I’ve not long arrived home from the conference and I have to say it has left me full of enthusiasm with lots of ideas and things to follow up on. Dare I say, a bit different from previous ALT conferences I’ve attended. There really was a feeling that we are getting beyond VLEs and starting to think about how the next generation actually learn.

This morning I went along to a social software set of short papers. Liz Bennett from Huddesfield talking about using sychronous discussions so students could get to know each other socially. And a group from the University of Leicester, led by Roger Device, talking about wikis and how they are being used for a variety of purposes – they were interestingly described as informal repositories – it seems to be the word of the moment! He talked about developing ‘wiki-bility’ amongst students, who’d actually really quite disliked being set an assignment that involved them having to do some original research and add an entry to wikipedia. If it was still there un-edited in 2 weeks they were deemed to have been successful. Roger concluded that Web 2.0 could well be a deep cultural change for universities and for IT services departments.

The chair’s of each theme then led a round up session and I went along to Phil Candy’s session on the Next Generation Learners theme. He entitled his talk ‘Laudable, but misgudied’ which was how he described people of his generation who attempted to engage with technology so that students thought they were cool! He summarised the key themes of the conference as he saw them, what had not surprised and what had intrigued him. He then asked us to discuss with the person sitting next to us what had surprised us, what we learnt and we fed back to the group. He concluded by decribing a model of e-learning based on research he did at the Department of Education and Science in Australia on Self Directed learning in the Digital Age. I really liked Phil’s round up to the conference and thinks he talks a lot of sense.

The final keynote was Stephen Heppell, and I only caught half of this session as I had to leave for the airport. He was an e-learning pioneer and talked about some early attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to use technology in education. He argued that we are in a new millenium and that 10 years ago we built big things that did things for people. Now we should be building things to help people help each other. He argued that universities are monolithic hierarchical organisations and they are going to have to change. It’s a challenging time and don’t expect the government to lead the way with policy. Steve can pick up where I left off, but I’m disappointed I missed the end of his talk as what I saw was entertaining and thought provoking.