Key takeaways for me from a great day at Future of Technology in Education (#FOTE11) at the University of London yesterday:

There was angst from the IT department as the ever increasing consumerisation of technology challenges creaking university systems and a too prevalent culture of ‘computer says no’. It is more productive for staff and students to collaborate and operate outside the system using free online tools (Google docs, Dropbox and Skype do the job perfectly well for me).

Vendors who try too hard to plug their stuff to an ed tech audience risk the ire of the backchannel (you know who you are!)

While a sense of place is still important, (we had a great tourist’s guide to Bristol from @nick_skelton ) mobile phones have allowed people to make their meeting plans on the fly (for example, student bars are struggling) and economics keep many students away from campus (eg living with parents). And this is before the increase in fees…

Time and time again we heard examples of poor communication (between university and students, teaching staff and students, IT and staff/students…etc)

We don’t know enough about what students want and how students live – it was agreed we should try *asking them*more often.

The importance of digital literacy – plenty of staff and students just don’t have it. Thankfully, there seemed to be general agreement that the ‘digital native’ is simply a myth. @suebecks gave a great presentation with many fascinating examples of the importance of digital skills to employability.

There was more emphasis on challenges than solutions. How do we take change forward…we have identified the need for it, but how to make change actually happen? Andrew Bollington provided a reality check, suggesting that appreciating and incorporating the contrasting perspectives of finance, strategy and marketing would be a good start.

@andypowe11 provided a great summary of who and what was shared on Twitter – as you can see, quite a lot!

Last week Hugh Davis, Su White and I hosted the 2nd International PLE Conference in the brand new Life Sciences Building at the University of Southampton.

The event provided a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas and experiences around the development and implementation of PLEs, including the design of such environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. There were around 90 visitors from all over Europe and as far away as New Zealand and Pakistan.

The event included a number of innovative features:

Un-Keynote sessions in “Fishbowl” formats: a small group of participants move in and out of chairs in the centre of the room when they wish to contribute directly to the debate. This enables the whole audience to experience a lively and intense discussion that is facilitated by the presenter.

Bring Your Own Laptop: for practical real time participation in a specific topic.

Speakers Corner: a time and place is announced for informal discussions on a particular theme.

Pecha Kucha: a simple presentation format where you show 20 images each for 20 seconds. The images forward automatically so the presenter has to be concise and stay on track 

During the event, a number of additional useful tools also emerged. Standouts for me were:

Scoop.it (via @pgsimoes) which is a curation service that allows you to find things that interest you and gather them all into one place or showcase on your blog

Packrati.us (via @torresk) = Twitter + Delicious. It automatically saves tweets or retweets with a url to your Delicious account

Debategraph (via @thanassis_t) enables communities to visualise, synthesise and evaluate contributions from its members and facilitate constructive dialogue around the issues raised.

We had an active backchannel including Tony (@aeratcliffe) who stayed up all night in Canada two nights running to watch the livestream and contribute via Twitter. There were some interesting combinations of online and offline communication. During the first unkeynote, two backchannel participants from different countries were introduced to each other via Twitter by a delegate in the room. On another occasion, delegates moved from the café area into the conference room part way through a session, intrigued by the content of tweets coming from inside the room.

A big THANK YOU is due to all the tech support guys from iSolutions who enabled high speed *reliable* wifi connections (how rare is that?!), live streaming and video capture of sessions (including contributions via Second Life and Skype).

You can watch opinions and insights from presenters and participants , read presentation slides on Slideshare (thanks to David Delgado), see photos on Flickr and read full papers.

Twitter provided some great feedback (and speculation about the location of PLE2012!) 

…with an obvious answer in 21st century educational settings, conveniently confirmed by Cristina Costa in her informative post earlier today about the challenges for learners that are inherent in today’s digital world. Cristina notes:

“It is important to bring people together for true collaboration, not just for representation in committees. It is by working closely together that we will be able to understand people’s approach and transform ours.”

What prompted me to write this was an email exchange that I observed the other day, and which has been winding me up every time I recall it. Someone was complaining that the new departmental shared printing facilities meant that other people might “steal his ideas”. Are there really any ideas that would not be enhanced from sharing, feedback and discussion? Surely you “get back” far more than you “give away”? And just think how easy it is now to achieve this position with modern communication tools. So why are some people still so resistant to sharing? Answers on a blog post please… 

Tonight Paul Harrigan, Maria Jose Serres, Natasha Allden and myself will be presenting a seminar to the University of Southampton School of Management about the new Marketing DNA. We will demonstrate 1) how the content of our courses has been informed by recent developments on marketing practice, and 2) how the learning process and employability are supported by digital profiles and activities such as reflective blogging. Maria and Natasha will showcase their own examples of best practice.

Lorraine Warren, Cristina Costa, Alan Rae and myself will be running a HEEG-sponsored workshop at the University of Southampton from 12 – 2 pm on 11th October in the LATEU Training Room.

 This workshop will encourage educators to use social media effectively in the development of entrepreneurial activity in academic staff and students.

My contribution is here:

It will be supported by an online training resource and associated community to provide a forum for ongoing virtual collaboration between all interested parties who might be physically located anywhere in the world.

We will demonstrate how blogs, social bookmarking and networking sites can enable entrepreneurial activity: 

•   rapidly build networks with high quality connections at low (or no)  cost

•   develop a relevant community of interest 

•   quickly identify and share new resources, breaking news and   current issues

•   benefit from new forms of publishing to enhance brand image and build digital profile

The rationale for this project is that the ‘digital divide’ between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in the developed world is now less about access to the web than it is about understanding how to actively participate in the networked society. We will draw upon case studies of  best practice to demonstrate how individuals with the skills, time and confidence to navigate and manage the online chaos effectively, will gain access to new business opportunities, find audiences for their work, or enrich the lives of others.

Media attention tends to focus on how inappropriate online material uncovered by a Google search (for example drunken graduation photographs) may damage an individual’s reputation, but less notice has been taken of the opportunity to actively develop an online presence that will enable individuals  to ‘stand out from the crowd’ and progress their careers in increasingly competitive markets.

How to book your place – please contact Lisa on l.j.harris@soton.ac.uk or via Twitter @lisaharris

We will also be running this workshop at the University of Portsmouth (20th October) and the University of Winchester (8th November).

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:

Bloom’s category	Digital applications
Remembering	Social networking, social bookmarking, favouriting, searching
Understanding	Subscribing, tweeting, tagging, commenting, annotating
Applying	Uploading, editing, sharing, hacking
Analysing	Linking, validating, mashing
Evaluating	Reviewing, blogging, networking, moderating
Creating	Programming, podcasting, vodcasting, animating, wiki-ing

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…