Lisa Harris Marketing

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!