Bloggers in Eden!

I've followed up on several of the bloggers I mentioned while writing from the conference.
Several entries (that's two links!) on EDEN and an interesting metaphor - Pompeii/Managed Learning Environments from Steve Wheeler. I also copied his way of using a Technorati search to give information, in this case about the excellent opening speaker Teemu Arina.
Teemu also lives as he preaches and his presentation is online both as audio and as slides. See his blog entry to access all this.
I've also been back to Ton's Interdependent Thoughts blog - no more on EDEN but a lot of interesting topics.
EDEN has given me a lot to think about and a list of 34 things to look up and check out. So if you see more about "slow learning" or "connectivism" you will know where I got the idea from!

EDEN 2007 (in Swedish and English)

As I wrote earlier it is interesting to read the blogs of other conference participants. The title link leads to a contribution (in Swedish) on Learning Net, a blog in which several Swedish universities cooperate and which the Swedish Agency for Networks and Cooperation in Higher Education supports.
I found myself agreeing with most of the author's comments but when it came to the second day's keynote speeches we picked different speakers out as interesting. So if you are bilingual, English and Swedish, take a look and compare our two approaches.

Flickr User Model

Flickr User Model
Originally uploaded by soldierant

An interesting image of how Flickr works. This is version 1.0 (according to the artist a simple image). Soldierant also produced version 2.0 and 3.0 which were more complicated but expanded the spread of Flickr to blogs and RSS and included the place of favourites in the scheme of things...
To really see these views you need to go to the original images and to view them on a large setting.

Blogging the Eden Conference

The first full day of EDEN was interesting. The Keynote speakers started the day well with three rather different views on learning and Internet - Inspirational, technical, and sceptical. The parallel session I attended was also interesting with much about blogs and wikis. It was unfortunate that there wasn't time to discuss anything (scarcely time for questions) during these sessions. Our paper was the last one of the day in the second session but the audience were still there and interested. A few even stayed to discuss and we had to break off the discussion to get our bus!

One of the best points about working within the blogosphere is shared experience with other bloggers, who then also document the experience and enable me to see things from their perspective, or through their specialism. Generally though there seems to be a lack of activity around this EDEN conference, which is strange considering the subject, NEW LEARNING 2.0 with all the connotations of web 2.0!
However, there is some activity going on and here are some links to those who are driving that activity...
A work-place learning related entry about a pre-conference (Toni's Interdependent)
More general comments can be found on Chrisses blog, one of the other bloggers at the conference.
Steve Wheeler, who presented an interesting session on Wikis yesterday has a blog that I have now added to my aggregator.
Check out Olli Vesterinen later!
Teema Arina's blog concerning his Keynote speech on the first day. An inspirational start to the conference.

Eden again

Plenary Session 2 - Innovation as Compass to the New Digital Territories
The general theme here was how policy can, could? should? steer development and vice-versa.
1) Maruja Gutierrez-Diaz discussed how important education is to the Lisbon Declaration and to the 7th Framwork Programme for Research. She mentioned that a favourable government policy towards the use of IT and innovative methods in education was vital IF these were to be part of a successful educational system. Very relevant for our organisation at the moment!
2) Claudio Dondi - a very reasoned speaker who spoke about why change is slower within institutions than it is among members of the institutions and why that can be a good thing. There is more inertia in an institute than in a new web-community but is this a bad thing? Is change more successful if it is top-down or bottom-up? When is a trend a trend and when does a trend become the norm? In contrast with previous conferences Cladio felt that both practioners and policymakers were now more positive to e-learning.
He also stressed the importance of non-formal learning, the human touch, the role of the teacher/facilitators, and education's place as a shaper of the future, even suggesting a new word - Learnovation!
3) Eric Bruillard spoke on the meeting between schools and technology and how/if/when institutes will accept/be transformed by the new technology.
4) Grainne Conole spoke about students today but for us there was little new in what she said. Some students are very hi-tech, very connected, very web 2.0, while others are less so. We need to cater for a wide range of competencies and doing so can be problematic.