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!

It was good to catch up with mobile supremo Jane Vincent from the University of Surrey at Digital Surrey last night. The topic was recent developments in mobile, presented by Jon Bishop, Head of Social Media at PayPal UK (@jonin60seconds). Jon’s slides are available on Slideshare and a detailed review of his talk was very quickly posted by Mark Wilson (@markwilsonit)

The purpose of this post is to flag up some points arising from listening to Jon, that could be pursued in a research project by Jane and myself as a sequel to our investigation from a few years back of the role of mobile communication in e-government. We suggested in this paper that mobile phones may offer the most viable electronic channel through which to encourage large-scale take-up of online public services, but ‘m-government’ would take a significant amount of time to become a reality unless there was a substantial change in social practices.

It was clear from Jon’s fascinating discussion of mobile payments in Africa that the developed world has a lot to learn from successful services developed in Kenya.

In the UK, mobiles have become even more central to people’s lives and business is clearly waking up to the marketing potential of location based services. But effective interaction with government services via mobile looks no closer than it did back in 2007.

The Digital Surrey community are by definition enthusiastic adopters of new developments in technology, but I’m not sure that the general population is quite ready for NFC and QR codes…and as Jon noted, 76% of websites are still not optimised for mobile devices.

Infrastructure issues still remain…just try staying connected while travelling by train.

And are smartphones really that smart? My BlackBerry (a recent model) takes forever to simply load a website, and if password access is required, forget it. I certainly won’t be using it to buy anything with. Perhaps a ‘hype v reality’ project might be a useful exercise…

Many thanks to Jon, Abigail and the rest of the Digital Surrey team for laying on great weather and free beer, as well as an informative and entertaining evening! For information about upcoming events, check out the website

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!) 

Next week I’m discussing a paper written by Paul Harrigan and myself in the 2nd International Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Conference which takes place in Southampton.

The PLE Conference is intended to produce a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological, educational and technological issues that they raise.

Thankfully the event “practices what it preaches” with a series of interactive discussions, Pecha Kucha, Un-Keynotes, a lively Twitter backchannel etc rather than the usual standard presentations – though for reference the slides that I will be basing my part of the discussions on are here:

The full paper can be accessed here: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/190415/

Following the highly successful inaugural event in Barcelona (#PLE_BCN), the next Personal Learning Environment Conference will be held at the University of Southampton (#PLE_SOU) from July 11th – 13th 2011. All because of a rash decision by Hugh Davis, Su White and myself in the Barcelona sunshine

The PLE Conference 2011 provides a space for researchers and practitioners to exchange ideas, experience and research around the development and implementation of PLEs – including the design of environments and the sociological and educational issues that they raise. Whilst the conference includes a traditional research paper strand, we also encourage proposals for sessions in more innovative formats including workshops, posters, debates, cafe sessions and demonstrations.

This year there will be four keynote speakers (profiled below), and in line with last year’s keynotes we have asked them all to prepare an innovative (or unkeynote) approach to their presentations, and to involve conference participants in the presentations:

Scott Wilson is an Assistant Director of CETIS  (Centre for Educational technology and Interoperability Standards). His areas of interest and responsibility include enterprise systems, identity management, personalisation, further education sector issues, and business processes.

Cristina Costa works at the University of Salford as the Research Technologies development officer. Her research focuses on the use of participatory media in a changing environment, and she is particularly interested in the advantages and implications of using the social web for teaching, learning and research. She was named ALT’s Learning Technologist of the Year 2010

Riina Vuorikari has worked for European Schoolnet (EUN) since 2002.  Her research aims at better understanding, capturing and modelling of contextual information within Technology Enhanced Learning in a multilingual and multicultural context. She co-chairs the workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL) and currently works on 1:1 computing in educational settings.

The deadline for abstract submission is 10th April and you can see more details about the Call for Contributions here

We look forward to hearing from you!

Next week I’ll be in Sunny Spain at the PLE Conference (@PLE_BCN)

What is a PLE you might well ask?

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) include the tools, communities, and services that constitute the individual educational platforms learners use to direct their own learning and pursue educational goals. It represents a shift away from the traditional model of consuming information through independent channels such as the library or textbook, and towards a more active approach where connections are made and relationships are developed both online and offline. A PLE also puts learners in charge of their own learning processes, challenging them to reflect on the tools and resources that help them to learn best.

