ALT-C 2009 Day One Round-up

As this is my first post-holiday post I'll try and keep it brief. I'm in Manchester for the next couple of days for ALT-C. ALT is the Association for Learning Technology and the C bit stands for Conference. It's a chance to spend a few days feeling confused about which of the ten parallel sessions you want to attend and more generally hobnobbing with other learning technologists and professionals in the education sectors.

This year's conference got off to a good start, thanks to a keynote from Michael Wesch, which covered identity, the search for authentic self, the history of "whatever", and how this is all looking in our new age of digital media. If you haven't heard of Michael Wesch before I strongly recommend having a look at his short and informative videos on YouTube - specifically The Machine Is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Students Today.

Wesch was funny, knowledgable and sometimes just plain endearing. He began by talking about his experiences in Papua New Guinea, living with people who have no (or perhaps next to no) experience in the way of exposure to digital media, the Internet, or any of the devices that conspire to keep us constantly "connected". According to Wesch, the people he stayed with don't even have names (that they can remember), their village and community are so tight-knit. It made an interesting contrast to his following description of mass civilisation, in which the search for recognition and desire to escape from anonymity have become so crucial that flocks of consumers become hell-bent on winning the next American Idol contest.

I don't think Wesch actually used the word 'alienation' but for me it would have summarised this feeling perfectly. The feeling that creates this desire, that is. And I was glad that he said, despite our need to engage with digital media (as educators, technologists, and citizens, I suppose), the Papua New Guineans seemed just fine the way they were - "disconnected", which sounds perjorative perhaps because it comes from our own homogenising value system with regards to "progress".

I'd like to write about this more - it's an area that fascinates me - but I should mention some of the other sessions I've been to.

Josie Fraser hosted a symposium called "The VLE is Dead" in which a group of four panelists got to put forward their views before opening up to the floor. The panelists themselves were lively and entertaining in their responses to the audience but some expressed frustration that the debate wasn't focussing on the real issues - which when they were brought up seemed to imply that the whole factory-based education system and perhaps even the socio-political organisation of educational institutions needed to be radically changed before something like the VLE (which may only be symptomatic of these larger issues) would die.

One of the panelists Nick Sharratt made a good play on words with the headline "VLE not finished" - meaning that's it's not so much vanquished as incomplete and it's our responsibility as technologists to keep working on it.

James Clay, one of the panelists has posted a video of the whole talk on his blog here. You could try watching the first twenty-odd minutes for a summary of the views as I don't think the panelists really shifted positions on anything fundamental. You can also leave comments there and take part in the general discussion on Twitter using the hashtag #vle.

The final "highlight" of the day was Steve Wheeler's session on Twitter which was kind of chaotic and may have left some newcomers to the tool feeling confused, but raised some interesting questions about its possible applications in teaching and learning contexts. I'll perhaps blog again sometime on the Infinite Summer project I mentioned previously, as an example of this.

All in all, an interesting if tiring first day. It doesn't help that I still have jetlag...

(For once, all the photos are my own! Ie. I pressed the button on my camera and they're not just pilfered from somewhere like usual...)

New iPhone?

July so far has been a busy month and there are only two days left for it to prove otherwise. Consequently, between sessions of preparing our new help system, I've time for the occasional visit to Twitter and that's about it. (Hence the lack of recent updates on this here blog.)

Since my last post about Twitter (in which I said I'd be taking part in a new social media experiment called Infinite Summer), I've been on it quite a lot. And unlike my other forays into social networking this hasn't been one of these read- or write-only things.

In fact, I've been getting into it so much, I've been tempted to get myself an iPhone so I can play with it on the go (which lately is where I've been finding myself).

Of course, these toys and gadgets are changing so fast nowadays, I find myself resorting back to my old "deferred entry" excuses, excuses which follow this line of reasoning: if something is going to be better and/or cheaper in a few months time, might as well put your pennies in a piggy bank and wait 'til then. Which reasoning means of course that I will never ever buy any new toy or gadget, unless we hit that sometime-anticipated technological singularity while my money is still worth something. (Some have placed bets on 2012.)

All of which is one way of directing you to a report from America's Finest News Source about the new iPhone, which I must say even I am tempted to buy into.

