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!) 

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

At Southampton a small group of us meet up once a month and take it in turns to present on something new and creative that we have been involved in. My turn this week, reporting on my recent experiences with the University of Liverpool Online MBA and the Open Online Course Social Media and Education:

I haven’t updated on Social Media and Open Education (ECI831) for a while but I’ve been keeping an eye on things, including the for-credit student blogs which are great and provide a wide range of perspectives. I particularly loved the networked student video which neatly summarises learning styles for the 21^st century.

Sue Waters did an excellent session in Elluminate last week. My key take away from the session was her reminder of the importance of getting student buy-in to blogging. Although the benefits of blogging may seem obvious to the ‘converted’, that is not necessarily so to newcomers. Sue showed some specific examples of her students’ blogs which clearly demonstrated how the writers had grown in confidence with their posts over time.

And another cool feature of Elluminate caught my eye during this session:

It allows participants in the real-time session to write their ideas on the whiteboard summarising their thoughts on their key learning points, as per the screenshot above.

The next session featured Alan Levine, who did a great presentation at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver this summer. However, Alan got stuck at the airport and so he was only there in spirit – but he has left a massive collection of fantastic stories and ‘stories about stories’ on the course wiki page that I am working my way through…

I was particularly interested this week in the video of a presentation by Danah Boyd. Key points:

The underlying dynamics of teen culture have not changed. The environment they are living in has changed – but teens can choose whether or not to engage with it, (or rather the extent to which they engage with it).

Danah confirmed our findings with students at Southampton that teens use social networks to hang out with their friends, not to network. It’s definitely not about meeting new people. This means that using Facebook directly for teaching purposes will probably backfire – it is an invasion of personal space. It’s ok to teach around the appropriate use of social networks, for example ethics, privacy etc, which is a more indirect approach.

Social media interaction with young people makes us rethink our position of power as adults – we certainly should not assume that students know it all (aka digital natives) but instead that we can each learn from each other. Again this confirms our own findings.

I also spent some time this week reading and commenting on the for-credit student blog posts. There seemed to be some concern about information overload (also echoed by participants in the chatroom during the Elluminate class sessions). I’m wondering whether an approach which introduces students to the various tools gradually through the course might help deal with this? Or is the idea to deliberately encourage students to find their own routes through the large amount of content in a way that works for them? Are the students perhaps given too many tech options at the beginning, would it be better to start with one and build in new ones through the course? Feedback on these points from any other course participants would be very welcome J

For those of you starting out in the School of Management this week, many of you newly arrived in the UK, I will be sharing with you some hints and tips to help you make the most of your learning opportunity. In preparation for this session, you might like to take a look at the following:

Igoogle

If you have a Google account (for example a gmail address) you can customise your page as I have done here, to keep up to date with topics of interest to you. You can organise under subheadings so that you group together all items relating to ‘dissertation’ or ‘Introduction to Marketing unit’ for example, and any new posts on your chosen blogs will automatically be pulled through so you can see these updates at a glance. Google Reader also serves the same purpose but presents the information in a different style.

Delicious

By scanning your igoogle pages , you may well find an article or video that you wish to keep and refer to again, in which case you can save it into Delicious and index it in a way that suits you. I would recommend that you include a few comments to remind yourself of the nature of the content and why you kept it, because once you build up a few hundred items you will forget what the earlier ones were all about J

Twitter

My main source of new material comes from Twitter. Follow people who share information that is useful to you – and be prepared to share what you find with others aswell. For Marketing students, a great place to start is Dave Chaffey’s blog post where he lists key people to follow on Twitter who are experts in various aspects of marketing.

Diigo

Diigo combines bookmarking and community building features. It allows you to highlight and add comments to web pages that you read, then save and share your findings as a slideshow. By tagging items of interest, you can connect with other users on a global basis who are commenting on the same material. Have a look at the explanatory video

Enjoy!

Week 2 of Social Media and Open Education has flown by. I was particularly interested in how the Elluminate session would work. Alec took the opportunity to demonstrate the various tools available in the course and it was great to track comments from the participants as the session progressed. For example, as Alec showed how he had embedded an RSS feed into the wiki to automatically update and display the shared Delicious links, the comment “clean up in aisle 4, exploding brain” could be seen in the chatroom J

The Elluminate screen displayed Alec’s desktop and he ‘wrote’ on the screen with a highlighter to illustrate the points he was making. There were about 70 people ‘watching’ the session live, and they could interact in the chat room or raise a question if passed the microphone. The big advantage for me (and other European participants, given the time difference) was that the full recording can still be accessed and replayed as required – it is linked from the bottom of the week 2 wiki page which summarises all the course activities.

It was a great idea to have a moderator in the chatroom to display links as they came up in discussions and respond to questions. Alec also managed to bring in comments and questions from the chatroom as he talked – who says men can’t multi-task?

Final points on Elluminate – the “passing of the microphone” to allow student voice contributions is clunky and resulted in a few lengthy silences, but the virtual round of applause that it permits the group to give to the speaker is a nice touch!

