Vicariously virtual

At the LLAS (Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies) E-learning Symposium on Friday 29 January 2010, Ming Nie and I, together with our avatars Ming Cham and Daffodil Moonwall, presented on our recent Second Life (SL) project with distance students on the Online MA in TESOL and Applied Linguistics. The presentation is described in the DUCKLING blog. Here I want to reflect on the combination of technologies used in the presentation.

Ming Cham

Daffodil Moonwall

This was a truly mixed-mode presentation, with a number of ways in which audience members could participate. For starters, there were approximately 30 people in the lecture theatre at the University of Southampton where I was presenting. They got to see me in real life, as well as Daffodil and Ming Cham on the big screen in SL. Meanwhile, Ming Nie was joined in real life in Leicester by a colleague from the MA course team, who had accepted our invitation to vicariously experience the virtual presentation. A few other colleagues joined Daffodil and Ming Cham in SL via their avatars. Finally, the event was also live streamed via video for anyone who wanted to see what was happening in the lecture theatre in Southampton from a distance. (Here I must apologise to my mum for sms-ing her the wrong URL – I misspelt “tinyurl” as “tinurl”, which had the effect of sending her off to an array of porn sites, thereby confirming her lack of faith in all things Web.)

For anyone who missed the live session and would like to see the recording, it is available, along with recordings of the other sessions from the symposium, at www.tinyurl.com/LLAS-livestream.

From a technical point of view, everything went very smoothly. Ming and I had our PowerPoint slides embedded in Second Life, and our avatars stood on either side of the virtual screen. I had two microphones – a lapel mike for the live streaming, and a headset mike for SL. We connected to SL without a hitch, and with the help of technical gurus on both sides (thanks Graham, Dean, Terese, Simon and Paul!) we managed to get excellent sound quality in both venues.

Despite the technical success, I am curious to know what value SL really added to the presentation. Yes, it allowed Ming to co-present with me from a distance. And yes, it gave a feel for the environment in which our study had taken place, which made it appropriate for the occasion. However, I wonder how exciting it was for members of the audience to watch two rather stationary avatars standing at the front of a virtual lecture theatre, and speaking to PowerPoint slides with disembodied voices…

Perhaps both Daffodil and Ming Cham need to learn the art of moving unobtrusively and gesturing while speaking? (Not as easy it sounds though, because as soon as you move your avatar, you also lose your view of the presentation screen at least momentarily, which could be very disorientating for any audience members watching the screen from the presenters’ point of view.) Perhaps we could have tried lip-synching, so that it was clear which avatar was speaking? Perhaps we could have hovered over the screen rather than standing next to it? Perhaps we could have used a more visually attractive presentation format such as Prezi, rather than PowerPoint? Perhaps… we could get some creative ideas from blog readers for the next time we try something like this?

Gabi Witthaus, 1 Feb 2010

An Initial Reaction to the iPad

Steve Jobs’ 27 January unveiling of the Apple iPad has drawn reactions running the gamut from adoration to ridicule.  Most comments in the latter category take aim at the device’s name. Other negative opinions focus on the iPad’s inability to multitask, lack of a camera, or the fact that it isn’t more like a netbook.

I for one agree with Jobs’ quip in his keynote: “The problem is, netbooks aren’t better at anything.” He goes on to show how the iPad is designed to do chosen tasks better — the chosen tasks being email, displaying photos, watching videos, playing music, browsing the web, playing games, and, yes, reading e-books. In addition, one can create Keynote presentations, spreadsheets, and word-processed documents using iPad versions of these apps, features which look quite impressive and set the iPad notably ahead of both the iPhone and arguably netbooks.

Those who have test-run the iPad testify to its clever usability and speed, courtesy of the new custom-silicon A4 chip. The iPad’s price tag is very reasonable, and its 3G data plan with AT&T is surprisingly low-priced and flexible, with no contract to sign. This alone well positions the iPad for all kinds of users — businesspeople, artists, students, academics, everyone. And since, in many parts of the developing world, 3G is the most common method of internet access, the iPad is in this respect well-positioned for new inroads into international markets.

