MOOCs in Scandinavia Conference at Karolinska Institute

The international conference on MOOCs in Scandinavia organized by Karolinska Institute, Chalmers University of Technology, Lund University, Uppsala University and Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) took place from 11 to 12 June 2015 at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. I presented a poster about my PhD research on learning ecology in connectivist MOOCs.

It was great to meet some old friends there, also make new friends for future research collaboration. As we had already planned, I met with #ONL151 course team (https://opennetworkedlearning.wordpress.com/ ) and discussed our possible research collaboration. M. Kvarnström, M. Hedberg, E. Ossiannilsson, L. Åbjörnsson, A. Creelman & L. Uhlin presented their work on ONL course:  From awareness to participation - student engagement in an online environmen.

Gerhard Fischer and George Siemens were two keynote speakers from outside Scandinavia who discussed the past, current and future of MOOCs. Here is Siemens' presentation slides: MOOCs & Learning Sciences: Where we were. Where we are going?

I had a chance to talk with George Siemens about my research and he kindly provided some useful comments and issues in research on MOOCs especially connectivist MOOCs. One of the relevant theoretical framework in research on online learning environments that George mentioned  is "Community of Inquiry" developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer. I knew about it but didn't pay too much attention to use it in my research on connectivist MOOCs. Now, after reviewing more thoroughly the literature and research on CoI, I am very interested in applying this framework to my research on community engagement in cMOOCs.

Conference twitter hashtag: #ScMc15

EC-TEL 2014 doctoral consortium in Graz, Austria

As I mentioned earlier, it has always been a privilege to be involved in TEL community (EATEL, JTELSS) and I try to participate in the events organized by them. Great researchers and experts from across Europe and the rest of the world are coming together to make constructive discussions and conversations around TEL topics which provide great support especially to doctoral students and researchers in TEL. 

Continuing from TEL summer school in Malta, I planned to attend the doctoral consortium of 9th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2014) 16-19 September 2014 in Graz, Austria. I submitted my doctoral research project to the consortium to be reviewed by expert reviewers and other doctoral student fellows. I was quite surprised by the review results I received on my proposal both the number of people who have reviewed my manuscript (ten reviewers!) and the quality of comments and feedback they provided. In addition to the reviews of the proposal, we (six doctoral students) presented at the doctoral consortium and received more feedback from the senior researchers and professors present at the conference. I should thank professor Mike Sharples from the Open University UK for his valuable and really constructive comments he provided both in the review process and during my presentation. 

Keynoter Etienne Wenger elaborated on the latest development of social learning theory in regards to open learning and teaching which was the theme of the conference. 

#ectel2014

TEL summer school in Malta

This year in late spring, I had a chance to once gain attend the 10th European Summer School on Technology Enhanced learning held from 27 April to 2 May in Malta. 

It was great that I could participate this year after three years (last time was in Crete, Greece, 2011) to meet friends from previous summer school and making news friends. Since I joined TEL community through EATEL and took part in this summer school, I like it and I enjoy networking, interactions and friendship in this community. 

There were different lectures and workshops which I enjoyed amongst them:  from PLE to MOOC by Denis Gillet and  Basics of paper writing and publishing in TEL by Michael Derntl and colleagues. 

I also enjoyed a lot the excursions organized  by #JTELSS14 committee in Malta and Seabank resort which was a very nice place. 

ICL 2012 Conference

 

From 26 to 28 September, I attended 15th int. conference on Interactive Collaborative Learning  (#ICL2012) in Villach, Austria. I presented a paper about content aggregation in a PLE and serendipity in online networks. Here are my presentation slides on Slideshare: 

ICL 2012 from Mohsen Saadatmand

I enjoyed Steve Wheeler’s keynote and here are the slides:

Learning 3.0 and the Smart eXtended Web from Steve Wheeler

The conference program is available here and the proceedings will be available in IEEE Explore 

NLC2012 "Networked Learning Conference" 2-4 April in Maastricht

Last week 2-4 April, I attended the Networked Learning Conference (NLC2012) in Maastricht Netherlands. I presented my PhD research in Doctoral Consortium in the first day of the conference.  Doctoral consortium was organized in two groups of 7-10 doctoral students presenting their research and four mentors in each group followed by one-to-one personal mentoring session. The mentors were Terry Anderson, Peter Goodyear, Grainne Conole, Maarten de Laat, Chris Jones, Jon Dron, Peter Sloep, Riina Vuorikari and Judi Marshall.
Grainne Conole has summarized some of the students’ research in her blog. 

