5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference – PELC10
A bright and sunny Plymouth welcomed the delegates to the 5th Plymouth e-Learning Conference (PELC10) on the 8th of April 2010. PELC10 (#PELC10 for Twitter) certainly found Plymouth in its best attire of sunshine and blue skies for the two days of the event, a trend which seems to be ongoing, even a previous PELC which had delegates unable to attend due to snow fall actually had a fine day for the conference. So enough of the weather, how was the conference?
Whilst smaller in delegate numbers than PELC09 there was certainly plenty to see and be involved with at PELC10. Delegates were busy from early to late on both of the days of conference, taking in multiple streams of presentations and workshops, of course networking over coffee and lunch, and badgering the vendors for freebies (and demonstrations of course!). As it seems almost every conference this year is extending deadlines for submission perhaps the economic climate is affecting conference attendance for the time being. However, maybe it’s time for conferences to be smaller and more intimate, and at the same time to be more open and accessible through streaming, blogging, micro-blogging and the like. PELC10 certainly achieved that, with several live events being streamed openly and a vast number of posts on Twitter reporting the event almost as a blow by blow account.
After the usual opening addresses the first keynote speaker, Josie Fraser, launched the conference into debate mode by speaking quite widely on the issues of community, identity, and social media. The introduction of ‘un-Googlable man’ as a contrast to the increasing impetus from institutions in the UK, including the UK Government, to provide services in a way that requires all to be online certainly set the framework for the 30 minutes of the keynote session devoted to audience participation. It’s good to see discussion so prominent in a conference.
Dave White, co-manager of Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), added some real zing to the conference with his keynote on day two. Dave’s vibrant presentation included some interesting thoughts and ideas about the relationships between those involved in elearning and embedding technology into teaching and learning. Suggesting a model including ‘players’, those who get to experiment and ‘play’ with leading edge technologies in a primarily ‘blue skies’ setting, and ‘pragmatists’, those who work at the practice end of teaching and learning trying to implement technologies for institutions, the key issue of the presentation seemed to be that we have a bit of a problem in communicating between these groups. It was perhaps a challenge to an audience of both players and pragmatists to work out lines of communication between the two groups for the greater good, i.e. to make e-learning effective and practical.
While it’s great to see people talking about what they have done successfully it was a real pleasure to see two presentations at this conference which looked at projects that hadn’t had complete success. Both found considerable resistance to the technology used in the course, particularly Twitter, so it was useful to see this and try to understand why. As has been seen before there is a sense from students that if they are not clear of the benefits from using a technology they will not see a point in using it and fail to engage with it, (despite the fact that it might seem fun to use from the perspective of teaching staff and/or learning technologists).
To round up the two days of conference a plenary session was held on the Friday afternoon. By this time most of the conference were probably pretty much talked out, but there were a few discussion points some of which can be viewed in the video below. Another student resistance to technology was raised by Pete Yeomans, this time the culprit being e-portfolio and the issue of students only using it when forced to. You’ll have to watch the video to find out what the panel thought.
Hopefully everyone who attended found this a lively, fun and stimulating conference and many will be back next year for the 6th Plymouth e-Learning Conference – Digital Futures: Learning in a Connected World (April 7th – 8th, 2011). The themes will be
• Learning in a connected world
• Changing roles of teachers and learners
• Institutional models of online learning
Start early on that idea for a presentation or workshop and come have fun in the sun at Plymouth next year.
[Images by Dawn Wheeler, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/49162466@N03/ and used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.]
[Video source http://www.ustream.tv/channel/pelc10 by PELC10]
