How to attend a conference!

Stephen Downes recently published a post in his blog about: How to Get the Most out of a Conference.
Based on his experiences and reflections from many conferences, he is providing some general technical and practical guidelines from finding a good conferences, preparing a submission, traveling, presenting and networking in conferences, preparing your talk and following the activities after the conference.  It’s really a good source to take a look at and get something out of it.
He has also referred to Clayton R. Wright‘s list of educational technology conferences which is normally updated every six months or every year.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011

Since few years ago, the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies @C4LPT conducts a survey on tools and apps for learning and ranks them according to the votes. On 13 November 2011 it published 5th annual survey of learning tools. 

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2011

View more presentations from Jane Hart

As for the past two years, Twitter is number one, then YouTube, Google Docs, Blogging tools, sharing tools and social bookmarking tools. This is quite what I was expecting according to my experience. Especially, Twitter has got its popularity as a connecting and networking tool used very widely in scientific events like conferences and also in online communities to keep following the activities more easily.

The future of learning...

The Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), as part of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), has just published a report about: The Future of Learning: Preparing for Change.

It is a great resource that envisages the future of learning and the fundamental transformation of education and learning which will need new skills and competencies. It illustrates a vision that personalization, collaboration and informalization (informal learning) will be at the core of learning in the future. It emphasizes the potential of technology very crucial in this process.  It is then presenting the persona of the future learners. I found it very interesting and worth reading.

Open Access, Open Content, OER: Towards the future of scholarship and research

This week is the 'Open Access' week, a movement which has started few years ago to raise the importance of openness and free sharing of information and content. This is to highlight the significance and the potential of open/free educational resources in academia in different disciplines from science to humanities and for the global society on the whole. Open/free access promises for more democratic opportunities to “the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – and has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted” (OC page; http://www.openaccessweek.org/).

There are various activities and events this week to promote open access in a global level. Some of them are listed in the page above which is a network dedicated to enhance this movement. Of which there are some webinars by the Athabasca University in Canada that I am following:  October 24, 2011: Fun and Fear in Open Spaces, October 25, 2011: Post Secondary Leadership and the OER Movement , October 26, 2011: Making Sense of Complexity in Open Information Environments , October 27, 2011: Panel on Moving to Open Educational Resources at Athabasca University , October 28, 2011: OER's and Sustainable Innovation: Low Cost, Low Risk but High Impact.

David Wiley , an open educator who has been contributing a lot to the promotion of open content and openness in education had also lately a discussion week on this topic in the #change11 MOOC.

This week of #change11 MOOC is about OER facilitated by Rory McGreal , UNESCO/COL Chair in Open Educational Resources at the Athabasca University.

I found an interesting article of Wiley here in EDUCAUSE Review 2010: Openness as Catalyst for an Educational Reformation  which is worth reading.  It is part of the EDUCAUSE Review V. 45, N.4 on "openness".

Here is David Wiley's talk in TED2010 about open education and the future.

Discussion on Networked Learning: #NLC2012 online 'hot-seats'

This week I have been following and somehow contributing a little bit to the online discussion on networked learning  organized by  #NLC2012 ( networked learning conference 2012). There is a series of online discussions prior to the conference facilitated by some researchers and thinkers in the area of networked learning in this Ning group.

Various topics related to networked learning will be covered in theses hotseats by some key persons in networked learning and distance education like Peter Goodyear, David McConnell, Terry Anderson and Lone Dirckinck-Holmfeld.

There will be seven weeks total, each week on a topic hosted and facilitated by some people, started already on Oct.10th continued until March 2012 before the conference on April 2-4. The schedule, topics and the hosts are available in the group page. It is all free and everybody interested can join the discussion and all contents will be free and available in the Ning page.

