My second conference in 2 weeks was in beautiful Banff, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.

A very different climate and a very different conference than E-Learn in Hawaii, but interestingly some of the same themes were developing – views of mobile learning as part of an overall connected ecology, social software, cultural concerns. Gratifyingly (as it was the subject of our talk) one of the really big themes was the nature of the m-generation learner, including keynote and paper presentations.

The conference was smaller and more intimate than E-Learn, but again some great people there: a brilliant team from Athabasca: Kinshuk, Terry Anderson, Rory McGreal. Old friends such as John Cook, Laura Naismith, and new friends such as Terry Anderson, Anoma Malalasekera, Steve Tanimoto. It was very interesting to observe that many of the delegates were engaged in other communities at the same time as attending the conference – one of the few that I’ve been to where interruptions by mobile phones ringing were quite acceptable and indeed perhaps the norm.

I ate a lot of elk. No wonder the elk wandering everywhere were so menacing.

Looking back, the main thing that sticks in my mind (apart from the stunningly spectacular scenery and threatening but tasty wildlife) is the way that mobile technologies have become embedded in everything. I was walking on a mountain having not seen a human being for an hour when my phone rang: a strange and almost surreal disjunction of isolation and intimacy.

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/67345/mlearn-2006
By: Jon Dron
Posted: November 2, 2006, 8:31 am

Belatedly blogging the E-Learn conference, which took place in Waikiki the week before last.

Many wonderful people. Old friends such as Jaakko Kurhila, Peter Brusilovsky, Curt Bonk, Philip Barker, Rosta Farzan, new friends such as Robert Mertens, Dave Webster, Sieuw Mee and Greg.  Sorry for all those I missed, but the conference is already fading from memory and somewhat overshadowed by the mLearn conference I attended last week.

It is always interesting to see themes develop in conferences. All the old stuff is still there of course, the case studies of learning management systems, learning objects stuff, instructional design precepts and patterns etc. This year there was a much bigger emphasis on the social, some stuff on mobile (pretty stable but growing slightly for the past two or three years), but the biggest growing theme was undoubtedly variants on connectivism. George Siemens would be proud. For me, this is pretty cool as it is what I have been trying to shout about since the 1990s and at last my way of seeing the world of e-learning is becoming mainstream. 

This conference was especially memorable for its shakiness. The 6.7 earthquake hit just after 7am on Sunday morning while I was in the shower. At first I was just a little surprised that the floor that I had remembered as being concrete was actually made of thin plastic. Realisation dawned on me just in time to get out of the shower before the second shockwave hit, at which point things fell of tables and rattled on walls. My own hotel was without power or water. I had to come to the assistance of a couple of morbidly obese women in a nearby room who had no water or food. The journey up and down a darkened stairwell as temperatures began to climb in the day was less fun than you might think. Amazingly, the conference hotel managed to restore some services via its backup generator, providing some lighting, a couple of lifts and even a hint of Internet access. They also laid on sandwiches and, by the evening, even a full spread of food. An interesting day full of queues to get water and food, struggles to make mobile phones work and some brave attempts to continue with presentations, often with presenters holding up their laptops to show the PowerPoint slides. Not a great idea. It was almost sad when the lights finally came back on some time after 9pm. There was a real feeling of camaraderie and companionship in adversity. 

Earthquakes aside, it was interesting to compare the experience of E-Learn with that of the same conference in the same place 7 years ago. Then, email was limited to a couple of 15 minute sessions in a day, and the rest of the world seemed far away. With unlimited (bar during the earthquake aftermath) wifi access for the whole conference, the world in 2006  is a smaller and more intrusive place. I was never really away from the office, just had less time to work and more distractions.

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/67316/elearn-2006-the-shakiest-conference-i-have-been-to-so-far
By: Jon Dron
Posted: November 1, 2006, 4:04 am

http://jondron.cofind.net:80//frshowresource.php?uid=anon&pwd=&tgid=28&tid=5280&qid=&quality=&show=all&page=&searchstring=&returnto=&perpage=20&order=&expired=&resid=1165&url=http%3A%2F%2Ficool.uom.ac.mu%2F2007%2Fuser%2Findex.php Full Papers Due 15 December2006
Authors Notified 15 February 2007
Camera Ready due Early Registration 15 April 2007
Conference 11 – 14 June 2007
Created:Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:41:45 GMT

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/73353/icool-2007-international-conference-on-open-and-online-learning
By: Jon Dron
Posted: October 18, 2006, 7:41 pm

As I return from another pair of conferences, it occurs to me that I have been presenting at at least 9 conferences this year. Assuming that the average number of working days spent at or travelling to each conference is around 5, and that preparation (writing and correcting papers or assembling proceedings plus preparing the presentations) must be a similar amount, that means that I have spent 90 days or thereabouts of my working life this year on conferences. It gets worse. I reckon that each time I am away I get about twice as much work to do in the week before (preparing stuff for students, finishing things that should happen while I am away etc) and the week after (catching up on what I have missed). In work terms, that makes this year’s conferences accountable for about 180 notional days of my time. As there are only around 240 working days in a year (at most) and I still have all the other stuff to do, this is not inconsiderable. Which leads me to the thought ‘is it worth it?’

