Online Educa Berlin

Guest post authored by David Kernohan

At about the size of one of our Bristol meeting rooms, the joint JISC-SURF stand at Online Educa was by far the biggest and most comfortable, and by any reckoning the busiest, stand in the exhibition space. Far from my plans of taking in some of the jucier-looking sessions, I found myself answering all kinds of queries on JISC and eLearning... from interested companies, counterparts from all over europe, the occasional UK academic stopping in to say hello...

From what I'd heard previously I was not expecting such a response. Certainly if you'd have told me that I'd be being interviewed for a swedish video blog (http://swedishlearningspace.wordpress.com/2007/11/30/the-future-of-digital-learning/ - wish I'd had more than 30s warning!), fielding questions on the limitations of LEAP (whilst frantically trying to catch Wilbert's attention), getting people excited about our lifelong learning work, explaining JORUM to content creation companies and having UK academics come up to me, shame-faced, to confess that they really don't like Second Life all that much... then, well, I would have been a lot more worried! But it was fun getting people interested in, and engaging with all the many amazing things that JISC and SURF do.

The sessions, when I managed to get to them, were distinctly underwhelming. Everything seemed to start right from basics... most of a session on using Web 2.0 in lifelong learning was taken up by explaining what blogs and wikis was, the sessions on the "future of digital learning" came over like the JISC strategic plan before last. Others seemed to agree, and JISC will shortly be publishing a podcast interview with the organiser of the conference which will hopefully answer these questions and concerns

There were some interesting people about, I had a lovely chat with euroPACE (http://www.europace.org) who are a non-profit network based in Belgium with the aim of linking between educational technology activities across Europe, making it easier to find people who are doing (or have already done) stuff others may be struggling with. I'm sure we could benefit from engaging further - I was impressed with what they told me about the way institutions in France are grouped regionally and thematically to develop learning content as communities in collaboration.

Under the category of "other cool stuff" comes the OLPC (one laptop per child) project - I saw a working production model of the laptop and it is lovely. Small, cheap, can be powered by a hand-crank! It is intended for use in developing countries but I could see many educational establishments being very interested in making use of it around the world. It runs a linux-based os which also makes me cheer in a faintly fanboy-ish fashion.

Finally, videopodcasting appeared to be a major theme. One quick and easy resource I was made aware of is Talking Letters (http://www.talkingletters.com) which allows you to very simply record an annotated slide presentation with live video and audio, apparently for free. An option for all those presentations we need to give...