For me, the most interesting, even revolutionary, news about the iPad was not only that e-books would now be available for purchase through Apple just as music and films have been, but also that Apple has been negotiating with textbook publishers to this end. In the UK we have had Sony e-readers and Waterstones, while the e-books scene in the States has been dominated by the Kindle and Amazon, but neither Waterstones nor Amazon has been offering very much in the way of textbooks for e-readers. We at Beyond Distance have been evaluating the use of e-readers by masters-level distance students as part of our DUCKLING project. As a part of this project, publishers Routledge made a special deal to allow us to include their textbook on the e-readers supplied to students, and we will be sharing with Routledge the results of our research. Now that Apple has taken the major step of promising textbooks on iPads, we should begin to see textbook publishers not only provide their materials for e-readers but hopefully benefit from Apple’s consistent “cool factor” with students.

Vive la revolution!

Terese Bird

Missed LFF10? Coming soon: LFF10 OERs as a download for you…

It’s been just over two weeks since the end of our Learning Futures Festival 2010 and I’m still riding high on the experiences and achievements of the festival, and also still working hard on the follow up to LFF10. 

As one of the Learning Technologists I was involved in the day to day running of the conference primarily keeping our conference environment up and running: http://atim.janison.com.au/ and I owe a huge amount of thanks to the team who supplied us with this environment for all their help.  It was my first experience of creating an online conference and I tried to make things easy to use but balance this with providing the necessary information.  The responses from the survey have provided areas for me to look at for LFF11 and to try and improve the navigation and layout of this environment, but for a first attempt I think it worked well and ran a lot more smoothly than I anticipated! If you would still like to provide feedback about the Festival and the Festival environment please fill out our survey:

• http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHJxVVFuVExubzBlTjBjNmptZm5LRlE6MA

As mentioned during the Festival we’re planning on turning as many live sessions as possible into OERs as part of our OTTER project: http://www.le.ac.uk/otter.  I’m currently transforming the sessions into video and audio files. How the sessions will be split e.g. presentation and questions into separate video will be decided on a session-by-session basis. As each session will be transformed into a reusable and repurposeable OER, you will be able to download and then, if you wish, edit the OER for your own preferred personal viewing and listening. This will provide delegates and anyone else who wishes to download the OERs with a chance to catch up with missed sessions and hopefully maximise the impact of LFF10 while still keeping costs and CO² emissions to a minimum.

We’re still tweeting about the festival and our other upcoming events with the following hashtags:

• #lff10
• #uolbdra
• #otteroer
• #uolinsl
• #uolmz

You might have noticed a recent tweet about one of our newest animals to the zoo, PANTHER. This might just be a fleeting visit, so make the most of it while you can!  PANTHER (Podcasting in Assessment: New Technology in Higher Education Research) is holding a workshop on the 3^rd March 2010.  This will be both a physical and online event which you can register for here:

• http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/beyond-distance-research-alliance/projects/panther/panther-workshop

Keep an eye out for my tweets (http://twitter.com/emmafull) about the LFF10 OERs due for release in the next month and I look forwarding to seeing you all at LFF11.

Emma Davies
Learning Technologist

Running the first oil rig evacuation

Last month, we ran our first evacuation from the oil rig. This was built around a scenario written by Dr Andrew Shepherd (AKA Dr Darcy Mint and Mr Quentin Harcourt).

Our student volunteers – now morphed into the ACME Occupational Psychology Consultancy Team – were required to visit the rig at the behest of the New Walks Oil Exploration Company and assess any potential health & safety issues. (The oil rig was for this purpose an ‘experimental platform’ to be tested prior to 35 full oil rigs being built in order to exploit the discovery of oil in SL.)

Following a short briefing in the Media Zoo boat house, the ACME consultants – now identified by their blue safety helmets –  were ferried out to the platform in one of the numerous motorboats. They were given a full tour of the platform by Johnson and Aallyah.

The consultants were then required to familiarise themselves with the platform, and several days later present to Dr Darcy, Mr Harcourt and everyone else on specific aspects of H&S. This presentation was done on the helipad using slides uploaded by Johnson. Both Aallyah and Johnson were very pleased to see that all smoking cigarettes and booze bottles had been identified! In addition to H&S, the consultants were asked to include a suitable evacuation plan.

