Clouds and much more at FOTE09
Had an interesting day at FOTE09 last Friday as much because of the people there as the speakers. Generous breaks and a very convivial drinks reception at the end made for some useful conversation. The morning sessions on the Cloud were dominated by companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Huddle and didn’t go down terribly well with the twittering masses in the audience, though one relatively high spot was hearing about Leeds Met experience of providing google apps for all students.
The afternoon was much more relevant to the educationally inclined with presentations from a wide range of people and organisations (possibly too many), new faces for me including Will McInnes of Nixon McInnes who gave a very stimulating (and worrying) view of our networked, constantly changing future and School of everything co-founder Dougald Hine who not surprisingly threw out a few challenges to the qualification bound culture of HE. Others included the ubiquitous James Clay of Gloucestershire College, Nick Shelton of Bristol, Peter Robinson of Oxford university on their experience of iTunes U , Lindsay Jordan (Bath/University of the Arts) on the need for a social dimension to any learning experience and Shirley Williams of Reading on the thisisme digial identity project that some of us first heard about at the Plymouth conference earlier this year.
The final session was an extremely polarised debate on Second Life which served little purpose other than to suggest a better way of doing this in future would be to find a different panel. Two SL consultants on the pro side, and one very negatively inclined academic and someone from RSC playing devil’s advocate on the other didn’t really cut it. One highlight though was the sucessful streaming of the whole day’s proceedings in Second Life.
Others have blogged in more detail about the event already so I’ll be lazy and link you to a couple, both of which were written as the event proceeded – quite an impressive form of blogging if you can do it:
LSE http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/?s=fote09
Goldsmith’s http://celtrecord.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/jots-from-the-future-of-technology-in-education-2009-p-m/
Presentations will be available in a week or so from FOTE09
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