Emerge will host a Second Life social on the evening of the 27th, so whether you haven't ventured in world yet, or enjoy having an excuse to show off that new outfit, the team will be on hand to help you. Following on from our fashion show and tower building events, there will be a new challenge for your avatars to get their digital teeth into.

Friday 28th will open with what promises to be a lively and heated debate, and continuing our focus on the relationship between innovation and institutional provision will be on The Future of the VLE.

Please make sure you have the 27th and 28th of November marked out in your diaries now. Registration information and further details to follow.

This years ALT-C Edublogger meetup will be taking place after the Emerge reception & dinner, in it's usual slot on Tuesday night. Really excitingly, it's taking part in this years fringe event - the first (and maybe only?) ever F-ALT: 

http://f-alt.wetpaint.com/

F-ALT is the seriously fun & participant led alternative to more traditionally  formatted conference session, and, taking a lead from last years slam session, we're planning on fast, furious and focused discussions around a range of hot topics, including e-portfolios and edupunk. 

Do you have a topic everyone can get their teeth into? Or an ingenious award idea? Or maybe you have a cunning point about Second Life you are able to deliver in under 3 minutes. F-ALT is the fringe event for you! 

The session was very lively, thought provoking and funny. People who had submitted pictures and were present talked through what they were trying to get at. Some people adopted orphaned slides and tried to imagine what their creators had been trying to get at, or made up their own versions. There was a fair amount of collective meaning making, and many salutary reminders that meaning is a slippery, uncontrollable beast.

If you'd like to join in, you can go do so now with our special extended SlideShare version. All the slides are up, accompanied by snippets from the sessions text chat.  Go along, and add your own thoughts or impressions to one (or more!) of the pictures. 

If one of the pictures is yours, I'll be asking you to send me further details for posting next week (once everyone has had a chance to peruse the images and leave comments). I'll be asking for a sentence of what the picture is of (& how it was made, if that's relevant) and info about what you were trying to represent.   

To me, the session really represented the strengths of our serious fun ethos - using an innovative approach to reflective practice to scratch well past the surface of users experiences. Enjoy! 

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It's great to see that microblogging is being integrated into our next conference - and also right here on site!

Microblogging and mobile site Twitter is one of the platforms that's being used in our forthcoming conference, Exploring User 2.0: the shape of the future user. If you haven't previously used Twitter, support is on it's way from Anne Jeffery and Andy Ramsden who will be leading on the conferences microblogging related activities. If you do already have an account - why not friend Emerge over there? 

I ran a session on day two of our last conference (Digital Communities, Digital Identities) on Microblogging, Lifestreaming and Presence (slides are available here, audio is available from the Moodle course site), so I'm delighted to see this being taken forward. You can also get some information on microblogging from my report on Young People and Social Networking Services (plenty in there of use to older people too) - microblogging is covered within What are Social Networking Services? although only the summary version is posted to site. To get hold of the full version with complete references, you can download the full chapter version (pdf) or download the entire document (pdf).  Check out the ideas section too, for links and examples of how people are using microblogging for formal and informal learning.

You can also use your Twitter posts onsite. Once you have an account its easy - just make sure you're logged in here, and click through account settings. Scroll down the page and insert your Twitter username and password, and then hit the save button at the bottom of the page. Your latest update will now automagically appear in your sidebar!

The conference programme has been posted to it's very own Moodle course, so you can head over and take a look at what's promising to be another great online conference. This one is being led by Emerge support team members Isobel Falconer and Chris Fowler, and the social event is again being led by Steven Warburton.  

Those of you who attended our last event will know how useful (and how much fun :) ) these can be. All of our events play a key role in bringing the community together to share and discuss both their projects' work and the wider interests, concerns and knowledge of each of our individual members. All of the projects need to attend events, or send at least a couple of delegates who can report back to their colleagues. If you haven't signed up yet then do head over to the registration page. 

I'm really excited about this months online conference and looking forward to seeing all of the projects at this weeks warm up session Thursday June 5, 12.30 - 14.00. Please do make sure that your project is represented and let us know if you aren't able to send any one along. Have all of your team signed up for the online conference yet? If you still have anyone who hasn't, make sure you send them over to the signup page. 

I want to give a big congratulations to the new benefits realisations projects that have just been announced too - I'm very excited to see the outputs from ARGOSI, Flourish (no onsite community page as of yet, so I'm linking to Sarah Chesney's page for now), PREVIEW (link goes to Maggi Savin-Baden's page for now), Sounds Good and EXTEND (link to Frances Bell). I'm looking forward to seeing these projects all making their presence felt on site :)

While I'm in round up mood, also a reminder that its easy and important to make sure your personal profile page and project home pages are good looking and informative. Using widgets, running RSS feeds, putting up project photos - or even video and audio - is a snap. If you can still hear the wind whistling through your pages check out the Using Community Space Worksheet in the tutorials file store - scroll down, it's the last one in there at the moment. We'll also be producing some new handy how-to guides soon. 

In addition, we'll be running a lunch time seminar on Thursday June 5, 12.30 - 14.00. Chaired by the ever lovely Graham Attwell and co-piloted by the just as lovely Isobel Falconer the drop in session will be held in Emerge's Elluminate platform (log in nearer the time using your Emerge username and password for room access). No - our lunches don't usually stretch that long either - but there are two great reasons why you should block out your diary:

Firstly, from 12.30 - 13.15 Graham and Isobel will be leading a discussion session which tackles issues around our June conference and the event to be held in the autumn. We will be focusing on user experience and benefits realisation, so if you've any interest in either of these, then please come along. We'll also be asking about evaluative practices and swapping notes and ideas. If you've never used the platform before, this is an ideal opportunity to try it out - tech support will be on hand and we'll aim to get everyone up an running super fast. 

Secondly, the 13.15 - 14.00 slot will be for projects taking an active role in the June event. If your team didn't present last time round - then you should be planning on taking up a short slot. Participating is a great way of sharing your stories and hard earned wisdom with the community and also in evidencing some of the team days all of our funded projects have agreed to. This session will be to become more confident with the platform, discuss opportunities for formats, and to plan slots. 

So, those diary dates in full:

June 5: 12.30 - 14.00, conference warm-up & discussion

June 23-25 Exploring User 2.0, Emerge online conference  

 (& not forgetting the Emerge Evolve project launch, this Friday, May 30 17.00 GMT)