The reading for the week was Richard Schwier’s paper “pursuing the elusive metaphor of community in VLEs” and Richard himself presented the next Elluminate session. A number of interesting points arose from the paper and discussions:

· Some people are merging their F2F and virtual worlds, others maintain a clear distinction – “whatever works at the time” was one comment from the chatroom.

· Don’t mistake interaction for engagement. It is possible to interact without engaging, and to engage without interacting

· The technology can get in the way – if you are new to the tools, or if they don’t work well, then your focus is on the mechanics of sorting that out rather than on the actual course content

There was an intriguing debate about the role of “lurkers” or “social loafers”. Obviously, we cannot determine the opinion of total lurkers, but the consensus seemed to be that everyone should contribute in some way, but not feel obliged to respond to everything. In other settings, I’ve noticed how some (usually insecure) individuals feel the urge to dominate the discussion, but that is difficult in this type of course where there are so many parallel communication channels. Others chip in occasionally where they feel they can make a contribution that ‘pays back’ in some way for what they have taken out from others, but they are relaxed about dipping in and out without feeling the need to comment constantly.

Great stuff – I’m looking forward to week 3

There are a number of resources available to help you maximise the value from your course at the University of Southampton. Here are a few examples to get you started:

Prepare for Success is an interactive learning resource to help UK institutions prepare international students for university study. It has been developed in the Centre for Language Study at the University of Southampton. These interactive multimedia learning resources help you to discover what British academic culture is like, and what kind of academic skills you will need for effective study in the UK. The resource also provides considerable scope for you to improve your English language skills.

Also check out the resources available on www.elanguages.ac.uk which cover Study Skills, Academic Writing and Living and Studying in the UK

Academic Skills is a new resource which is all about helping you learn how to be a more effective learner and develop the research skills that will help you now and in the future. For example, included within the site are:

Podcasts - these audio podcasts will help you develop your academic skills. Each one lasts around 10 minutes and includes lots of advice and tips. A transcript of the audio recording is also available.

Study Skills Toolkit -this course comprises a set of short self-contained interactive ‘learning objects’ on specific topics – with the emphasis on learning by doing, so expect lots of activities, exercises and quizzes.

• Learning Skills
• Academic Writing Skills
• Reading & Critical Thinking Skills
• Aspects of Academic Language
• Academic Speaking and Note Taking

Getting Started with Academic Skills – start with these quick-reference guides to gain a overview and lots of practical tips.

Developing Your Academic Skills – use this series of printable activity-based study guides to improve your skills.

Advice from the Students’ Union Advice and Information Centre -publications on Academic Integrity and How to Study Successfully.

English for Academic Purposes – enrol yourself on this Blackboard course which is packed with interactive learning materials for international students.

A Guide to Academic Integrity – this is a set of interactive guides that aim to help you gain a better understanding of academic integrity and develop your skills so that your assessed work does not accidentally plagiarise the work of others.

A Guide to Research methods - a useful set of self-study modules introducing postgraduate research. Some programmes offer these modules as an accredited course, and you really DO need to complete the written exercises to gain benefit from the process.

A later post this week will introduce you to some basic social media skills that will help you to manage information, build your network and develop your personal brand.

I am participating in an online course run by Alec Couros called Social Media and Open Education. The plan is to blog the highlights on a weekly basis. The course starts today (well, actually “today” is really 2am tomorrow because Alec is based in Regina, Canada). The good news is that the weekly sessions are being recorded on Elluminate and so they can be viewed at a more civilised hour.

More good news – there is a course blog, a wiki, slides posted in Slide share, readings posted on Delicious, and comments and announcements on Twitter. Thankfully, much of this material is pulled together on a Netvibes page.

To obtain credit for the course, you need to register at the University of Regina. Informal participation is free, and so far nearly 200 people have signed up from around the world. You can see the full list (complied using the TweepML listing service) here and here

So far I have simply completed the week 1 reading and videos. The highlight was a video of a presentation by Michael Wesch titled “A Portal to Media Literacy”. It is rather long (over an hour) but Michael is an engaging speaker who hits the viewer with a barrage of facts. The first 25 minutes are particularly useful. I jotted down a few key quotes:

“Helping students create meaningful connections is what learning is all about.”

“You are in the same boat as your students – we are all stupid in this environment. It is a place to experiment. “

“We cannot assume students are media literate” (which certainly endorses our own experience)

Michael’s central message is that digital media destroys many traditional principles of education, for example that information is hard to find, that knowledge is about acquiring information, and that authorised information should not be challenged. By persisting with this model beyond the end of its shelf life, Universities now face the dissatisfaction highlighted so well in A Vision of Students Today Instead, he proposes a new model – take advantage of developments in technology to “harness, critique and create something new”.

So, lots of food for thought. Next step – I’m now going to check out http://diigo.com (adding post-it notes to web content) and then the recorded Elluminate session in the morning