It is a week since I attended the Online Educa Berlin conference for the first time. An important aspect of the conference is the trade exhibition but to see all these structured solutions crowded together gives the impression that learning is just a question of the right technical and organisational structure.
Regarding the sessions, you have to accept that you miss most of them because there are so many parallel sessions. Among the keynotes, Prof. Sugata Mitra stands out with his elegant experiements and revolutionary conclusions all delivered with wit and humility. The idea that children can organise their own learning is quite revolutionary especially in these surroundings but certainly deserves a chance to be explored much further. Andrew Keen thinks that Web 2.0 makes it impossible for professional communicators to earn a living and produces untrustworthy content. He may have a point but calling Wikipedia contributors monkeys goes too far. Donald Clark made a very robust and witty rebuttal of Keen as well as knocking the stuffing out of many cherished educational theories such as constructivism and learning styles. One theory which was not put through the mill by Clarke was experience based learning which was lucky as that was the name of the project which I came to Berlin to report on as well as introducing the new project VITAE which will try to incorporate mentoring elements into teacher training.
Second Life was quite a theme at Online Educa and indeed I met two people who I had formerly only known as SL avatars, Helen Keegan who will be a partner in the new VITAE project and who was part of a panel discussing Second Life and Paul Sweeney, Director of Studies at Language Lab there to give a talk about Language Lab's progress in developing language courses in Second Life. My own session went well but I had to race off shortly after as I had to get to Remagen for the Managing Cultural Diversity weekend.
If Second Life was one running theme then the slow acceptance of ICT in the classroom was another. We are all still feeling our way on that one it seems.
Keywords: Andrew Keen, Donald Clark, Helen Keegan, Language Lab, online educa Berlin, Sugata Mitra, VITAE
Comments
Re Experiential Learning. I'm a fan. We've had adequate evidence from William James through John Dewey to more modern theorists such as Roger Schank, that experiential learning is important. It's tragic that so much eduction and training is so obviously theoretical.
Only one downside on the theory, and that is the Kolb cycle. It's conceptually weak and empirically wrong. Others have shown that experientiallearning is more complex and messy that his cycle suggests - modern memory research and theory is unravelling all of this.
Like your blog