This was a conference opened to everyone, but we knew that our main target audience would be people whose familiarity with technology was not as quite advanced as in the groups and communities some of us move about. Most of them use only a working email and rarely ever consider the web for anything else. That seems to do the trick for them so far, as trainers, mentors and/or policy makers. However, they were (are) also up to trying something else, to see the landscape from another perspective. Isn’t that the greatest driver of learning: to want to?  Willing is what it takes to get us started.

Technology however often plays the trick on us. There were people who struggled to get into the conference room: institutional firewalls, computers that crashed, names with non-standard characters that the system peremptorily refused to accept, people who were continuously directed to the sandbox room, despite the fact they were clicking on the right link… we got a bit of everything! But in the end, through different back channels and with the effort of a silent team, who was working hard in the background, most participants were able to succeed and join us for two days of remote live interaction.

Contemporaneous issues were raised and well represented in practical examples. The educational concerns and wishes are common across countries: how do we engage people to learn differently? How do we innovate and comply with the assessment and outcome “rules”? How can we value, and recognise, work-based learning? How little impact informal learning still has in official recognition of skills and competences. How to change that? What should be the role of the trainer in the 21^st century?…. Many thoughts were added to these questions and many others that arose from the presentations.

The interactions increased as the technology became less of a stranger. The written chat was quite powerful in that sense, and some people were even brave enough to communicate with the speakers and the rest of the audience with audio. By the last two presentations, we had completely forgotten the formalities of the traditional question- answer format and were bouncing questions and comments at each other with enthusiasm. It became a big conversation. Wewent global right there and then, and all of a sudden all barrier (space, time, technology glitches, etc) seemed to ceasse. We were just taking part in a great conversation.

Above all we were just doing what the presenters had inspired us to do: to share, communicate and work together.

I think we can say we all learned something and we all had a bit of fun. It was a meaningful opportunity to power the connection and encourage people to come together, to consider a future which some of us are already part of.

Preparing the Conference

Preparing it was quite time consuming, but also quite interesting at different levels. It was an experience different from the others I have been accustomed to. I have been doing this for years, but usally only take a small role in preparing stuff.  In this sense, it was even a more enriching experience, especially due to the diversity of people I was able to interact with.

It’s incredible how much has to be done beforehand to put an event of this dimension together. But it is equally amazing what a great experience it can also be, even if stress sometimes takes over. The backstage team much be recognized for the amazing supportive work.

A Thank YOU note

I have been receiving a lot of positive feedback about the 2 day conference, from both speakers and attendeed, and people are just amazed about how well it went.

Our newbie moderators did a stupendous job running the sessions with enthusiasm and professionalism. They sounded so natural...as if they had been doing it for year. I guess all it takes is a bit of mutal trust and belief in others, as in themselves. We were there to support them, they were there to try. And they succeded! :-) Thank you so much for the hard work.

Not least important was the "backstage team" - the silent team behind the curtains who provided an amazing support in terms of sound recording and technology support. Thank YOU Joe and Dirk for all the effort.

What can I say? It was truly an inspiring collaborative experienced which brought together people from several countries into one single event. Germany, Austria, the UK, Holland and Greece came together over an ICT bridge to help support this event, which was able to reach out to people from different parts of the world and in different time Zones . Just AWESOME! :-)

We have proved that it's possible to create the network. We just need to guide by example, to be willing to collaborate, and to believe WE can do it!

Now the question is: when's the next one? :-) I feel I can tell : we are ready for it!

GO TEAM!
 

You are invited to attend a session with Dave Cormier! Bring a friend too! ;-)  

When: 3rd November 2008, at 1800 UK Time (check your local time here)

Where: Elluminate (enter here)

Speaker: Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada

Dave will be speaking about his experiences, so far, of the CCK MOOC and touch on the technological platforms being used to support participants, the tensions that exist within the course design and the peer support models that are being embraced. Within this discussion he will interweave some of his perspectives and theories around education and attempt to place the course into the context of other open courses being taught around the world.

More about our guest speaker:

Dave is well known as an innovative thinker, active researcher and practitioner in the field of the technology enhanced learning. His major research interests include the tracking and development of educational technology, the examination of planned and unplanned online communities, and open-source multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs). His most recent work has been the development of the concept of rhizomatic education and the community as curriculum. He is also one of the main discussion leaders on the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - Connectivism and Connected Knowledge (CCK) - with George Siemens and Stephen Downes.

If you didn't have a chance to attend it real time, you can still check the recording.

Your opinion are obviously pertinent and we do care about it. So if you wnat to take this discussion forward please don't hesitate to post your reflections, questions and views in the Evolve Community site, or at least  provide a link to where we can find you (probably your PLE ;-) ) 

And if you are wondering when the next event is - please stay tooned - we will be announcing it shortly here. 