The platform supervisor, Mr Harcourt, a misery at the best of times, assigned the consultants certain tasks around the rig. It was at this stage that Dr Kelly Barklamb (AKA Doreen Mint) put in a performance worthy of Oscar recognition, as she played to perfection the distracting and obstropolous administrator unwilling to do anything the consultants asked of her.

While all this was going on, Johnson flitted around the rig laying fires, before setting off the first klaxon and starting the evacuation. Although one stairwell was blocked off, eventually all the consultants made it to the waiting boats and headed for the shore. No lives were lost!

So apart from being great fun, how useful was the scenario? As outlined in Kelly’s post from the summer, the occupational psychology team already had a good idea of how to ‘assess’ the students. And I think it’s useful to make the following observations:

• As shown by the high quality of the presentation, SL offered these distance learning students an excellent environment in which to collaborate;
• Most of the participants were new to SL , yet only required a one-hour training session (although it was important that this training was focused);
• Despite the training, some found it hard to manoeuvre within the tight confines of the rig;
• All participants acknowledged the realism of the evacuation, made more so by the noise of the klaxons.

The scenario will become more refined the more we run it. But for a first attempt, we were overall very pleased with the way it went. And certainly the participants/students/avatars/consultants tell us they found it very useful.

Simon Kear

Keeper of the Media Zoo

Publishing e-learning research in higher education

If you’ve resolved to publish more of your e-learning research in the New Year, you may find useful a list of peer-reviewed journals that publish papers in our e-learning field with special reference to higher education. I’ve not included US journals because they seldom take foreign contributions, but all on my list have an international readership. Each one contains a statement of themes covered and the preferred types of article. The editor will usually respond to enquiries about the relevance of a new topic to his or her journal.

Some journal web sites carry an ‘impact factor’ related to how often their articles are cited by other authors. Broadly speaking a factor above 1.0 indicates a journal that commands more respect and attention than those with factors below 1.0. There’s more here if you want to understand the virtues and problems of impact factors of journals.

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

Association for Learning Technology Journal

British Journal of Educational Technology (1.041)

Computers & Education (2.190)

European Journal of Open, Distance & E-learning

Higher Education Quarterly

Innovations in Education & Teaching International (0.250)

International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning (Canadian)

Journal of Computer Assisted Learning (1.065)

Journal of Further & Higher Education

Studies in Higher Education (0.938)

Teaching in Higher Education (0.500)

There are also solely online journals, such as the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME, from the Open University).

A good principle to adopt as a researcher is to write up every project you are engaged in and try to find a suitable peer-reviewed journal. When you submit an article, even if it is rejected, you are likely to get some useful feedback, but it’s worth asking a colleague or two to have a look at your article before submission.

BDRA researchers have published recently in:

British Journal of Educational Technology (5 papers)

Electronic Journal of e-Learning (1 paper)

European Journal of Open, Distance & E-learning (1 paper)

International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (1 paper)

Journal of the Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre (1 paper)

Journal of Lifelong Learning in Europe (1 paper)

Reflecting Education (1 paper)

Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education (1 paper)

Good luck!

David Hawkridge

Day 7 at LFF2010

Formal and informal, anarchy and surveillance, communities and learning cultures and greening of education.

The day started with the daily address by Gilly envisioning alternative forms of education and suggesting “Self Organising Learning Environments” as an approach.

Josie Taylor from the Open University, our keynote for the day, took up Gilly’s challenge and described the ways in which the Open University is expanding its role in providing further education regardless of the learner’s location and circumstances using personal networks and technologies such as Facebook and the iPhone to engage the informal learner and encourage her towards more formal qualifications. Josie’s talk generated a lively question and answer session, covering areas such as assessment and monitoring of students, copyright issues and learner (pre-)qualifications. In our Second Life campfire, the question of how discussions go beyond text and whether the avatar is a better representation of the true self than the physical person engaged the minds of participants.

