I am off to ALT-C on Monday and intend to blog what I see there. I would really appreciate your comments so please feel free to tell me what you think of the keynotes, presentations and social activities.

I am writing this in morning coffee break of Tuesday morning. 

Diana Oblinger from Educause talked about today's learners and how they behave differently from a previous generation because of the different experiences they have had read more here  .  She raised issues such as immediacy, social and multi-modal communication, informal learning, choice.  Changed behaviours are not just evident in young people, we are all behaving differently in the digital age - checking email whilst speaking on the phone.  Diana said she was part of the World to the Desktop metaphor whereas our students live in an Alice in Wonderland , multi-user virtual environment.
She also spoke of (Siemens') connectivism and the importance of social connections in knowing - knowledge is in the network.   Also the importance of physical spaces in learning.  Interesting example of participatory game for learning about genetics where students move around the room 'mating' by infrared seeing what difference this makes to DNA.  Students using live data (National Ecological Observatory Network).
Finished by speaking of formal and informal environments - "harmonize space with learning theory"
Speakers introduced themes ( more details here ) of next generation learners, next generation learning, next generation providers, next generation technology, raising questions for delegates to think about them - the idea is that these speakers will follow these themes through the conference and report back at the end.  We'll have to rely on these theme speakers to some extent (as well as ALT-C bloggers - tell us more please) as there about 160 short papers, research papers, worshops, symposiums, posters  and demonstrations - gulp !!!

 

Other blogging ALT-C include Christopher Sessums , Workshop WIKI, Catherine Howell, Josie Fraser, David Sugden Seb Schmoller

Please let me know of others.  I am hoping you can help me improve the account of the conference I'll write for the ALT Newsletter. 

In an interesting session at 11.30 on Tuesday morning, Caroline Walker from University of Sunderland spoke of her use of blogs with education students in two modules to promote academic and digital literacies, and criticality.  The use of blogs was driven by pedagogy and programme objectives, and took account of the students' previous and everyday experiences of reading, writing and criticality.  Students were required to keep a blog, dialogue privately with another person, and critically reflect on their own blogs.  They used a public site but anonymised themselves by use of pseudonyms.  Although there was some initial resistance, the group eventually decided to use the public site (rather than an alternative private space).  Caroline, in answer to a question, compared student use of blogs with previous paper-based journals, and found them to be more immediate and less sanitised than the retrospectively written paper journals (also easier to share with other students).  Another questioner using blogs with pre-service teachers stressed how important the immediacy aspect was to students who could derive support from each other when they wanted it.