What an excellent, and interesting event, the immaculate planning, brilliant setting, and dedication to designing an event which made real communication happen was a refreshing change from the usual conference fare of dutiful presentations by inexperienced postgrads and academic posturing from over-inflated egos. Official web pages for the conference are at
http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ A massive thank you to all the organizing committee, but especially to
Plenty of discussion and time for though with a conference which worked to challenge the standard format integrating components of bar camps and unconferences. This makes for some work for the participants (which is good), and does not necessarily result in the super smooth corporate commodified conference, but something which participants take with them afterwards because they joined in at the time.
Opening (un)keynote was a joint effort from Alec Couras and Graham Atwell @courosa and @grahamattwell. It included a whole load of contributed slides, and was structured around eight questions. There were a few tech issues, the usual stuff about computers not talking to the av system and computer and projection screen resolution challenges, but it was well aligned with (my) observation that (real) learning is messy!
The second unkeynote from Jordi Adell and Ismael Peña-López @ictologist and @jordi was crafted to ensure maximal participation, literally getting attendees to vote with their feet and express their views
The hash tag for the event was #PLE_BCN, and the twitter back stream peaked 5000 well before the close of play. You can take a look at the twitter stream (as we did during the conference) by using the visualiser tool
http://visibletweets.com/ . Official web pages for the conference are at
http://pleconference.citilab.eu/ .
Session chairs were asked to be innovative in their approaches, you can see Graham Atwell's blog
http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/07/how-we-share-our-ideas-ple_bcn/ It provides details from session chairs about how they will run their session - mine was rather tame by comparison, asking presenters to provide tag cloud style summaries prior to their short formal presentation, and trying to link the perspectives on the two items during an extended joint discussion slot!
ThoughtsEmerging definition - well when Hugh and I discussed it we decided to take part of O'Reilly's definition of what is Web2.0, and extend it...the web as a platform (for learning)
things I found/the conference usedVisible Tweets
Cirip
http://www.cirip.ro/grup/plebcn/cloud?limit=200&nr=30&cols=4&us&lg=en Scribble Pad
http://moourl.com/ple1 things that made me seasickgoogle wave
prezi
People who also presented in our session which was about PLEs and Institutions
TOWARDS AN ELEARNING 2.0 PROVISIONING STRATEGY FOR UNIVERSITIES Oskar Casquero, Javier Portillo, Ramón Ovelar, Jesus Romo, Manuel Benito
MAKING IT RICH AND PERSONAL: MEETING INSTITUTIONAL CHALLENGES FROM NEXT GENERATION LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS Su White, Hugh Davis, Pete Hancock, Debra Morris
FULL IMMERSION LANGUAGE LEARNING IN ON-CAMPUS UNIVERSITY COURSES Bradley Bowers (did not attend/present)
ANAGRAMMING PLE: EMPOWERING PROFESSIONAL LEARNING THROUGH MICROBLOGGING Gabriela Grosseck, Carmen Holotescu
People in the session I chaired
AN APPROACH TO INTER-WIDGET COMMUNICATION SPECIFICATION Tobias Nelkner, André Kemena
PERSONAL DASHBOARDS FOR AWARENESS IN SOCIAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Wolfgang Reinhardt, Sebastian Nuhn could not attend
DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE INTEGRATOR FEDERATED WITH PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE ENVIRONMENTS
David White
participant blogshttp://ibuchem.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/ple_bcn-conference-day-1/
remote viewers blogs/comments
http://www.masmithers.com/2010/07/08/the-ple-as-a-tool-and-institutional-lock-in/
A few of the new Twitter folk I met/followed from the conference - there were a lot!
@pgsimoes Paulo Simões
@samscam Sam Easterby-Smith
@ocasquero - Oskar Casquero interesting paper which complemented our paper on Rich Learning Environments by laying the ground with working definitions of the environment labs doing work implementing sytems which are in our Rich Learning Environment
@ggrosseck Gabriela Grosseck
http://pleconference.crowdvine.com/
http://visibletweets.com/ there were a number of presentations which looked at mobile platforms and discussed widget frameworks - sort of stuff I want to follow up
Work Related to the Southampton Learning Environment - which we put in a framework of a Rich Learning Environment
Sappo Campus - Portugal
Work in the Basque Country from Oskar Casquero et al
there were also various presentations on widget use and frameworks which could be usefully followed up - more when I have refined this blog
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