It is 1.00am Wednesday morning and I have just got back to my room from the Wimba sponsored event at Jongleurs, the comedy club. Me and my 5 guests had a great time and the acts were great - tailored I suspect for the 'corporate' audience. There were some slightly uncomfortable moments when the compere took the mickey out of intellectuals, new universities and the last act edged into gender issues areas, but pretty funny and pretty harmless I think.

I have had a most interesting day and feel both motivated and a little frustrated at how far we have to go and some of the great stuff being done elswhere and the progressive, enlightened and can-do attitudes on display. I will spend a little time deciding what I will go to tomorrow (actually later today) before turning in rather than blog on today's sessions but I will list what I went to at least and write more later when I get a chance. First was the opening keynote presentation by Michelle Selinger of Cisco. There was some really interesting stuff here that I want to follow up on. Then:

• Podcasting exercise physiology - enhancing the student experience
• Using informal podcasts to enhance students' collaborative learning
• Measures of learning style in the evaluation of blogs as reflective learning
• Blogs and e-mails: an effective means to understanding the student learning
  experience?
• Blogs, reflective practice and autonomous learning in graphic design
  communication.
• Whose e-learning is it anyway? A case study exploring the boundaries
  between social networks and VLE courses.
• Building bridges: how e-learning can encourage social constructivist
  approaches to teaching
• Social conferencing: moving learning beyond lectures and learning
  management systems

Tomorrow at 9.00am I am torn between "Web 2.0 applications as student-centred tools for portfolio construction: evaluating the fit between the technology and the stakeholders" and "Web 2.0 Slam – ‘Performing’ innovative practice".

I'm afraid I have wimped out a bit on this post but hopefully I will still be able to read my notes tomorrow and try to summarise what I found particularly stimulating and useful today.

I am sitting in my room totally knackered and badly in need of stimulants and a shower. Got to get up for the big dinner tonight and not fall to sleep in the consome.

Another great keynote today - all teachers are rubbish when they start and get to be moderately good after about 20 years; marginal improvements in learning outcomes with smaller class sizes and increased teacher subject knowledge but by far the biggest impact is produced by expert teachers employing formative assessment, aggregating the information/evidence from students and designing linked activities based on the assessement. Assessment for learning rather than 'of' learning outcomes. Focus on measuring outcomes a disaster in terms of ecouraging learning, etc. etc. More, much more. And I am supposed to be blogging!! Trying to isolate different learning styles and individualising teaching is all rubbish. Wrong in principle, unachievable and simply not necessary. Here is a man that knows his mind - Prof Dylan Wilian.

Some great stuff at other sessions today on social networking and use of wikis. Must get it down here soon. Also a very useful and entertaining workshop on implementing web 2.0 for e-portfolios. This used role play. My heart sunk, as usual, but it worked really well, thanks to Susannah Diamond and Andrew Middleton - a class act. All these worth several sides of A4 each.

I am hoping to be able to re-view the keynotes and the presentations and papers I went to via research extracts and slides to benefit from them and report in more detail.

Noticed someone using twitter in Facebook during keynote presentation. Short 1 or 2 sentence notes, each a separate post. I think this, or something like it, is the way to go for immediacy and to get close to real-time posting. Is this what they mean by microblogging? Then the consolidated reflective posts later. Or perhaps that is how I should have been using this blog? I've still got lots to learn.