Continuing with the theme on alternative forms of education Pal put forward a strong case for promoting a digital listening culture in education using podcasts. He presented two design approaches for learning and assessment to demonstrate the pedagogical value of podcasts and also introduced the ten-factor framework for learning design using podcasts.

James had a more radical view of how university education should be conceptualised for the future. In his “Anarchy in the universities: Beyond the student-teacher hierarchy” presentation, he challenged the current notion of learners as “customers” contending that such a view reinforced the banking concept of education. He argued for moving away from essentialist/humanist traditions to more social constructivist approaches to learning. The anarchist approach to learning rejects authoritarian relationship and seeks to influence rather than direct learning. Tutors become curators of connections with the student taking greater responsibility. One implication of such a radical approach is whether or not lectures should be abandoned and greater emphasis placed on tutorials and collaborative learning around the concept of communities of practice.

Cate in her presentation on “The electronic academic: Subversion, surveillance, disruption” described the way in which society’s control of people is changing and the demands this places on academics with universities moving from the institutional (lectures, F2F tutorials) to the personal (mobile devices, PLEs). In the electronically surveilled university the divide between the academic and personal life disappears as does individual sovereignty. There were questions around how academics may best respond to the changes. Should we embrace the change or fight it? What are the benefits and risks for embracing these changes?

Sheema reported on an attempt to bring about change in the Maldives. In her presentation on “Elearning experience of teachers and children in Maldives” she presented a case study of five teachers’ participation in an online continuous professional development course in Maldives, a small island of dispersed communities with poor internet connectivity and not enough resources. The key challenges identified in her study were course design and delivery, learning support and social issues around gender and how it impacts on collaborative learner to learner support. To Sheema the ability to succeed in elearning is partly dependent on the social and intellectual network.

I wrapped up the day with a presentation on “Teaching and Learning: How environmentally disruptive”. Using the GECKO pilot project which compared CO² emissions of blended and face‐to‐face modes of teaching as a context, he invited discussions on teaching methods that are more environmentally friendly.  Many participants were of the view that blending learning could impact less on the environment than traditional methods of teaching and learning.

Dr Sahm Nikoi

DAY 6 at LFF2010

… with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore and Marcus Bentley

T’was the day after Monday, and all over town -
Many noses were frozen, and much snow fluttered down…

Good thing this is an online conference, because getting in to Leicester for 9 am on this Tuesday would have been a nightmare…

The day began  with Gilly’s daily address which through pre-recorded, went rather well. I found the idea – suggested by Gilly, that each educational institution was an enterprise that needs to evolve – to be quite interesting. Considering the different parts of the world that participants have been joining sessions from, the discussions, questions and comments related to experiences and observations from a range of varying contexts. An energetic debate focussed on an emerging trend of a more pronounced consumer mentality of educational ’shoppers’ (students and parents) and that this might force forces HEIs to adopt adversarial business models because they have to compete more and more with each other.

Following this was Tessa Welch’s keynote address which suggested that the main value of OERs (open educational resources) in Africa’s context is that they provide momentum for the surfacing of good quality existing resources as OERs, which would otherwise remain undiscovered or remain locked within institutions or publishers. She drew extensively on SAIDE’s experience in a pilot OER project resulting in the adaptation and use of a module in the teaching and learning of mathematics in six South African institutions, and also on the lessons of experience in taking this to scale for a teacher education space on the OER Africa platform. The discussion sessions for this keynote followed later in the day.

At 1100 GMT, five bravehearts joined Simon, Terese and Paul (aka Johnson, Aallyah and PD Alchemi) in Second Life for the Oil rig evacuation, and though this was only the second time that this session was run in SL. Attendees found it to be most enjoyable. Some of them admitted to be scared by the ‘fire’ that led to the evacuation scenario.

The OTTER team led 22 attendees through the Open Wide workshop at 12 noon, which focussed on reward and recognition for academic staff for making teaching materials freely available as OERs. The presenters suggested that despite the recent, dramatic increase in the number of OER repositories in the UK HE sector and some altruistically motivated academics making their teaching materials freely available for re-use, concerns remain regarding appropriate reward and recognition for staff contributions of OERs.

