conference
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Feel the l-OER-ve
(The sun always shines for OER) OER18 was held in Bristol this year, superbly chaired by David Kernohan & Viv Rolfe, and once again organised and managed with care, efficiency and joy by the team at ALT. I found it stimulating, challenging and enjoyable as always, but I’m not going to comment on the content so much here, (Sheila and Maren have some excellent posts amongst many others) but rather on what are the characteristics of it as an event that make it probably my favourite regular conference. These are entirely personal, so I don’t offer them up as a ‘how to’ but just what I like. Size – it…
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Every decoding is another encoding
I was invited by the Virtually Connecting team to present with them at OER17, and I of course, jumped at the opportunity. I’m a VC advisory buddy and have done a few VC sessions at conference but the work Maha, Autumm, Rebecca and others put in to making it work is tiring just to observe. For those of you who don’t know VC, it started as away of those not present at conferences to feel part of the experience. This is often realised through an hour session with a keynote or two after their talk, with someone onsite facilitating and a group of online people joining a Google hangout (which…
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Edtechie review
After books and films, here is my look back at my year of blogging. As with last year, I set out to average one blog post a week. This post makes 51, so only one short. This year also saw 10 years of blogging for Edtechie, and so still blogging at a reasonable rate is testament to how much blogging forms part of my work and social environment. And one thing that has been shown this year is that it is as vibrant a community as ever, despite all the recurring pronouncements of the death of blogging. On a couple of occasions my blog became host to what Maha Bali…
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OpenEd16 & my manel shame
I’ve been at OpenEd in Richmond this week, and I feel bad about this post, because it’s been an amazing conference. For example, I’ve just come from post conference drinks with Audrey Watters, Ken Bauer, Christina Hendricks, Autumm Caines, Laura Gogia, Jim Luke, and so on. Anything that brings those people together in one place is worth applauding. So what follows is meant in the best possible friendly critique manner. OpenEd conference needs to do better at, well, being open. Before we start, I’ll say I dislike the way people use ‘open’ as a means to bash others eg “if you’re open why do you charge conference fees at all?”.…
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Keynotes & communities at ALT-C
I was at the ALT-C conference last week (I become Chair of ALT for this year, will try not to break it). I’ve noticed over the years that there are two communities at ALT (there are many more of course, but two main ones I think). These can be labelled practitioners who have started to use some ed tech, and more full time educational technologists. For the former group, Alt-C is not their normal conference, they may be physics lecturers, but they have started to use technology in an interesting way. This may well be their first time attending. For the second group, ALT-C represents the main UK conference in…
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The new or reused keynote dilemma
James Clay wrote a post about ‘the half life of a keynote‘ recently in which he pondered how long you should keep giving the same talk for. I know people who always create a new talk, and people who give the same one for almost their entire careers. This year I decided I would create new talks for every keynote, so it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I think the initial reaction is that creating new talks is better. But now I’m through my new talk phase, I’m less convinced. To add to James’s conversation then, here are my pros and cons. The advantages of giving the same talk multiple…
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No country for old ideas, this
So, I've been in New Delhi this week as a keynote speaker at the EdgeX conference. It was great to catch up with George, Dave, Stephen and Grainne, and to meet Jay Cross, Clark Quinn and LesFoltos. Viplav Baxi and the team were the most amazing, hospitable hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to be here. I thought I'd share a few of my own perceptions from the visit, although one has to accept they are based on a very limited scope of India, but for what it's worth. Start-up fever – It feels like a very exciting place to be at the moment. The opening speaker said he felt…
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Digital scholarship recognition – the debate
So, I was the invited keynote debater at this year's EdMedia conference in Lisbon. I had ten minutes to put my case in favour of the following motion: "This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship" My (poor quality, one take audio) slidecast is below. Digital scholarship debate View another webinar from Martin Weller My argument was that there are a number of converging pressures which will make recognition inevitable. These were: 1) Impact 2) Efficiency 3) Efficacy 4) Complementarity 5) Institutional benefit 6) Variety 7) Human factors Antonio Figueiredo…
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5 things I think about Learning Analytics
<Ed Techs go in search of data in the wild> I am at the 1st Learning Analytics conference in Banff, which has been interesting. I came not sure of what it was, or what my take on it was. The conference has been good, very interdisciplinary in nature (for which you can read 'I didn't understand some of it'). I'm still not sure about a lot of it, but here are five things that have occurred to me over the course of the past few days. I don't believe they're strong enough to say I've learnt them, but rather they are things I now have come to a tentative viewpoing…
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Learning Analytics 2011 is the place to be
(This man wants your data) I'm pleased to say I've managed to get some funding to attend the first conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2011), organised by George Siemens and the good folk at Athabasca. It's in Banff, Canada, Feb 27th to March 1st. Look at some of the people on the steering committee: Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium David Wiley, Brigham Young University, US Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada Tony Hirst, Open University, UK Grainne Conole, Open University, UK Dragan Gasevic, CSIS, Athabasca University, Canada Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, UK Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia, Canada I think this first conference…
