designer : innovator : educator

Since formalising an outline for my research project spent a day at Plymouth e-Learning Conference.

One thing struck me how in a lecture situation we demand the students attention; mobile off, listen and learn, I was struck by how comfortable, and useful, it was when the conference delegates were commenting live on the sessions. Twitter again demonstrated the facility to complement and augment the conversation.

The sessions were wide ranging, strong keynote from Graham Attwell, and following this talks ranging from Andy Black talk on new technologies to Brian Whalley showing real applications for these in the field with geography students.

We’re still it seems struggling with technology; blogs and wiki have relevance but don’t represent the key qualities of the expression and discussion we seem to have the desire to facilitate. There’s a lot more to be defined here, Steve Wheeler did a good job of clearing up the distinction between blogs and wiki but that’s only a small portion of a very large pie.

Pat Parslow held a session on digital identity which, thanks to tweets from some of the participants, I was able to eavesdrop on and toward the end of the session join in. The idea of the dislocation between the actual identity and the perceived identity may be thought of as something new but in reality we’ve been dealing with this for many years. Meeting someone in the flesh when we’ve spoken at length on the phone always requires some re-adjustment and so it is with the difference between digital and real persona.

If the work with the Graphics students site goes well I’ll have something to contribute to this next year.