The afternoon sessions began with Emma Kimberley’s presentation on the University of Leicester’s Graduate School Media Zoo initiative that supports postgraduate researchers. This paper took an overview of the challenges of supporting and connecting postgraduate researchers at UoL through the development of a physical and virtual ‘research forum’ based within the University  Library. An interesting discussion ensued, with reflections from several participants on their own experiences of support that they had as postgraduate students.

At 1500 GMT, David Wolfson’s (an independent education consultant) paper titled ‘Eight Years Old and Already Collaborating Online’ focussed on what the future holds for HE (considering that today’s 8-year olds will be entering HE in about a decade), describing a stepped approach to successful online teacher- and student-led learning in schools. Practical evidence  - from senior leaders and learners at over 100 schools of all types and sizes as they set out to use learning platforms – was brought to bear on the proceedings.

Later, Stuart Johnson, David Morgan and Matthew Mobbs from the University of Leicester shared their experiences of using social media (especially  Facebook and Twitter) to engage with students about issues deemed important for Student Development and the Students’ Union at the university of Leicester’s Student Support Service and Students’ Union. A lively discussion followed with a range of practitioners contributing their experiences from different aspects of providing and receiving pastoral and learning support for students.

Following the Second Life Campfire, the last paper of the day was from Dr Richard Mobbs, which challenged listeners to put the ‘PLE in to the VLE’. VLEs being more often than not designed to meet the needs of the institution, rather than the learner, the time – Richard claimed – had come to integrate new developments like online social networks, mobile technologies, widely-used social software applications and others to provide ‘more PLE’ within the context of the main VLE provision.

This is a screen-grab from Twitter on what people were saying about LFF2010 on Tuesday evening. One keynote from a previous day has proven inspirational and the attendees of the SL Oil Rig Evacuation from earlier in the day sound happy!!

That Was The Day 6 That Was … now Day 7 awaits. Enjoy!

- Jai Mukherjee / 13 January 2010

Day 5 at the LFF and still going strong…

Monday 11 January saw another series of extremely stimulating discussions at the Beyond Distance online Learning Futures Festival (Registration still open for late adopters who haven’t got on board yet!) We were privileged to have Professor Ian Jamieson, recently retired VC of the University of Bath, and recipient of an OBE in December, as our keynote speaker. He made a heartfelt plea for speeding up the pace of change in the higher education sector, to keep pace with students’ expectations and changing approaches to learning. An interesting side issue for me in this session was the back channel conversation about student satisfaction surveys, and the point that many students express dissatisfaction when they are being challenged or stretched in their studies, but on later reflection may state that exactly those moments were the most transformational for them.

PD Alchemy and Aallyah then led our intrepid Second Life delegates into the virtual Genetics Lab which is being developed by the SWIFT project at Beyond Distance. Unfortunately my avatar (Daffodil Moonwall) had some connectivity problems and so was unable to join in, but according to a couple of cryptic twitter posts, it seems that certain avatars underwent a spontaneous genetic modification during this session. Indeed in the Second Life Campfire session later in the day, Daff noticed that the general level of whackiness of the conversation had reached unprecedented heights – a possible result of whatever experimentation took place earlier in the day?

Returning to the mainstream programme: at noon Alejandro Armellini and Gilly Salmon led a session on “The Carpe Diem journey: designing for learning transformation”. Carpe Diem is the tried and tested workshop process developed by Beyond Distance at Leicester to support academics in using their VLE (virtual learning environment) effectively. Discussion here centred around the ways in which academics had responded to the training, and the transferability of this process to a range of educational contexts.

We were then treated to a fascinating description by Magdalena de Stefani from Uruguay of a blended teacher development project using Moodle for language teachers in provincial and rural areas of her country. Magdalena shared with us a dilemma she faced in terms of whether to view her students as “customers”, with the concomitant notion that “the customer is always right”. She felt that she had perhaps been too “respectful” of her students in this regard, thereby depriving them of some potentially transformational challenges. (This resonated nicely with the issues arising during the keynote address.)

