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• Plymouth eLearning Conference 2010 - The View from OUR Window

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Tags: Education, Online Learning

On Thursday and Friday of last week I was lucky enough to attend the Plymouth eLearning Conference (right here in OURlesson's hometown!) for the first time. The event, which is organised and hosted by the University of Plymouth's Education faculty, a short distance away from our offices, was in its fifth incarnation this year. It is chaired by Steve Wheeler (Blog, Twitter), a notable eLearning Researcher, Technologist and all-round evangelist with a fairly substantial following. This is reflected in the fact that the event's two keynote speakers were Josie Frasier (Blog, Twitter) and Dave White (Blog, Twitter), who are very well respected eLearning practitioners themselves.

The theme of this year's conference was "learning without limits" which encompasses a range of sub-themes and topics, and was mostly centred on the potential of social media and web2.0 applications in education, and addressing potential issues to their adoption and successful use. The two days had a very similar structure – each started with a keynote presentation and featured six strings of parallel sessions running throughout the day, in themed blocks of three half-hour presentation or workshop slots.

Most of the days' sessions and the keynotes were streamed live online, which appeared to attract a fair number of followers. Despite it being hard to quantify this, it was certainly reflected in the online participation in the conference via the Twitter backchannel - the conference gathered a substantial following during the two days and was even mentioned by BECTA as their hash tag of the day (#PeLC10) on the second day. In fact, at the time of writing you can still find most, if not all, of the presentations and shared resources from the day by simply searching for the tag on Twitter and scrolling back through the tweets. 

Given that I believe that video has true potential as an educational resource for the future of learning what proved to be of particular interest to me were two sessions that were delivered on the subject of "Visual Media".

During the first, a team from the University of Galway reported on their successes, as well as the challenges that they faced, in recording lectures and making them available to students. What proved very interesting to hear was that the fear that some lecturers have of students abandoning classes in favour of watching a recorded version at their leisure was somewhat unfounded, at least in their case, as they reported that class numbers had been unaffected and that students actually felt that both the physical lecture itself and the recorded version were more useful if they utilised both.

Covered in one of the other sessions was the use of video as a feedback medium. Again, the positives seemed to outweigh the negatives and students appreciated the depth of feedback available by using recorded content in this way.

Many of the other tools and resources covered were also of interest. For example it was good to hear that a student project in Swansea Metropolitan University had been successful in using a Ning social network as a group learning platform, as Ning has always struck me as a tool with some classroom potential and I have played around with creating my own in the past. Update: Since writing, it has transpired that the free version of Ning is going to be phased out, as reported by James Clay (Blog, Twitter) in this article, where he also discusses some free alternatives.

Saltash.net Secondary School should also get a mention, as they are doing some great things with online tools in their classes, a brief insight into which was presented by one of their Assistant Heads, Dan Roberts (Blog, Twitter). The enthusiasm and aptitude demonstrated by some of the school's pupils was very impressive.

Overall, I found PeLC10 to be a very worthwhile occasion and would thoroughly recommend it to other eLearning practitioners and enthusiasts - a sentiment which I am sure is shared by all who attended. It was a refreshing experience to see first-hand the real enthusiasm and motivation that the attending delegates showed for eLearning.

I certainly plan on attending future events and am confident that it will grow over the coming years to become a real noteworthy date for the diary.

(Pictures are courtesy of Dawn Wheeler from http://www.flickr.com/photos/49162466@N03, used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license)

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