EdTechUK

ALT-C 2006: PLEs

The read/write web certainly hit ALT-C this year. If I had the time to make a cloud tag of the event, learning objects would be in tiny, tiny letters, and web 2.0 would only be beaten in size by the word Blackboard, who stormed into first place on the wave of animosity that their software patents have whipped up.  There were some interesting sessions on blogging, podcasting popped up, along with wikis. For me, of course, this has been the year of the Personal Learning Environment, and it’s probably not good practice to say so but I really enjoyed the PLE session the most. It was also cool to finally meet up with Dave Tosh of Elgg/Curverider fame. Also really great to get to work a little with Terry Anderson, although I managed to miss bumping into him for most of the conference.

The low point for me was probably the mushroom risotto along with the giant playstation uninteractive things outside of the Dynamic Earth Center.  I was also sad to miss Brian Kelly’s session that clashed with ours.

I’ve put up the PLE photo set over at Flickr – if you took part in the session, please do head over and contribute some comments or information about yourself (“that’s the back of my head!”). And don't forget to re-live those precious moments with Graham Attwell: Live at Edinburgh.

Alt-C 2006 Edinburgh edubloggers meetup

Frances Bell & Anne Hewling, originally uploaded by Josie Fraser.

Despite some logistic Ceilidh-related issues on the night, a bunch of us managed to get together to talk about out current projects and do some planning for the December conference, which will be scheduled to tie in with the third Edublog Awards show.

Chat around the table was about platforms, projects and what’s next, and themes and schemes for the big conference next June.

Andy Pullman, Andy Worth, Steven Warburton, Russell Dyas, Jenny Booth, Graham Attwell, Anne Hewing, Frances Bell, Christopher ‘witness protection’ Sessums, Brian Kelly, me and Terry Wassall all managed to follow the trail of crisps to the edubloggers table.

What is pretty urgent is that we come up with a new name for blog.ac.uk, for two very good reasons:

1. It’s obvious to everyone that the focus and interests of the group have superseded blogging. Two years ago, the landscape was very different – as were the common tools and practices. Blogging is now only one element – and for many people, not even the focal element, within the web 2.0/read-write web landscape/arsenal. Personal Learning Landscapes (PLEs) represent a really significant conceptual shift with respect to this – taking the implications and possibilities of distributed conversations, communities and identities of practice and thinking them through in terms of formal, (as well as the existing, already extensive, informal) experiences of learning.

2. ac.uk is only available to FE and HE institutions within the UK. We want to be an inclusive organisation that recognises the importance of working across sectors, institutions and qualifications. We had a big discussion again about the shelf life of the organisation in terms of the development of fractions and more focused sub-groups. For me, the organisation is an essentially transient one, like most of the other communities I’ve belonged to. It’s being put in place to deliver some specific objectives – primarily around raising the profile and strengthening the network of UK educators who are passionate about the use of new and emerging technologies to support learning and promote learner communities and autonomy. I’ll be more than happy to see it made redundant and dismantled by its members once more useful way of working emerge.