This week the hotseat was with Peter Goodyear , one of first contributors and developers of networked learning, about the definition of the term, some key foundations, examples of leaning networks and researching the architecture of productive learning networks.  There was a good discussion on these topics and so far there were about 140 threads in the discussion. The main topic of the discussion perhaps was about the definition of the term  and what is meant by 'networked learning', also what are the main components of networked learning? How can we research on networked learning and what are the examples of networked learning practices.
Goodyear put some key variations of the definition of the term as follow:

• learning in which C&IT is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources
• learning that involves people collaborating with the help of networked technologies in a shared enterprise of knowledge creation
• learning and teaching carried out largely via the Internet/Web which emphasizes collaborative and cooperative learning, learning through dialogue and group work together with interaction with online materials, and collaborative knowledge production
• learning and teaching carried out largely via the Internet/Web which emphasizes dialogical learning, collaborative and cooperative learning, group work, interaction with on-line materials, and knowledge production
• the use of Internet-based information and communication technologies to promote collaborative and co-operative connections: between one learner and other learners; between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources, so that participants can extend and develop their understanding and capabilities in ways that are important to them, and over which they have significant control

For me it has a been a question that could we define networked learning without relating it to technology as it was also discussed there, and  is networked learning equal just to learning in networks 'learning networks'? Or the other way around that learning networks are part of the networked learning? I think the latter! In my opinion, creating and developing connections is the main feature of networked learning which is connection between learner and other people, learner and resources and of course learner and communities and networks.

In one discussion thread McConnell introduced this book to come: Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning, Dirckinck-Holmfeld, Lone; Hodgson, Vivien; McConnell , 2011, Springer

Open, Digital, Networked: The scholarship in the 21st century!

Image: http://tinyurl.com/338dja

#Change11 MOOC ( open online course) keeps going well with good discussions and facilitators each week but for me it’s an unfortunate, due to being very busy with my research, that I cannot participate in the activities and in many live sessions. However, I am trying to follow the weekly activities at least on Twitter, Facebook Group and live session as much as I can.

The week three of the course was with Martin Weller from the Open University UK about “Digital Scholarship”.  (Here is the recording of the session).

He has been researching and talking on this topic for years and recently he has published a book on it entitles: The Digital Scholar: how technology is transforming scholarly practices  

The argument is that how new emerging digital technologies have enabled us to form a kind of scholarship (learning, teaching, collaborating, creating contents, sharing …) which is open, digital and networked. I really like these three words: open, digital, networked. In my research I am also investigating open, digital and networked learning. That’s the reason this kind of learning and scholarship is my personal and professional convictions!  

Although, there is a debate on this that how these technologies have changed or could transform our academic practices and traditional teaching-studying-learning processes? How their impact on our today’s scholarship is really feasible? It was also debate on digital and traditional scholarship between Weller and Antonio Dias de Figueiredo in Ed-Media 2012 conference in Lisbon.  

Here in his blog Weller talks about how digital scholarship can also change the way we do research or at least has the potential to alter the way we conduct research and to add some new tools to the toolbox.

Starting the academic year with two open courses!

I have been busy with some work on my research and data analysis in the summer and I haven't written something since July. However, I am not regularly blogging but I try to keep writing from time to time!

I am starting this fall with the open online courses (MOOCs) I am interested in following if not actively participating. I have been participating in some Moocs already and I don't think I have time in this very busy moments of my research to spend in MOOCs in spite of my willingness though.

Following the previous open courses by George Siemens, Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier, they have been planning after #CCK11 to offer a new course as an inclusive of all #MOOCs to discuss various issues relating to open and digital scholarship, networked learning, open education, PLE, and all stuff that has been covered in other courses. So, they came up with  #change11 MOOC; Change: Education, Learning and Technology to discuss all those important issues and to answer some crucial questions also about the future of education  as posed in the course page:
"- How does learning change when formal boundaries are reduced? 
- What is the future of learning? 
- What role with educators play in this future? 
- What types of institutions does society need to respond to hyper-growth of knowledge and rapid dissemination of information? 
- How do the roles of learners and educators change when knowledge is ubiquitous?" 

This is a 36-week course starting this week and lasts until May 2012. Each week with an innovative educator, researcher or scholar from different countries to discuss all of the above issues of present and future learning and create a global understanding and learning experience.  Here is the course schedule with the list of the topics and speakers.


Another open course is EC&I 831: Social Media & Open Education , #eci831, offered by Alec Couros from the University of Regina, Canada starting this week and lasts until December. I have attended last year this course and I liked the whole learning experience and interaction,s and I am going to take part again as much as my time allows . Especially because Alec is an inspiring open educator and creates such motivating learning environments in his courses.

