The EDEN conference sounds idyllic and in many ways it is as it is one of the friendliest conferences I’ve ever been to. The theme this year in Oslo was ‘The Joy of Learning’ and as ever it included reports from many interesting projects around Europe as well as a few from further afield. I was there in my capacity as Danish ambassador to NooA, the Nordic Online Academy, to present a poster about how this new elearning portal implements the Cooperative Freedom approach in courses aimed at small businesses, vocational and school catch-up markets.
Below are the highlights:
Peer homework help: My three days started with a bang with a keynote by the amazing Anna Kirah who took stakeholder participation to new heights when she presented a start-up called Kono which will support Norwegian school children in finding peer help to work on both homework and personal projects. Rather than just talking about it, Kirah had invited the founders to make their own presentation, which they did professionally and confidently which was amazing to watch considering that they ranged in age from 16 to 30. As Denmark has just legislated to include homework during the school day (and yet not), I feel this is an initiative which could have wide application beyond Norway’s borders. Unfortunately by the time we met the enthusiastic members of the cash-strapped start-up, the Norwegian Minister of Education had left the building!
Planning a tech-enhanced course: After so many years in the business, it is tempting to feel that there is nothing new to be discovered but Grainne Conole’s workshop was a very concrete and collaborative approach to course planning which could be usefully applied in many European project situations that usually involve the planning of training in some form or other. The approach which Grainne led us through (rather breathlessly as we were attempting to do in 90 minutes what normally takes 2 days to achieve) would be a great exercise to go through in most kick-off meetings for EU lifelong learning projects. What I especially liked about it was the simple device of having all aspects of a course available as a card. These cards could be arranged and re-arranged on the table as we discussed what was essential, nice to have and irrelevant.
Social media training: Another interesting session was from Sally Reynolds who presented the Web2LLP project which is developing training and resources for projects guiding them in the use of social media. One interesting aspect of this was the conflict Sally highlighted between disseminating the name of the project (which will likely last only two years) and the product which the EU pushes us more and more to be long-term and sustainable. Get the handbooks here.
Seniors and ICT: I was especially interested in this session as I am involved in two projects involving making accessible learning materials for seniors. It was very encouraging to learn that older people do find the tablets (more specifically iPads) easy to handle and use for various purposes compared to a netbook.
Robinson and Mitra: A highlight was the double act plenary with Sir Ken Robinson and Prof Sugata Mitra who were their usual inspiring and entertaining selves. Strangely though, we were told not to disseminate any pictures or recordings. This sits uneasily with one of the big themes of the conference which was about creating more Open Education Resources.
In other news:
A new international learning network, the Higher Education Teaching and Learning association, HETL, for higher education professionals seemed like a good idea and complementary to the aims of EDEN.
Thanks to NooA for supporting my attendance at the conference.