In main conference, I also presented a paper about the learning ecology in open and networked environments which was the results of a preliminary analysis of my PhD dissertation research.

Networked Learning Conference 2012

View more PowerPoint from Mohsen Saadatmand

The conference was well organized and I enjoyed informal interactions and social gatherings.I met and talked with many people in the area of learning technologies, technology enhanced learning and networked learning, some of them whose work I am following.  

Terry Anderson and Jon Dron presented a really interesting keynote in a funny way:

The final panel discussion was facilitated by David McConnell with Etienne Wenger, Terry Anderson, John Dron, Peter Goodyear, Tara Fenwick, Judi Marshall.

Here is the conference abstracts. 

The conference Twitter hashtag: #NLC2012. 

Prior to the NLC 2012 there was a series of online ‘Hot-Seat discussions’ hosted by some of the leading thinkers in the field. Here is the link to the Ning Page for the hot seats.

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.

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"

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.

Global Education Conference ( free & online)

Last week from 15 - 19 Nov. 2010, the "2010 Global Education Conference" was held online and free! It was  totally an online conference and all sessions were presented on Elluminate platform. I participated in some sessions ( as many as my schedule allowed me) which I enjoyed some of them.

I personally like the idea of having such a worldwide online conference which brings all interested people from all over the world together in such an online environment to discuss about global education issues. The organizers explained the conference "collaborative and world-wide community effort to significantly increase opportunities for globally-connecting education activities. Our goal is to help you make connections with other educators and students, and for this reason the conference is very inclusive and also is provides broad opportunities for participating and presenting."

 It was free and just on your desktop to join and no travel or money were needed! With the fact that it is not easy to organize such a big online conference but, in my opinion, it was well-organized  with good moderators and all sessions were on time except few which presenters didn't show up!

All presentations were recorded which are available here.

Here is the  "The Global Education Collaborative",  the official social network of the Global Education Conference if anybody interested in joining the network.

AECT Conference 2010 in Anaheim, California

In late October ( 25-30) I attended AECT "Association for Educational Communications and Technology" conference in Anaheim, California, US. 

This year's conference theme was:  Cyber Change: Learning in Our Connected World. It was very related to what I am researching in my dissertation which is about open and networked learning in a networked world. The conference covered various topics and themes regarding new technology applications in education and learning. 

The conference was very well-organized and I enjoyed the whole programs. It was a great experience for me to develop my professional networking.  In addition to attending some good sessions about researching on social media and web 2.0, social networks, personal learning environments,  learning networks , I  found some people who are working and researching in my area of research whose comments to my research were very helpful.  

There were different types of presentations and very useful workshops of which I really enjoyed the workshop about " using cutting-edge technology to improve qualitative research and evaluation" by Rick West ( Brigham Young University). This presentations was also great: " social leaning linkage model for open network learning environment (ONLE) and PLE" by Chih-Hsiung Tu & Michael Blocher ( Northern Arizona University). 

I also attended a workshop by David Merrill where he was talking about new approaches in instructional design and some principles of instruction "e^3 (effective, efficient, engaging) Instruction."  

   

There were also such good programs for graduate students ( faculty/student mentor program, intern program) which of course, I  would have wished to be in one the them!

AECT is a prominent association for promotion technology in education and learning. It has published some books of which two are more important: Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology  and Educational Technology: A Definition with Commentary. 

It is also publishing several journals including: Educational Technology Research and Development , TechTrends - Linking Research and Practice to Improve Learning, Instructional Science and Quarterly Review of Distance Education. Here is the list of its publications. 

The 2011 AECT international conference 'Celebrate 3.0: Design.Learn.Community' will be in Jacksonville, Florida , on November 8-12.

There are some few photos of  the conference here in my Flickr.