The PLE Conference 2011 in Southampton

The second conference on Personal Learning Environments (PLE), The PLE Confrence 2011, was held from 11-13  July 2011 at the University of Southampton, UK. The first PLE conference was last year in Barcelona.
For this year's conference I had an accepted abstract which unfortunately I couldn't make it to attend and I missed this opportunity.  Nevertheless, I followed it online both from Live-casting of the keynotes and sessions, and from twitter stream: #PLE_SOU.
 Paulo Simoes has aggregated all resources and presentations again here as he did in Ed-Media11. Here is the link: http://www.scoop.it/t/the-ple/

Ed-Media Conference 2011 in Lisbon!

From June 28th to July 1st I attended ED-Media Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. It was a great event to meet people working in the area of my research especially keynotes: Alec Couros, George Siemens, Erik Duval, Martin Weller and some other scholars talking about the impact of emerging and networking technologies on our today’s teaching and learning practices and how open and networked learning is important in the current era of openness and connectedness.   

Alec Couros’ keynote was about " Why Networked Learning Matters". I haven’t met him personally but, I’ve been in one of his open courses already last year which was inspiring and I liked it. From that and some other (massive) open online courses by George Siemens and Stephen Downes I became more interested in this area and shifted my research focus more into open and networked learning. We met shortly in Ed-Media11 but we couldn’t manage to have a conversation though. Maybe some other time….

Academic Learning & Collaboration & Learning

View more presentations from Alec Couros

Erik Duval was presenting about “The Importance of Being Open”. I met him also in the TEL Summer School in June in Crete where he also presented something about learning analytics and the importance of ‘attention’.

On the importance of being open

View more presentations from Erik Duval

There was a keynote debate about the importance of digital scholarship and how emerging technologies will transform our education and scholarship in the near future? The debtors were Martin Weller (for): "This house believes that in the next decade, digital scholarship (in open journals, blogs, and social media) will achieve the same status in academic settings as traditional scholarship" and Antonio Dias de Figueiredo (against), and George Siemens ( moderator). 

Digital scholarship debate

View another webinar from Martin Weller

Digital Scholarship Debate (ED-MEDIA 2011)

View more presentations from Antonio Dias de Figueiredo

The last day keynote was by Andrew Law from the Open University ( UK) about "Bringing Social Into Learning By Open Media".   

Bringing the Social into Learning with Open Media

View more presentations from SocialLearn, Open U

I also enjoyed the “Graduate Student Program” which included different sessions and presentations covering various topics from theoretical perspectives in research to methodological choices, practical issues to be successful in research and how to publish.
The whole conference and especially the keynotes were useful for me to develop my dissertation research and to get networking with more people in this area.  

There were quite many social and sharing activities online by participants in different platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare etc.  But, tweeting was number one favorable online interaction (as in many academic events).  According to the social media team of the conference there were about 3745 tweets by Hashtag #edmedia11. Here is the statistic of the tweets.
  
Here are all resources and URLs related to Ed-Media 11 collected by Paulo Simoes in Scoop.it. http://www.scoop.it/t/edmedia-2011  

Participants of the "Graduate Student Program"