxim: “If I don’t innovate, I stagnate”.

Reasons to be cheerful, part III

I’m back at my desk, facing some new challenges… the coming financial year will be tight (we all know that), changes at the LSC mean we go back under Local Authority control from April 1st -  I’m not yet sure what that will mean for us.

Reason to be cheerful? I have a great job, have wonderful staff, am involved in some amazing projects  – and possibly most importantly… I am part of a fantastic extended community of practice stretching around the globe – fellow practitioners and educators who are prepared to be innovative, share what they are doing and encourage others to do the same.

If you’re happy and you know it – clap your hands

Shibboleth Implementation at BSFC

BECTA TEN Profile

MoLeNET thin.clusion

time to innovate?

The title of this years’ BECTA Annual Conference for FE & Skills, was ‘Time to Innovate’.

I love to innovate… so obviously this years’ conference was going to really interest me.

I booked a place and then waited to see the keynotes and break-out sessions… Hmm, not much inspiration really – I thought this was going to be about innovation, rather than cost savings and efficiency.  Yes, we need to do that too – we need to create effective sustainable ‘green’ systems – but I wasn’t expecting this at a BECTA conference called ‘Time to Innovate’.

The day seemed to be more about the Keynotes; with only two break-out sessions and a panel discussion with Q&As.

For me, it was definitely a more low-key event than last year.  In 2009, we were looking at positive ‘Step Change’ and we left the conference feeling good about the coming year.

Uploaded by borman818 on 6 Feb 09, 10.44PM GMT.

Maybe it is due to cuts in education funding, but I felt that today we were looking at how to use technology to save money. Well for me, that’s a business model – rather than an education model.

On a positive – I got chance to meet up with some colleagues and Twitter contacts.

Twitter stream for the event #timetoinnovate

take note

I was on the London – Liverpool train on Tuesday evening, on my way home from the MoLeNET Conference and decided to add a blog entry about the event on our thin.clusion blog.

I copied and pasted notes between aNote (which I’d written at the conference) and WordPress 2, on my iPhone… however – Although the App had been saving a draft copy, a number of times the file did not save and so I ended up losing quite a few minutes worth of copy/paste/update/reformatting.  I did get frustrated and gave up after many attempts.

It made me realise that this note-taking and updating process is exactly what we will be asking our learners to do on the thin.clusion project.  Now, I’m a patient guy – but even I gave up on the blog entry after about 40 mins.  So how will this process work for our learners?  Will they give up if the technology lets them down?  I would imagine so. In which case, what can we do to address this?

Hangin' on the Telephone

Just been reading James Clays Blog entry on the lack of connectivity as we move around the country and more ironically, at ‘eLearning’ conferences.

I too have found that there is great variation in the quality of 3G coverage in some very surprising areas of the UK.  Whilst this can be infuriating for those frequently working out of the office, it is not actually something we can easily influence – the single driver for change is ‘profit’; it must be economically viable for the telecomms providers to increase coverage in areas of poor service.

No T-mobile signal

Photo originally uploaded by Kai Hendry

What I find more frustrating is turning up to an academic conference to find little or no WiFi connectivity – and this happens at academic institutions, not hired halls!  Does this show that universities and colleges do not actually have campus-wide WiFi, or have they not planned to incorporate a flexible system (which is what WiFi is supposed to facilitate)?

Now this is not an advert, but travelling in First Class on Virgin Trains west-coast line, gives you free WiFi access… yes, ladies & gents, boys & girls – WiFi on a moving (high-speed) train.  It is decent quality and realiable – how do they do that???

Telling Tales – Mimas #mimasmob09

I have to admit, I wasn’t too sure what I had been signed-up to… I say ‘signed-up to’ because I quite literally was!  We had an exhibition stand at the recent JISC RSC NW annual event – I had just been off watching a few cool Pecha Kucha shows [David Sugden, Kevin Hickey, Liz Bennett] and came back to our stand, to be told I had volunteered and been signed-up for Mimas: ‘Telling Tales’ conference.  OK, I was going to be down in London for the elearning@greenwich conference the day before, so that was cool.

Of course, I looked-up Mimas and realised what the event was – mobile learning, with the added bonus of a James Clay presentation on ‘the future’!

I arrived, grabbed a coffee and sat at a table, said hello, etc. looked at names on badges – then looked at the running order.  The people at my table were ‘big players’ in the mLearning world – I suddenly felt a little out of place.  But then thought, why should I feel out of place?  Everyone seemed to know each other and I knew a few people, so just go with it.

What a great bunch of innovative, radical thinkers!  The day was excellent.  It was interesting to talk to some new contacts about general ‘learning with tech’ [I'm trying not to box and label, James]   One thing that stuck out for me, apart from the wonderfully interesting presentations, was that there appears to be plenty of funding bodies, willing to fund research projects – but they don’t appear to follow them up or apply the findings.  I’ve been to many conferences now and there seems to be a few Universities and Colleges doing similar research work, funded by different bodies – is there no cohesion at ‘the top’??

One interesting point raised towards the end of the day, during a reflection session, was that the kind of technology we’re currently looking at and researching will be so out of date by the time it comes to being embedded into learning.  Are we wasting our time and resources on researching ‘the tech’ (which will develop anyway as part of the consumer culture) when we could be researching the pedagogy?

Mimas: Telling Tales

To quote a Tweet exchange during the conference:

RT @jamesclay: #mimasmob09 @colhawksworth maybe we should ignore content and concentrate on activity first?

Thoughts, anyone?

Making it Personal – elearning@greenwich #mip

#mip

I returned to the University of Greenwich for the 7th Annual e-learning@greenwich conference, having been inspired and enthused by last years’ conference.

The theme this year, was ‘Making it Personal’ – here are some high-lights:

KEYNOTE: ‘Personalization: the good, the bad and the ugly.’ Professor Johnathan Drori.

A fantastically unique Keynote – which is the delivery style I prefer – a Keynote to challenge your thinking and preconceptions, rather than just listening to someone give you their academic life-story or an overview of their most recent research.   He was witty (which is always good!) and went off on some very interesting tangents.

Session 1: ‘Learning, teaching and social networking.’ – Cheryl Reynolds and Liz Bennett – University of Huddersfield

The basic outline of this session, was that the MSc students did not find official course VLE (Blackboard), to be interesting or particularly useful as part of their course.  A Ning was created and students were invited in http://numanuma.ning.com

There was a noticeable increase socializing and freedom of expression within the Ning. It created a valid social learning space with increased activity and participation.  Students now had some ownership of their group, etc.  The photo below (with permission of Liz Bennett), is taken from the session and is quick round up of suggestions from the audience, as to ‘what makes a good teacher?’

What makes a good teacher?

Session 3: ‘Tag Clouds and Skill Conversations.’ – John Davies and Carol Shergold – University of Sussex

Excellent session on Tag clouds and how Sussex have created software to aid students recognise and build-up a personal profile by answering some questions about tasks and work they have completed as part of the course.  The software builds up their profile for them based on their answers.  Apparently, many undergraduates do not know what skills they posses.

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/skillclouds

#mip and #mimasmob09

Just an update on my interim update, so to speak.

Both entries for these conferences are now available on my Blog – please feel free to leave feedback/corrections, etc.

elearning@greenwich – 7th Annual eLearning Conference: Making it Personal.  July 8th, 2009 #mip

Mimas: Telling Tales.  July 9th, 2009 #mimasmob09