Liquid Learning

LIFT '07

A conference about the challenges and opportunities of technology in our society: 8&9 February 2007 Geneva, Switzerland.

Just announced and I would love to hear from anyone who is planning to go along?

Wikis in education workshop

Just announced and a shameless piece of advertising. A timely one day workshop will be run at Austin Court in Birmingham on Friday 3^rd November by Brian Kelly and myself on 'Exploiting The Potential Of Wikis'. It is a great venue with and excellent line-up that includes Henry Rzepa  from Imperial College London and Phil Wilson from the University of Bath. There will be plenty of time for discussion and interaction so please book early if you can as there are limited places for this one.

Slides available at: http://www.slideshare.net/stevenw

blog.ac.uk

Announcing the UK's first conference for and about educational blogging being held on 2'nd June 2006 in London. The website for the conference is up and being developed - as fast as possible as the day is fast approaching - and we have two fantastic keynote speakers lined up and a busy day of parallel working seesions. Pop over to Josie's blog for more details and the contact addresses.

Spring conference speakers

At last. All the speakers for the ALT Spring conference in Leiden this year (April 6th and 7th) have been confirmed and the line up consists of an eclectic with a mix of presenters from Norway, Denmark, Holland and the UK. It is going to be a unique opportunity to hear about and compare the activities and projects from a diverse range of sources. Ok, so I may be the conference chair but I am really looking forward to it. The speakers who will be addressing the conference themes of lifelong learning, emerging technologies, the net generation and digital games include:

Prof Robert-Jan Simons, University of Utrecht
Prof Angela McFarlane, University of Bristol
Leo Waaijers, DAREnet and LOREnet repository projects, SURF
Harald Haugen and Bodil Ask, Høgskolen Stord/Haugesund, Norway
Scott Wilson, CETIS UK
Pieter van Parreeren and Nico Juist, INHOLLAND University
Igor Mayer, Delft University of Technology
Simon Egenfedt-Nielsen, IT University, Copanhagen

BlogTalk Reloaded

Early days yet but preparations are afoot for BlogTalk Reloaded which is set to be held in Vienna, October 2-6th 2006. The conference follows on from the success of BlogTalk 1.0 and BlogTalk 2.0. The focus has extended to social software and a call for papers has been announced (submission deadline April 1st) with broad themes under the categories of:

• form and consequences of emerging social software practices
• social software in an enterprise/educational environment
• political impact of social software
• applications, protoypes, concepts, standards

Plenty of scope here and because of the interdiscplinary audience they want to attract they have provided three different tracks:

• academic
• developer
• cases/practitioner reports

Great venue and what promises to be a great conference.

ALT Spring Conference: Leiden, April 6th and 7th

New connections, new challenges

The preparations for the ALT Spring Conference 2006 are well underway with an exciting list of invited speakers for the conference day which will be followed by a second research seminar day debating the three main themes:

Tools for lifelong learning: identity, movement and standards
Within the global information society, how realistic are claims that technology is being used to shift educational boundaries? What tools and practices are influencing learner flexibility and mobility? Key themes to be explored include: ongoing developments in tools for lifelong learning; the challenges for quality assurance posed by the rise of International degrees; and the tensions between standardisation and innovation.

Emerging technologies and the ‘Net Generation’
Who are the so called ‘Net Generation’? What do current technological developments afford in terms of new approaches to learning? Key themes to be explored include: the evidence for next generation learners; the rise of social software and peer to peer learning; the semantic web and emerging architectures.

Digital games: play and simulation
What is the potential contribution of digital games in relation to learner engagement and motivation? What challenges do they present to existing pedagogies? Key themes to be explored include: games technology as an educational medium for the digitally adept generation; cultural and institutional barriers to implementing new approaches to learning; community and collaboration in games play.

Further details are now available on the conference wiki at

http://altspring.jot.com

and if you want to attend then booking details can be found on the ALT site at

http://www.alt.ac.uk/conferences.php

ALT-C 2006 call

The call for submissions for ALT-C 2006 are now open for papers, workshops and symposia on the conference themes of:

• Next generation learning
• Next generation learners
• Next generation technology
• Next generation providers

This is a 'future thinking' set of strands and should provide a great platform for addressing much of the activity that has been going on in the areas of educational social software, personal learning environments and Web 2.0. I hope that we (w/ Josie Fraser) can put together a symposium specifically relating to weblogs and understandings of the impact that this genre of personal publishing is starting to have within educational settings.

Into the blogosphere

An interesting collection of studies published via the University of Minnesota on the rheotric, community and culture of weblogs and is the first collection of studies to focus on the weblog as rhetorical artifact To quote:

"This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities."

There should be lots of food for thought in here though some of these are areas have also been explored in other studies.