OK, I’m cheating a bit or a lot. I still do plenty of my ordinary work while I’m at a conference, and the fact that work doubles in the weeks before and after is made up for to some extent by the fact that somewhat less time is spent oing the boring stuff while I am away. I also (generally) enjoy conferences, though they are not exactly the holidays some believe them to be. Generally speaking, I tend to learn a lot at conferences too. However, the time spent conferencing eats away at the time that I would spend applying that learning. 

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/66977/is-it-really-worth-going-to-conferences
By: Jon Dron
Posted: October 7, 2006, 8:49 am

Very interesting – thanks Jon

Stan 

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/66861/great-posting-on-gagne-by-donald-clark#354
Posted: September 22, 2006, 4:50 am

This is a great antidote to those of the ID community who swear by Gagne (not the greatest of ideas anyway as he had no scientific grounds for his theory) and use dull formulae to come up with teaching designs:

http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2006/09/gagnes-nine-dull-commandments.html

Although there are plenty of tricks that can ease the process and make it work better, I am increasingly of the opinion that the approach used in teaching barely matters, as long as it is done with passion, both for subject matter and for helping learners to learn. How we translate this from the classroom into e-learning is one of the Grand Challenges, but Donald’s blog shows one way it can be done.

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/66861/great-posting-on-gagne-by-donald-clark
By: Jon Dron
Posted: September 22, 2006, 4:50 am

Interesting article exploring the failings of crowds
Created:Thu, 14 Sep 2006 08:13:14 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1154
Posted: September 14, 2006, 2:13 am

Interesting article introducing a new acronym (WOC) to cover social software and related issues
Created:Wed, 13 Sep 2006 13:42:18 GMT

Original: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5303&resid=1152
Posted: September 13, 2006, 7:42 am

Recently I read ‘The Goal’ which is a fine book – it’s about management by constraints, but it’s written in the form of a novel. As a novel it’s pretty lame (though surprisingly gripping), but as a text book it’s brilliant. The idea behind it is simple – any business has a goal, and anything that helps to achieve it is good while anything that doesn’t is bad.

For most businesses, the goal is pretty clear: to make money. Universities are a bit odd though, and the nearest they come to that kind of goal is generally to try to avoid losing too much money. So I’ve been wondering, what is our goal? More specifically, what is it that we produce?

I went through the obvious things like ‘qualified students’,’research papers’, ‘intellectual property’ and so on, but none of them seemed to make any sense as a primary goal, though they might be means to achieve it, or perhaps side-effects of it.

The thing I’ve settled on for now is knowledge.

Whether it is increasing the knowledge of our students or creating new knowledge, it seems fairly unequivocal that what we are trying to do is to increase the quantity and quality of knowledge in the world at large. Of course, that comes with a whole bunch of necessary corollaries, the most significant of which is that we must be concerned with spreading that knowledge as much as we can. In fact, I can go further. The more and/or the better the knowledge that we create, the more successful we will be as a university. Everything we do should therefore be focussed on that one goal – to increase knowledge.

So where do we go from here? How can we increase the knowledge that we produce? Some things are pretty obvious: we must teach as well as we can, we must learn as much as we can and we must discover as much as we can. But this is not a production line. Accurately quantifying the knowledge that we produce is well-nigh impossible, as the knowledge resides in people’s heads, not in papers, libraries, computer systems or exam results. However, it does suggest one important thing: we mustn’t keep it hidden away. This means we have to communicate. Firstly, we should communicate with those who will benefit most, the fertile ground on which to sow ideas. But we must also scatter it to the winds, as well as plough new land and make it fertile. Hopefully, our students and colleagues (especially in our subject areas) are the fertile ground. Conferences and journals are prime farmland. But we must also sow the seeds of knowledge further, into the world at large (the Internet is a wonderful thing) and into the broader community: to spread knowledge, and the intellectual tools to create that knowledge, far and wide.

And that’s why this is a public posting.

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/66748/what-do-we-produce
By: Jon Dron
Posted: August 24, 2006, 11:19 am

http://jondron.cofind.net:80//frshowresource.php?uid=anon&pwd=&tgid=30&tid=5290&qid=&quality=&show=all&page=&searchstring=&returnto=&perpage=20&order=&expired=&resid=1146&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.milostongue.com%2F Milo the dog with the tongue. Cute,ugly.sexy.
Created:Thu, 10 Aug 2006 16:20:01 GMT

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/76023/miloacircs-tongue
By: Jon Dron
Posted: August 10, 2006, 10:20 am