Learning Technologies – A week later

It seems impossible that seven days have gone by since I was getting packed for Learning Technologies. It’s been something of a whirlwind. As always, I came away exhausted and with a head full of ideas. It was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for a while, and to meet a whole raft of interesting new ones.

Here are the highlights of the event for me.

Tony Buzan – This isn’t the first time I’ve seen him speak, and in all honesty there wasn’t much in the content of his keynote that I hadn’t already heard. But, he is an inspiring speaker with a true passion for his subject that rubs off on everyone.

Seb Schmoller – Introducing himself as someone more normally focused on the learning than the technology, Seb went on to deliver what for me was one of the highlights of the two days. The falling cost of technology, the ubiquity of tools and connections and the increasing prevalence of open source and open content, will continue to change the way people learn. We fail to keep up with this at our peril.

Jane Hart – As always with Jane, there were new tools to share, but I was more interested in the work she is doing with the University of East London. They are building a social learning platform, based on the open source Elgg. The project is still in it’s early stages and I hope Jane will be able to share more when the project is live.

Andy Tedd – This was a very entertaining and informative insight into some of the activity taking place at the BBC’s College of Journalism. Anyone wondering about what it is that makes Web 2.0/Learning 2.0 work, would have found their answer in one of Andy’s slides;

Peer Recommendation

Peer Recommendation

Peer Recommendation

Finally, I’m not suggesting that my own session was a highlight from the audience perspective, although I do hope it was useful, but I can say that it was a highlight for me. It was one of the new format sessions, with three speakers each presenting for 8 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of questions from the floor. Although we were close to the end of the event, and fatigue was taking hold, there were some great questions from the audience. I plan on expanding on my answers to those questions here on the blog.

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