MC Backstage

I’ve decided. I’m going to ETech 2007 in San Diego and it’s final. There won’t be any financial support from my company who makes digital television capturing boards and digital radio players and there WILL be a salary cut for being off work for that period and people make disappointing remarks such as Japan’s market is not yet at that level to digest advanced conferences such as ETech but, never mind all that, I should go. There seems to be a focus on media, traditional or not, this time. My current personal interest is techie savvy international people or travellers and how one can enhance one’s experiences in various local areas for a short period of time. I want to find out where my interests and ideas stand in the (supposedly) cutting-edge movement.

So I went to ALT-C 2006: the next generation, the 13th International Conference of the Association for Learning Technology at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh where I saw Watt a Clever Cow (left taken by mms). Why Learning Technology? Why the UK? Well, I had three things in my mind: (a) Is Learning Technology the field where I next want to be in? (b) What changes does it entail to move into the UK academic from the IT industry? (c) Is there any learning technology which can be applied to my own personal learning? To find the answers to these three questions, I attended the following:

• IMPALA: Informal Mobile Podcasting And Learning Adaptation
• Self-directed e-learners and their social relations
• What does podcasting offer as a learning technology?
• Learning on the move: the use of mobile technologies to support teamwork
• An innovative integration of interactive SMS technology in a vocabulary building mobile learning course
• Are we the Borg? Questioning the relationship between self and technology in online learning
• A student model based on computer adaptive testing to provide automated feedback
• The Game Object Model: conception and use in computer video game evaluation
• Developing video rich learning objects using the goodMood WIP webcasting platform
• Weblogs as a support tool for international mobility students
• Speech recognition software in higher education: another educational dead end?
• Re-using digital media in an open source learning environment based on Moodle
• Personal learning environments: challenges in next generation learning

There was a surprising amount of talk about blogging, podcasting and social networking systems. Less surprisingly, using mobile phones for learning seemed to be still popular. Since this year’s focus was the next generation (a horrid, exclusive name in the first place, btw, as if us vs. them) or the net generation, what they use on the Internet had got a lot of attentions. I seem to have missed, however, how these technologies can be actually used for effective learning.

Software programmers learn a great deal on programming by reading blogs and increasingly listening to podcasts on a daily basis. Communities such as Open Source projects have been around since the days of Unix. Some of my friends who are learning Japanese use Japanese social networking services, such as mixi.jp, to practice their writing and to make Japanese friends. Travellers use reputation or recommendation systems to find nice local events and pubs. With all happening on the Internet, listening to some of the presentations made me feel slightly out of place. More fieldwork through going out on the Internet, talking to ordinary digital citizens about how they use such services to enhance their own learning environments and daily lives might have been more useful. More presentations with less PowerPoint culture would be helpful. Except, there was one outstandingly good presentation entitled Personal Learning Environments by Mr Graham Attwell of bazaar.org. Video. The concept of Web2.0 well understood in there. And yes I agree, learning is messy.

Ultimately, it was interesting and educational to attend the conference. I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Child and others. Academic activities seem to require a little too much patience for practitioners. Techie savvy individuals (from the next generation?) may be in a better position to experiment their use of learning technologies. I think I would progress quicker if I focus on first finding out what works for myself, then not till then think about applying that to a broader context, if at all possible.