Shiv Rajendran, a co-founder of languagelab.com, stayed within the theme of English language teaching by sharing his experiences in the use of Second Life as an EFL teaching environment. (See Shiv’s blog here.) The trigger for the establishment of languagelab.com in Second Life was Shiv’s online meeting with a German who could not speak a word of English, but learnt sufficient English within two weeks to be able to participate in online games. How did he do it? By playing online games… Some discussion ensued in the session about whether Second Life is a game or not (Daffodil thinks not, but that’s for another blog post), and this conversation continued almost seamlessly around the campfire in Second Life a couple of hours later.

Alan Cann then led a thought-provoking session on Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) and lifelong learning. He described how he and colleagues had taught students to use some basic Web 2.0 tools such as citeulike and delicious for social bookmarking, as well as Google docs for collaborative writing. This fitted in nicely with Stephen Downes’ Sunday keynote on pedagogical foundations for personal learning and Kathreen Riel and Tami Saj’s presentation, Survive and Thrive in a Social Media Workplace – as well as giving us another opportunity to use the great term coined by Matt Mobbs – the “Social Media Brain“.

The final session of the day was about learning support for mobile learning by Beyond Distance’s Samuel Nikoi and Palitha Edirisingha, with reference to the WOLF project. Sahm made sure we ended the day with a bang, culminating his presentation with a rousing call for 24/7 mobile learning support for learners.

Elluminate recordings of all the sessions are currently available to conference delegates in the conference environment (as mentioned earlier – it’s not too late to enrol!) and selected recordings will shortly also be available in the public domain.

Finally, thanks to our conference delegates who have been blogging about the festival:

Ignatia Webs – on Phil Candy’s keynote address last Friday (“Any Useful Statement about the Future Should At First Appear Ridiculous”: Discuss): http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2010/01/lff10-phil-candy-concentrating-on.html, and on Nick Short’s presentation (“Androids in Africa”) http://ignatiawebs.blogspot.com/2010/01/lff10-androids-in-africa-by-nick-short.html

Brendan’s blog on his journey through the labyrinthine google-opoly task: http://malleablemusings.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/google-opoly-at-lff10/

And mickelous who mentions the LFF in his post about Technology in the snow.

Last but not least, thanks to suchprettyeyes for creating a twapperkeeper archive of the tweets: http://twapperkeeper.com/lff10/

Please do post comments here or tweet to let us know if you have blogged about the Festival

By Gabi Witthaus, 12 Jan 2010

Learning Futures Festival (LFF) 2010 on Sunday the 10th

Yesterday (10th Jan) was the fourth day of the Beyond Distance’s Learning Futures Festival.

Delegates joined the conference via a mixture of modes: in Second Life, on-line on Ellumiante and via the conference website.

The keynote speech and other presentations were delivered from different geographical locations reflecting the truly international flavour of the LFF 2010. Dr Stephen Downes who delivered the keynote came online from his hotel room in Las Vegas (at 5am!).

About forty participants joined the keynote session from around the world: from Sao Paulo (Brazil); Victoria, British Columbia; Denmark, Connecticut, Egypt, South Africa, and of course many parts of England where snow was in some cases gradually melting! (Leicester, Bath, Kent, Welingborough, London). This was a satisfactory number of participants for a session on a Sunday, especially including the international delegates.

The keynote was very engaging and interactive, in a very relaxed atmosphere on Elluminate. Stephen joined Elluminate’s live seminar room half an hour before the session, and participants had a chance to introduce themselves to Stephen and to each other before the keynote started.

In his keynote, Stephen argued that recent developments in educational technology have centred round the concept of personal learning environments (PLEs). He considered PLEs as a replacement for virtual learning environments (VLEs). PLEs focus on the individual learners while VLEs focus on the class or the institution. He stressed the need to examine the pedagogy in personal learning. The key questions for teachers were: how are we to understand learning outcomes, shared understandings, or social construction of meaning and understandings?

Stephen argued that a shift form VLE to PLE is not only a shift in technology but also a shift in how we view learning itself. A PLE is a software environment where we can manage our connections online. A recording of his keynote will be available at the conference website.