And if you are thinking you would like to host your own session, do get in touch. After all EVOLVE is an open community and we would love to hear from you and to get you on board! ;-)

This Month is about PLEs. Hopefully a lot of food for thought here!!  

This month our guest speaker is Scott Wilson from CETIS UK, who will share some thoughts about Personal Learning Environments

The idea of a PLE (Personal Learning Environments) is that learners can configure different services and tools to develop their own learning environment, bringing together informal learning from the home, the workplace as well as more formal provision by education institutions. The PLE is controlled by the learner and as well as offering an environment for accessing different information and knowledge allows access to web based publishing and other opportunities for creating content and expressing and exchanging ideas. The idea behind the PLE is to harness the power and potential of social software and web 2.0 applications for learning.

The session will take place in September, 22 2008 at 1800 UK time (please check your time here)

We will meet in Elluminate meeting, which you can access here. [ This is an open meeting. Attendee(s) don’t require a password to join, even if requested to do so. Just type your name]

Do share your thoughts and experiences about this theme, and of course tag it (evolvejisc) !

Your contributions are invaluable to keep this community going. We want to learn from you!

The synchronous event will take place in June 20 at 1200 GMT (For other time zones please check here: http://tinyurl.com/4u7fp3 ).

The Venue for the presentation is in Elluminate - http://tinyurl.com/4tcmxh (no password required). Hope to see you there. Bring a friend too! ;-)

Challenge:

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the June topic. See how to get involved here.

And if you still haven’t got your own freefolio spot on the Evolve platform, there is still time to do so. You just need to create an account!

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

If you have any questions, suggestions, problems logging in, etc please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

The day has arrived. It is today! Evolve is being launched toda. YEAH!

Today at around 6pm BST (7pm CEST) Barbara Dieu will keynote our first event, which will take place in Elluminate. She will be presenting on Social Media in Engish Language Teaching, as our monthly  theme is Social software in Schools and Institutions.  

We will also be hosting a topical activity around the monthly themes. See how to get involved here. We would love to hear and learn from your expereinces. 

And don’t forget to get your own freefolio spot. You just need to create an account!

We hope you join us. This is will be a great chance to network, to get to know what other people are doing, and also to share your work and ideas.

See you later! 

Today seems a good day to post, especially because I have decided to take part of one more challenge: this time is twitter and I was wondering if you were interested in twittering or at least checking what it is going on there. The challenge page can be seen here and basically it all comes down to one thing: Twitter fun!

Let me tell you how I got so into twitter. I always start off being very suspicious and quite reluctant about the new fashionable tools to which you get invited almost on a daily basis. Twitter didn’t appeal that much to me at the beginning – I am never an early adopter… it seem to be quite vague and ineffective... to be honest …and so after signing up to one more account I didn’t give it much thought. However, during the preparation of the earth day event it became extremely useful as a way to get to know the other members of the project a little bit better. Along the way I started getting more and more involved in it as people were sharing resources, expressing opinions, talking a little bit more about what they were doing at that exact moment (how it is raining again, and Hurray … the football team scored again! – those little things that make daily life more bearable and also make you wear a smile on your face as you think to yourself…it’s not only me who has all this paper work to take care of!) Nothing like experiencing in context!

Then with diigo offering the possibility to twitter your bookmarks away and igoogle allowing me to add my twitter friends’ feeds to my home page, twitter has become part of my daily wanders in cyberspace. I got convinced about its potential. Finally!

I have linked to so many useful resources my twitter friends have twittered about, I have followed other interesting people who otherwise I would probably not have come across, and I have benefited loads from what other people bother to share. The twitter-land is indeed a GREAT micro-world.

The learning with computers community has recognized that and is now promoting the Microblogging challenge. I hope you can join us! ;-)

We have been busy preparing the last things for the BIG DAY!

So far so good - people are engaging, we are connecting to new and interesting individuals and learning while having fun.

Please check my latest blog post to listen to the pre-activities I have prepared. 

April 22, we will be going live for a 24h webcasthon. I will be webcasting from 0900 - 1100 am through Edtechtalk.

If you want to join us or know of someone that would like to get involved, give us a shout! We will be around. ;-) 

powered by ODEO

Original Audio Source (for downloading and remixing)

Specail Thanks to: Matt Montagne for leading this project, Jason Robertshaw, who put together the terrific audio-promo & Badge for the 24h show; the entire Edtechtalk / eathcast08 team for all the support and enthusiasm, and of course, all the guest students and speakers for their amazing cooperation!

Here is my small contribution.

Now I need YOU to comment on it.

Looking forward to the interaction and the online event!