I get to one or two conferences a year on average and have just returned from my first visit to the EDEN conference which this year was in Gdansk and my main impression was how friendly everyone was. Large conferences such as Online EDUCA Berlin and hip conferences such as Reboot in Copenhagen make efforts to use the technology to help people get together but at EDEN without the technology I think I probably talked with more people at a conference than I ever have before and that was simply down to good old-fashioned human friendliness and concern. At one point for example at the end of Friday’s proceedings, it was too late to go back to the hotel and change but everything else was over and so I was swept up by a project network with people from Spain, Germany, Italy , Finland and Greece and we had a great, if cold and windy, hour in a cafe while we waited for the coach to take us to our evening dinner venue.
I had gone to EDEN with Helen Keegan to present some of our experiences in the VITAE project training teachers to integrate ICT in vocational teaching while mentoring colleagues to do the same. The session was based on a great paper which Helen has written on the topic of the role of communities of practice in learning in collaboration with Cris Costa. And on the same platform as us later we heard Thomas Fischer tell us about his very interesting Mobi-blog project in which university students on mobility semesters blog about their experiences and in so doing encourage more students to take up this option because they are better informed.
The University of Leicester had a very strong presence led by Professor Gilly Salmon and her media zoo. I am not being disparaging here. Media Zoo is the clever metaphor used to identify the status of the different ICT tools which teachers may consider using ranging from the LMS/VLE in pet’s corner to more dangerous and untried ideas in the tropical house.
At the conference I also met one of my distance learning students who is coming to the end of her Certificate in teaching languages with technology course which I tutor with The Consultants-e in Barcelona. But I found it easy enough to maintain the boundaries between social interaction at the conference and continued business talk through the course VLE. This is something which is not likely to happen very often since my students have been spread literally all over the world. But it was yet another friendly event which happened at this conference.
The conference theme was about innovation but I missed the inspiring case studies which told me about the activities of individual students and individual teachers. But I did come away with quite a few contacts for use in current and future projects as well as for the podcast so in that sense the conference was useful.