So what did I learn over the last two days at Online EDUCA?
Well I certainly got the impression that Web 2.0 is very much on the agenda and very much a part of the educational landscape (while we wait for Web 3.0 
). At the same time I learned that I really need to be careful about my online identity and the online identities of my children and my grandchildren. One talk (Margarita Perez-Garcia) pointed out that pictures of children put up on Flikr by proud parents are often harvested for use on pornography sites, a very sobering and disturbing thought. This is because the parents are not aware of what they are doing when they put photos on an open site with no control over who can access them. This was well linked in various talks to the theme of critical literacy, which should be very much on the curriculum for all people using the internet. At the same time as hearing the downside I also learned how students (Helen Keegan) through positive intervention into their digital lives can change their image on the web. Creating a blog, for example, that reflects how the students want to be seen on the web can make a big difference to what shows on a Google search about yourself. Take control. Shirley Williams also talked about some ‘tools’ they have created at Reading University to help students think about these issues: www.reading.ac.uk/thisisme.
I mentioned Lord Puttnam in my Tweets from the conference. He showed a very interesting video called: ‘We are the people‘, and this shows well what many other talks tried to show, that learning processes need re-thinking. We heard again that if you take a 19th century medic and show them a hospital today, they wouldn’t recognise it, but if you showed a 19th century university lecturer today’s teaching spaces they would feel at home. The London Grid for Learning (Brian Durrant), on the other hand, (schools appear to be much more ahead of the game than universities) looked like it was a well thought through project, fit for purpose; universities could learn from this kind of regional initiative. The key idea that I took away from this talk is that you should start with an idea and then build the technologies around it. Sounded like something I might say .
Gilly Salmon gave a thoughtful and effective overview of the history of education using the metaphor of a tree and it’s branches, saying that for universities to survive, we must make sure we nurture learning, whatever technology we use. She suggested we must be bold enough to stop doing some things to allow others to happen and that we need to make sure we partner with our learners to be sure that we take their needs into account. It’s well worth looking at Leicester’s media zoo and they also have a conference running in the early part of the New Year (2010).
I also saw the first evidence that learners of today are actually differently wired. Artur Dyro talked about work by Stanislaw Dylak. Maybe it’s always been there, but I’ve not seen anything quite like this before-pretty convincing. I want to follow this up.
I realise that our move towards using video in our distance learning materials is a good one, but that we need to be more creative about this and we need to get more learner content, we still need to engage with ideas through text, but video support this in better ways that we use it now.
Some links that might be useful:
autolearn.barcelonamedia.org — they have a plugin for Moodle that allows the construction of activities based around NLP.
www.evitaproject.org — sounds like they had some interesting ideas on creating educational games.
Here are some photos from the event: http://www.online-educa.com/media-picture-gallery. I think I can find myself here, but if anyone else can, in one go, I will find a prize for you