In a refreshing contrast to many academic conferences, this event looks likely to “practice what it preaches”:

• The keynote speakers ( including @courosa and @grahamattwell) have already posted up video and slides previewing their sessions and requesting comments and questions from the delegates.
• The conference hashtag (@PLE_BCN) has been active on Twitter for many weeks.
• We have been asked to design our own ID badges, with the instruction to “be creative”
• There is an active conference social network on Crowdvine 
• And a YouTube channel

Amongst all this innovation and creativity, are my boring powerpoint slides:

I will blog some feedback about the event next week

Mike Lister (Principal Business Fellow at the School of Management) will be presenting this Seminar at the University of Southampton. Mike was one of the experts consulted by the Office of Fair Trading as they looked into the future of where digital tracking is taking society.

Venue: Room 1019, Building 58a (School of Management Executive Education Centre), University of Southampton, Highfield Campus.

Internet use is so pervasive across society now that using it is considered normal behaviour.  But consumers are surprisingly unaware of how much information about them is collected – either online or offline and how this gets combined.

Currently the main application of this knowledge is to entice you to buy products and services that you otherwise might not have bought.  You use Google but do you realise how much they know about you?  German authorities are so concerned they have just told Google to stop tracking website visitors without their consent.

In the UK we seem less anxious.  But privacy and the data about you that companies capture and sell on to others will become a hot topic.  Not least because of the business opportunity this represents for the legal profession.

Date: Thursday 28th January 2010. 6pm Registration, 6.30pm Presentation, 8pm finish.

To book your FREE place please email busdev@soton.ac.uk with your contact details and numbers of seats you wish to reserve.

Lorraine Warren and I are running a Careers session for Southampton Students on Thursday – the slides are here:

We also hope to have some virtual guests in the form of representatives of last year’s graduates and maybe also some Twitter followers…I will update this post with feedback after the event.

Now that I’m back in the UK after Opened09 in Vancouver, here are some of the things that have stuck in my mind, in fairly random order…

• “it’s not about content” Providing open educational content is just the starting point…people are what make the difference
• “Cute kitten syndrome” – or “if it’s open it must be good”…this attitude can lead to a lack of critical evaluation of what really works and what doesn’t
• The enthusiasm of back channel (morning sessions were even followed by some attendees from their hotel rooms, but no names will be mentioned…) There were more than 3000 tweets using the OpenEd hashtag over the duration of the event
• The efforts of tech team were awesome – running 3 live streams concurrently, between 10am and 4pm every day, with 95% uptime. If you check out the daily conference programme on http://openedconference.org/ and select any session title, you can link to a synopsis of the talk, the presentation slides, trackbacks to blogposts that have mentioned the session, comments on the session and the full video of the presentation…wow!
• I heard the word ‘awesome’ a lot…J
• Great breakfasts, with enormous cakes and pastries, comfy chairs, wifi and access to powerpoints J
• Relaxed presenters with a lot of humorous interaction with the audience
• There were lots of mentions of Clayton Christensen, applying his principles of ‘disruptive innovation’ to education. This theory centres on the notion that established industries are not best placed to adapt to change, and may not even notice the need for change. They will eventually lose out to newcomers who start off outside the system with a basic product aimed at a different audience that can acquire critical mass under the nose of the incumbent (think of the first PCs on the desk providing simple consumption of computing vs the complexity of usage of a minicomputer….)
• Even this audience of enthusiasts seemed to baulk at the model where content is created by the students themselves, but such a system is already up and running in the USA (see the learning model adopted by Brigham Young University, Idaho)
• Gardner Campbell of Baylor University warned against “digital facelifts” (a term coined by Clay Shirky). This means ”we will do what we did before but we will put it on the web” …you can check out his entertaining presentation here
• A number of participants who are far more efficient than me have already blogged about their OpenEd experiences, see for example the reflections of Cole Camplese and Dave Cormier

Many questions emerged from the discussions, for example:

Sustainability – how to grow and manage online communities beyond the initial funded phase?

Where is the student feedback, as users what do they think of open education resources?

For open education to become mainstream, do we need a new education system or is it possible to amend the old one?

Are new elites of the “hyper-connected” emerging? (for example we heard a story of Wikipedia editors forming an exclusive club)

As early adopters are well and truly on board, how can open education now appeal to the next wave of more mainstream tutors? Is a new language required?

How many of these OpenEd initiatives reflect their broader institutional culture, and how many merely operate as isolated pockets of openness within a sceptical traditional system?

In summary…the best event I have attended, well done to all the organisers and volunteers. I’m looking forward to Barcelona next summer J

The other day I presented some ideas about online assessment and recording micro-lectures to the University of Southampton Learning and Teaching Unit’s Online Learning Workshop. There was a lot of interest and it was good to discover that many projects are already underway across the University. A Ning site is under development for ongoing discussions which I will link to when it is ready. Meanwhile, you can find the slides below.