I often reflect at these events (probably because I’m away from work) and this time was no different.   I’ve been to many e-learning type conferences over the years, NILTA, FERL. ACL and all sorts of other ones and I really see a change in how we both perceive e-learning and how far its come within the last 5 years in FE. The early events I attended were always about staff training, and how to engage senior management and what equipment to buy.  Now it’s about learning spaces both online and offline within classrooms, new builds, collaboration, the learners voice, blogging, podcasts, streaming media, and lots more exciting stuff, this is much more stimulating than which VLE to purchase and why. 

This is an exciting time to be in FE, with so many college’s around the country re-building incorporating wireless technology and innovative new learning spaces.  And e-learning is rapidly moving to the forefront of everybody’s minds, who would have ever expected a debate 10 years ago about taking the ‘e’ out of e-learning, perhaps only a few forward thinking individuals, not a general debate within the sector.  This only really hit me recently because I was chatting to some of the other managers here at the college, and they were talking about e-learning and I suddenly felt threatened, I thought, ‘Hey, e-learning is mine, I should have been told about this!  It wasn’t till later I realised the magnitude of what had happened, finally, (and I’ve been striving for it for years) finally, other people in my college are not only interested in e-learning but see the amazing benefits of it.   I always thought when this finally happened I’d be out of a job, but in reality, with the technology changing so rapidly, e-learning technologists will have employment for quite some time to come, at least until the current crop of lecturers have retired and they are all replaced by digital learners….

When I think back to how I started teaching staff, thinking they would be able to go away and do what I’d showed them, it was a very didactic style of teaching.  Although we’re trying to move away from this with our students, I thought our teachers would prefer a more traditional style of learning and be happier with it.  How wrong I was, they like the hands on style as much as anyone.   It’s nice to reflect back on that though, it’s good to see my style of teaching improve and not remain static.  In this changing world of digital natives and digital immigrants, if we as teachers stand still, we loose them! 

The training has been extremely popular, so much so, we’ve been turning staff away because the sessions were fully booked, to this end, I’ve added 5 extra sessions over Easter, intensive training where all four sessions can be done in one day.  These are pretty much all full now too.

I’m attending the next business results meeting and will have to feed this info back to the senior management team. I’m sure this won’t be enough though, even though we only went live with Moodle in September 06 so it’s only been 6 months but already we’ve moved soooo far and yet, I anticipate a roasting, perhaps I’ll be pleasantly surprised and they’ll be very pleased and supportive.

Watch this space...

After listening to Donald Clark, and watching a couple of videos with a fairly engaging presentation on the new excellence portal, I trotted along to the breakout session to find a stack of papers on my chair, with the print-outs of a really dull presentation, filled with text and bullet points.  My heart sank, from feeling inspired and (dare I say it) entertained, back to reality of boring bullet-points and paperwork.  Thing is, I’m at a bit of a loss at this point.  Should I be expecting engaging, exciting sessions?  Yes I suppose I should if it’s NILTA, but some new legislation or new government initiatives would be pretty difficult to ‘jazz up’ and make engaging.  Isn’t this is the argument some teachers use when they don’t want to adopt technology in their teaching, ‘I’ve been doing it this way for x amount of years, this is how we do it’.  I feel I’m being slightly contradictory and I don’t know what the ‘holy grail’ is, blended learning approach is the usual answer.  At least that’s what I usually tell people.

I’m feeling very slightly negative about this conference, I used to go each year but stopped going, but I couldn’t remember why.

Sitting there today, made me remember!  Seeping memories creeping back into my consciousness of previous conferences.

I have to say, some of the breakout sessions have been excellent, the keynote speakers from this morning were very good, particularly Nigel Paine so I’ve got quite a lot out of it already.  BUT, this afternoon keynote speakers were fairly dull, as were the links between them, perhaps it was the mid afternoon slump, but there are two major thoughts coming out of this conference for me.

The first:

A lot of the organisers and speakers have all known each other for years apparently, they’ve all worked together in different organisations, created national policy together, worked in various working groups etc and I recognise they are inovators and have made a huge difference to the sector.  But, lots of informal chatting goes on during the conference, it can actually be quite alienating.  And I’d forgotten all about this until I sat there today but that’s how I felt the last few conferences I’d attended.  And if these people have all worked together for so long, where are the newbie’s?  Where are the innovative teachers and College managers who have stories to share and could be working for organisations like AoC NILTA.  These guys sharing stories of how long they’ve worked together, is not particularly inspiring to new attendees, at least not to me anyway, it makes me feel somewhat estranged from the conference.

The second:

This conference is all about e-learning, interactivity, personalised learning spaces, and yet some of the speakers deliver speeches from written scripts with nothing else.  How can we be promoting e-learning within the sector and beyond with someone standing reading a speech!  For me, it misses the point of the whole conference, which is called ‘e-volution: the future of learning and we’re going backwards.  When we teach our students, we don’t read to them, (they’d crucify us) we find ways to entice them into the subject matter, we enthuse them using technology and activities.

Anyway, will put another entry in tomorrow, perhaps the next day will be different.