This is a really intense conference period both online and offline, both traditional and unconference. It started with the Webheads in Action online conference with its emphasis on language teaching, continued with Learning in the Workplace where I learned a lot about mobile learning and then went virtually 3D with the Second Life conference on Best Practices in Education where I only succeeded in attending one session on the Schome project. Schome is neither school nor home but an attempt to re-design learning literally from scratch.
Then I discovered that the local government area in which I went to school is abandoning the timetable in favour of personalised targets and workgroups across the whole secondary sector in their area. This sounds very exciting as long as it isn't just spin as I have met so often in my years working in the British educational sector. I can see that the locals fear that this is an attempt to sell off school land to the lucrative private housing sector while yet others see diminishing school options for the non-Catholic population.
Back to conferences and the next one was the face to face Reboot in Copenhagen which attracted people internationally. Here I found myself facing really fundamental questions about life, death, work-life balance, how children fit in, new consciousness created by the always-on internet and how to achieve happiness! Others have done a much better job of recording Reboot than I could have done. See for example Ewan McIntosh's running summaries starting here and Stephanie Booth's starting here. My enduring impression is that I am often confronted by arguments that online is not as good as face to face; the implication being that those who operate online are cold-hearted geeky nerds, whereas it is quite obvious from the sessions here at Reboot that those behind Web 2.0 tools and mash-ups are actually intensley caring and social. That's why they develop these types of tools.
Reboot was an unconference in the sense that the programme was fluid (at least at the edges) with anyone being invited to contribute, the sessions were not always in traditional conference format and there was a great deal of back-channelling for example on Jaiku. There were disruptive elements such as the miniature robot Zeppelins flying randomly around the conference hall on Day 2 having been built by participants the night before (see below). And of course it was great to meet up with people known only by their blogs such as Ewan McIntosh and Trine-Maria Kristensen as well as meeting new people such as Fred Oliveira and Delphine Ménard, more of which later.
Back home to another online conference with grand ambitions, The Future of Education, featuring such speakers as Jay Cross and Sugata Mitra. The infrastructure behind this conference with its discussion forums helps us to continue the conversation at our leisure while the recordings are good for those of us not based in the Americas.
And finally there will be another Second Life conference at Edunation Island this time, specifically about the potential of Second Life for language learning. I hope that I will have mastered the technology by then to attend.
Then it is back down to earth to my real life challenges which include devising a mobile English course for my time-pressed colleagues, train the trainer course to teach technical English and staff development sessions on the use of Web 2.0 tools.
Keywords: consultants-e, edunation, future of education, Knowsley Borough Council, reboot, schome, second life, wiaoc
