At the kick-off meeting for the VITAE project, our visiting guest, Ewan McIntosh sowed the seed of an unconference and we decided that we should try it out in our next meeting. Before the second meeting in Remagen which was last week, we set up a wiki for people to add their names and topics. Our German hosts were meticulous in their planning and we held the unconference in a restaurant in Bonn one evening where we would have a room to ourselves.
We even decided to record the contributions. However the restaurant had misunderstood our request and a large group of noisy guests were shown into the room. So we had to change the format to deal with the new circumstances and instead of 7 minute contributions from each speaker, we settled on 2 minutes for each speaker and 10 minutes or so for follow up questions and discusssions so that it looked more like a natural conversation. Some participants felt that it was rather late in the day to be exercising the brain but overall I think we felt it was very stimulating.
Topics tackled included:
1. How I am going to tackle the 6 week course on Communication and IT so that students produce digital artifacts and connect with people outside of the classroom.
2. How I use FURL in my daily working life.
3. Are digital tools just a fad?
4.The indispensable tools in my working life.
5. How I organise my studies in a personal wiki
6. Potential for student exercises using mapping tools.
I have a feeling that the format we adopted in the end, short intro with discussion follow-up, will be incorporated into future project meetings and other events, but perhaps without the noisy neighbours!
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Tags: Remagen, Bonn, unconference, euvitae, VITAE