In the afternoon participants listened to Rod Angood’s presentation entitled’ Baths, Drains and Web 2.0: Why Waste a Perfectly Good Crisis’. His presentation was on building a resilient and cost effective internet service for university students. Questions for Rod included: cost of proving internet access through an optical line, institutional issues of providing 24/7 service, resilient access to internet, and management-related barriers that need to be overcome.

Then, Lucy de Mello from Brazil presented her work on Educommunication. As her session was scheduled for Sunday morning time in Brazil, Luci had recorded her session prior to the conference, but she had enjoyed the earlier live sessions so much so that she wanted to speak live to a live audience! Delegates listened to Luci talking about the use of dialogue in distance education in Brazil. Luci’s work is drawn from several theoretical traditions: cultural studies, mediation theory and communication theory, in addition to recent models from distance education.

Participants had great fun learning in Second Life events in both the morning and afternoon. In the morning, newbies to Second Life had great fun refining their walking skills (very useful when it snows!); they learned how to see themselves face to face; learned how to attach and detach objects, including recovering lost hair – I wish I could do that in real life too!!. In the late afternoon, participants gathered around the Second Life campfire and discussed their Google-Opoly tasks.

In addition to taking part in live sessions on Elluminate and in Second Life, participants were also busy doing asynchronous activities on the conference website. Googlo-Opoly needs a special mention, as you can see from feedback from the participants:

“Really enjoying the game and can see that it’s helping with tools, but also with more imaginative ways of writing blogs, and with design of e-tivities…”

” “Brilliant use of technology/google etc as a learning tool thanks for all your hard work”

” “Thanks for that, it was fun and challenging”

” “Back from pub lunch to tackle more of my Google-Opoly adventure. Will try to catch up on PLE session at some point too #lff10″ – (from Twitter)”

“ “….Then at 6pm I signed in to Eluminate to do the orientation briefing. Unfortunately I missed most of this as I was cooking dinner at the time and had two screaming children. However I understood that I’d receive an email and a link to a Google Map and would be able to do the session later that night / the following day….”

Someone else had two kids and had to cook in between Google-Opoly, Another delegate had a cold and was happy to be sent to sunnier places on the Google map. Someone else had a sick child at home and was pleased to be able to take part nevertheless.

So … the Learning Futures Festival continues until the 14th of January. Return to this space for more blog entries…

Palitha Edirisingha
11 Jan 2010

Learning Futures Festival Online 2010 (Twitter #LFF10): The mid-way point

I’m writing this blog on Day 5, just over halfway through our Learning Futures Festival Online 2010. I thought it might be  a useful point to note down some initial observations.

Overall, for me, it’s been a novel and fantastic experience. With my techie colleagues Terese, Richard and Emma, the physical Media Zoo has formed a suitable base of operations, with one desk used solely for vital equipment such as chocolate, Wagon Wheels and coffee.

The days have been long and the challenges diverse, but satisfying. For example, a wobbly wireless connection on the first day saw us move quickly into hard-wired mode for presentations. We’ve also been responding to a steady stream of help requests from delegates. Most of all, though, we’ve supported each other by shouting ‘PRESS THE RECORD BUTTON!!’ at the appropriate times.

Thus far, the online conference software provided by our sponsors Elluminate Live! has performed faultlessly, and the excellent suppport of our Elluminate liaison, Sophie, has been much appreciated. All proceedings thus far have been recorded and placed on the festival website (and will be made available to the public in due course).

The festival website, provided by our sponsors All Things in Moderation, has been excellent and under the control of Emma, who has done a great job keeping it fresh and updated. And I’m looking forward to the final day, when 10 ebook vouchers will be given away by our sponsors Routledge: Taylor and Francis (3 in Second Life!).

And, most important of all, the keynotes, papers and workshops have all been of the highest quality: engaged, intelligent, current, practical … I could go on. And our delegates have been fantastically enthused.

Considering our delegates and speakers are based all over the world, I’m very much a convert to this sort of conference. (Read Gilly’s blog about the environmental benefits.)

As long as we don’t suffer the trauma of the first day, when the supply of biscuits reached dangerously low levels, the final four days of the festival should be as good as if not better than the first four.

Simon Kear

Learning Technologist

PS The conference is still open!