Some more stuff about Twitter and the #infsum thing is waiting in my blogpost drafts area and it'll be there I guess until I've decided the grammar is sufficiently anal enough for all to see. Hopefully sometime in the next few days.

Wired Launch in the UK

Walking into the shop on campus this week, I noticed that the magazine Wired have now launched a UK edition. So I picked up a copy and though I've yet to read through it properly, it looks like it might be interesting. You can see a sample of the magazine here.

The sampler will give you an idea of how many adverts the magazine contains (perhaps not as many as some) and contains some nice interactive features, like Page 10 & 11 for instance, which allows you to see London before and after huge sea-level rise.

A quick skim of the magazine itself though reveals the usual tid-bits, factoids and design frills that I eventually found so annoying right before I stopped buying magazines a few years back. The only magazines that have really interested me lately are Private Eye, The Wire (soberly designed avant-garde music magazine; no relation to this one or the television series) and McSweeney's (each one a different and beautiful format, containing little else but carefully short stories by both professional and amateur writers). What I was (and am) hoping for from the UK Wired are some more critical articles on technology and its increasing (or already ubiquitous) presence in our lives and in society.

I've blogged previously about my tendency towards analogue snobbery - ie. finding enjoyment in getting away from the technology, preferably by going somewhere at least reminiscent of the feral... It would be good to see this reflected more often in technological publications. Like Bill Joy's doubts and worries about where technology is taking our civilisation and what we can do about it (one fasincating section even cites the Unabomber manifesto as a way of drawing attention to these issues) or Steve Silberman's look at the rise of autism in Silicon Valley in which he wonders if "math-and-tech genes are to blame". Both of these articles appeared in U.S. issues of Wired. While the U.K.'s edition has a centre-spread section titled "Fetish" in which readers are invited to drool over pictures and stats of new gadgets and laptops...

While there might be an irony in an e-Learning Development Officer (a job title which is often used interchangeably with the word "technologist") pointing to almost uncritical worship of technology and wearing an expression of vague concern, I think it's important to consider not only how technology can be used to enhance learning but also what impact it's having on students - from their expectations of the education system to their views on social interactions and participation, right down to their lifestyles in general.

Technology vs. horse!

I'm back! Actually I've been back a little while now but didn't feel like blogging until today.

My week in the New Forest was largely spent walking around, taking photos of deer and horses and trying to write. I didn't have t'Internet and I didn't miss it one bit... And if you believe that, then I'm a better liar than I thought.

The first things I did after unpacking were open up my laptop and flick the wireless switch on and off to see if it would work. It didn't. I was marooned without access to e-mail or Wikipedia or Facebook for a seven days. Which was partly the point because if I was going to get some writing done and relax, something had to give.

By the end of the week though, I'd almost forgotten about the Internet and felt sad to be leaving my new of world of streams and bogs and wandering ponies for one of choked roads, dazed shoppers and screen-induced headaches. Having Internet access again hardly seemed compensation enough.

I have to come clean about my usage here though: I use Wikipedia and Google and I do a lot of reading online. I get my news online, I do a lot of research online and, because I don't watch television that much and only have three of the terrestrial channels, I use things like BBC iPlayer to watch programmes I couldn't otherwise see.

However, I don't use MSN, I try not to login to Facebook too much and never send an e-mail if a phone call is possible. So I'd say my use isn't typical perhaps for someone my age and while I missed being able to immediately look something up, that passed quickly and I found myself simply getting more involved in the non-fiction books I'd taken along.

I'm also someone who owns a very old phone (Nokia 3410), doesn't have a portable music player and prefers to read and look out of the window when on a train, both of which are dying pastimes according to this BBC article.

Coming back to "all this" has left me feeling a little as though the Web and perhaps technology-in-general erodes the possibility of narrative or an awareness of narrative time. I feel that putting some headphones in and creating my own bubble not only cuts me off from my surroundings but time as well. If I commuted everyday it might be a different matter. This is also the reason I'm an analogue snob when it comes to fiction - even hardbacks are too hi-tech for me.

And here I leave you with a not entirely unrelated clip from Adaptation - a great film and worth seeing in its entirety if you can. Don't let Meryl Streep climbing atop Nicholas Cage put you off...