The structure of these MOOCs are almost the same, distributed across the web, using various tools and platforms by the participants to collaborate, communicate and create learning reflections and artifacts in different forms on blogs, wikis, FB, twitter etc. augmented by a number of live weekly sessions which bring together people to discuss their ideas and negotiate different topics of interest which all make such a ubiquitous, rich, self-directed learning.

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"

IRRODL Special Issue on Connectivism Published

I have been looking forward to seeing this special issue of IRRODL about connectivism since last year in September when I started participating in PLENK2010. So, it was published last week.

 The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning (IRRODL) is a refereed free e-journal that aims to advance research, theory and best practices of open and distance education.

Below is it the content of this issue however, I am not sure if I can post them here but since it's a free and open access journal there shouldn't be any problem I guess!

IRRODL Vol 12, No 3 (2011): Special Issue - Connectivism: Design and Delivery of Social Networked Learning

Editorial: George Siemens, Grainne Conole
Articles:

Interconnecting networks of practice for professional learning
Julie Mackey, Terry Evans

The challenges to connectivist learning on open online networks: Learning experiences during a massive open online course
Rita Kop

Emergent learning and learning ecologies in Web 2.0
Roy Williams, Regina Karousou, Jenny Mackness

EduCamp Colombia: Social networked learning for teacher training
Diego Ernesto Leal Fonseca

Three generations of distance education pedagogy
Terry Anderson, Jon Dron

Connectivism: Its place in theory-informed research and innovation in technology-enabled learning
Frances Bell

Frameworks for understanding the nature of interactions, networking, and community in a social networking site for academic practice
Grainne Conole, Rebecca Galley, Juliette Culver

Dialogue and connectivism: A new approach to understanding and promoting dialogue-rich networked learning
Andrew Ravenscroft

Proposing an integrated research framework for connectivism: Utilising theoretical synergies
Bopelo Boitshwarelo

My plan for conferences this year!

 This year I am planning to participate in one (or two) of the following conferences.

- ED-MEDIA 2011;World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, June 27-July 1, 2011 in Lisbon, Portugal. Deadline for submission is April 12th. We will have a paper with my colleagues about blended learning and using wikis in higher education. Two keynotes of the conference : Alec Couros  and Erik Duval  will be speaking about interesting topics of today's learning; openness and networked learning. This conference I will attend for sure and looking froward to seeing Alec and Erik and other keynote speakers' contributions. There will be a doctoral consortium in this conference which I am interested to attend.

But between the two conferences below, I may attend just one . I'd like to participate in both but it depends on the situation then!  I am now preparing my proposals for both of them which is focused on self-directed learning, personalization of learning and personal learning environments.

- 6th European Conference on Technology- Enhanced Learning  ( EC-TEL 2011), 21-23 September 2011 in Palermo Italy. Proposal deadline is April 4th. The conference theme for this year is " Towards Ubiquitous Learning" with two keynotes talking about issues related to emerging technologies and ubiquitous learning.. There will be some workshops and also a doctoral consortium in the conference.


        - PLE Conference , conference on Personal Learning Environments (PLE), 11-13 July 2011, Southampton, UK. Deadline for submission is now extended until April10th. This conference is a good venue for my research and good themes related to PLE where I can also meet some researchers in this area.

Interviewing the MOOC's participants

In this spring I conducted some online interviews with the participants of two open online courses as part of my thesis data. The interviewees varied in professional background and their extent of participation in open online courses. While they were all good users of social media and web 2.0 tools, the way and purposes they incorporated those tools in their professional activities and educational and learning practices were different. Most of them have been participating in more than two (M)OOCs with different level of engagement. In each course the level of activities and the requirements for participation however were also varied. In one course, which two interviewees came from, there was a need for more active participation and preparing some reflections and final digital and online projects which required more involvement in use of tools and technology to fulfil the requirement.   
I did interviews on Skype, GTalk and one by phone and I used some online tools like Pamela for recording.

The whole process of interviewing was challenging though; for arranging practical preparation and technical resources but, also inspiring to go through participants’ experiences and perceptions of such open online environments and their interactions with resources and people from different parts of the world, using many forms of technologies and tools in the process of learning and collaboration.