Lisa Harris Marketing

The session seemed to go well and there were *lots* of questions, causing us to overrun our slot. Some people expressed concern that the university might be exposed to possible legal action if students were encouraged to experiment with social media and something went wrong. Others felt that the approach offered significant scope for creativity, particularly with regard to the development of reflective portfolios.  Now I’m off to brave the torrential rain and track down the conference dinner

Congratulations to the PLE_BCN team for organising a great event in Barcelona – fabulous venue, interactive sessions, interesting people (with over-large egos refreshingly absent) and lovely food.

The scene was set before the event started with a request from the organisers for us to design our own conference badges – the creative results are showcased here

Interaction was the name of the game, and Twitter the tool of choice (more than 5,000 contributions from both the audience and from #PLE_BCN followers all around the world). The Session Chairs highlighted relevant tweets sent while the presentations were taking place, and Twitterfall displayed them all to the room. @cristinacost put me on the spot in the first session by asking me to elaborate on one of my tweets – and so the first time we meet face to face she is shoving a microphone at me!

In the first Keynote, @courosa and @grahamattwell had a few technology challenges to overcome but their keynote ‘walked the talk’ on Personal Learning Environments, bringing in contributions by video and making effective use of the skrbl boards where people could raise questions and start debates relating to each of the key conference themes. These items then display in real time on the virtual white board.

In the second Keynote , @ictologist and @jordi had us moving around the room to ‘vote with our feet’ and complete the grids displayed in their slides, on issues such as whether the PLE should be located inside or outside the institution. The results may have been slightly skewed by hopeless Brits like myself misinterpreting the instructions (given in Spanish…)

A few reflections to end this post…despite all the talk of engagement and interactivity in PLEs, some presenters seemed keen to stick with the traditional delivery model, and even amongst an enthusiastic audience, not everyone wants to engage all of the time…we need some “down time” to catch up on what’s been happening in our own PLNs, or just to chat in the cafe with other delegates. And there are different types of engagement – some people go for quantity of contributions, others for quality (and a few lucky peeps even manage to do both! You know who you are…)

Finally, here is the summary of today’s PLE_BCN tweets from Archivist

On Tuesday June 15th I’m presenting a preview of our Digital Presence Workshops at the HEEG Conference at the University of Greenwich. The event is titled “Towards the Entrepreneurial University: are we getting there?” and I will hopefully be able to answer this question after the event has taken place

The slides are below:

Thanks to the global reach of the Internet, the other day I stumbled upon this little gem courtesy of Andrew Churches of Auckland, New Zealand.

Benjamin Bloom was an educational psychologist working at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. His original taxonomy was designed to help educators to understand and structure the learning process, based on progressing students along a continuum starting from “Lower Order Thinking Skills” and moving towards “Higher Order Thinking Skills”. The underlying principle is that the higher order skills are dependent upon prior acquisition of lower order skills, which means (for example) that we cannot apply knowledge until we have understood it. The terminology used in Bloom’s Taxonomy has been revised over the years, and now looks like this:

Remembering – Understanding – Applying – Analysing – Evaluating – Creating

Bloom’s Taxonomy accounts for many of the traditional educational practices, behaviours and actions but it does not account for the new learning activities that are associated with Web 2.0 technologies. Andrew has very usefully mapped these to Bloom’s categories, which I have summarised as follows:

Andrew notes that “Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy isn’t about the tools or technologies rather it is about using these to facilitate learning”. Obviously certain activities will cross these boundaries – blogging, for example, is an activity which can be carried out at many different levels, and over time today’s popular tools will evolve and change. But this is a very welcome framework for educators to re-think how they deliver and assess their courses. You can read the full story and access a range of supporting resources on Andrew’s wiki

Alan Rae and I presented to the 3Market Social Enterprise Event at the University of Southampton today. The slides are here:

Thanks to funding from the Higher Education Entrepreneurship Group, Alan, Lorraine Warren and myself will be developing this introductory session into a series of more specialist workshops to be delivered both offline and online through 2010. Watch this space…

On Wednesday, Lorraine Warren and I will be running a School Forum at the University of Southampton on the topic of building digital presence and its increasing importance as an academic profile. The slides are here:

I suspect that some of the audience will be sceptical, so I thought I’d use this blogpost to supplement our discussions and present some support for our case

In an interesting presentation last year, Martin Weller of the Open University claimed that the time will come when our online identity is indistinguishable from our academic identity – that is simply how academics will be defined. The various tools that we now use to build and manage our digital presence can be mixed and matched to suit the particular needs of the individual, so online identity is distributed across a range of platforms which can then be shared and integrated in a variety of ways – in my case I mainly use Twitter, Slideshare and Delicious, all co-ordinated through this blog. Everyone’s online identity is therefore unique and their work can be widely distributed to a range of different audiences, and then informed and enhanced by feedback from these networks.

Martin goes on to discuss the growing IMPACT of online activity, where the reach of every individual blogpost can be calculated in terms of the number of its readers and the quality of feedback received in the form of comments and links to related work. Similarly, a Slideshare profile will showcase not just the content of the presentations that individual has posted, but also how many readers each presentation has had, and how many people have commented on that work or marked it as a favourite. It is not difficult to accumulate impact in this way that far exceeds the readership of my published academic articles, which I usually have to apologise for as out of date before they even see the light of day…

I plan to this post with feedback from the session on Wednesday (assuming I escape in one piece…)