A great question about PCF5?

Just how many photos were taken.  See link.

The work still goes on….

As most of the delegates are arriving home work is still going on in the PCF5 office.  Today two of the conference officers were back in the office running through the various administrative tasks that still need to be done.  They are busy uploading content to Wiki-Educator, collecting powerpoints and ensuring that everyone gets the documentation that they need.  Look out in your email for the newsletter which should be coming out tomorrow.

Post PCF5 blog entries….

Mark Surman writes on Richard Heller’s presentation on the emerging Peoples Uni. project on his blog.

Screen resolution shots taken by the PCF5 conference photographer are now available on Flickr. We’ll put the higher resolution shots up when we can. Some of the delegates have also been busy uploading photos on to Flickr (including velkr0 who has some great London shots as well as some from the Forum).

PCF finale

The PCF5 gala was last night. It was a very interesting finale. At the start of the evening, the music was provided by a string quartet, they were very good but very difficult to hear. It wasn’t just me who was wanted to continue the conversations started at the forum and was talking over the top of them! However, after the bowl food there was no way you could talk over the Celidh band. They played in to the night and many of the delegates and organisers danced on until late.

Conference Wrap-up

Delegates listening to the closing session

It’s incredibly difficult to explain or summarise the breadth of the work that has been presented and I think the session leaders and especially Sir John Daniel did a remarkable job in the summary. Sir John’s speech and presentation are available on the COL website.

Learning to Design Learning with Rural Communities

Many thanks to all of you who contributed to our workshop at PCF5 on Monday. We learnt a lot and will be linking to our analysis of data and workshop outcomes on the WikiEducator page. I personally learnt a lot attending many great sessions and meeting fascinating people at PCF5. Thanks

If you are interested in discussing methods for involving learners in design and participatory approaches to designing learning and educational technology we are running a session 10am – 1pm Friday 18th July at the LKL. To attend please email me (you’ll find my email here and directions to the LKL here).

joshua underwood / researcher LKL

The view from the conference office

The view from the Conference Office

As I’ve already posted, I really haven’t managed to get to as many sessions as I wanted because I’m working behind the scenes on the conference administration and have a day job, marketing the University’s courses and I’ve had a few some meetings that can’t be shifted. However we’re lucky that from the conference office we can see in to the sessions in the WLE Centre. Some of them are straight presentations, some are groups discussions – in others I’ve not quite been able to work out what’s been going on. However I haven’t totally missed out as I’m also going to be poring through the papers and session reports when they are released on WikiEducator.

Off programme activities

One of the lunchtime talks on mobile technology

Not all of the activities within PCF5 made it on to the official programme. This session on using mobile technology is a good example. The programme organisers made a conscious decision to try and keep the programme directly linked to the core themes of livelihoods, children and young people, governance, conflict and social justice and health. This meant that many of the sessions on new technologies were forced in to lunchtime presentations in the Jeffery Hall.

More press coverage

The New Vision, Uganda

The Guardian, Nigeria

Open Mic slot and Self-Organising Communities of Interest

On Tuesday at the Asa Briggs lecture Professor Brenda Gourley talked about project based learning and also described Self-organising Communities of Learning (which abbreviates to SoCoL). For those who missed the lecture I will give more background before mentioning the related Open Mic session we held.

Professor Gourley used the phrase Self-organising Communities of Learning when she described something which is comfortably familiar to those of us who are:

• Learning on-line
• Learning in collaboration with others online
• Learning informally
• Learning with some kind of specific project or need in mind
• Learning outside of any formal academic institution

When Professor Gourley was talking about SoCoLs I started to feel much happier about being at PCF5. I began to feel that if she, of all people, took the reality of learning through SoCoLs seriously, then it was okay for me to be here at PCF5. I began to feel more hopeful that perhaps I would find other people, like me, who feel that their “academic home” is with specific communities of learning on the Internet. I am at PCF5 because of work on the Teachers Talking (TT) programme, which I am working on in Nigeria with Fantsuam Foundation, and in Kenya thanks to COL. In a way, presenting TT is my field work. I develop, discuss and analyse it on the Internet within a supportive online community. My Internet experience with TT and other work seems very close to Professor Gurney’s description of self organising communities of learning.

After the Asa Briggs lecture I got talking to Ingrid Bruynse, and found she identified with my “feeling more included” at PCF5 thanks to the SoCoL reference. We compared our experiences in SoCoLs, and although our projects were very different the elements were very similar i.e although the content, or project product, was totally different, there were enormous similarities in the process – the roles, information flows, technology barriers that had to be crossed, and so on. We decided to seek out others, to explore their experiences. We want to swop stories and explore the emerging patterns in the processes behind our projects. We also want to alter the direction of some of the information flows, and bring in new elements, and create new connections – but all of that comes under our longer term objectives. Finding people and collecting their stories is our starting point.

We decided to book a lunchtime Open Microphone slot for Wednesday, and Roger Mills kindly gave us a notice board to aid our networking as well. We decided to invite people who were interested in SoCoLs as well as people who already felt they belonged in one. We did not want to form a SoCoL clique. We are interested in building bridges with the formal system, as well as understanding our own SoCoL systems better and learning from each other.

Our thanks to the seven people who gave up precious time over lunch to join us, and who started exploring some ideas and features of SoCoLs. We were coming from various very different perspectives, so with hindsight, we should probably have spent longer at the start defining our terms (but that is okay, it is part of our learning). Thanks too to the people who have signed our contact list, but I confess there are some I can’t read with certainty – so if you don’t hear anything, or if you haven’t given your details yet but want to, please email me pam54321@googlemail.com

Mentioning PCF5 SoCoLs. It looks like we may have the start of a SoCoL study group.

We still hope to find more people who are active in SoCoLs so we can swop stories and learn from each other. If you are interested please look out for me at what remains of PCF5 or connect up online afterwards. I’m not sure where the SoCol study group will e-meet yet – I could organise a yahoo group, but maybe some-one else could organise something “closer to PCF5”. If you have any ideas for a good online home for our group please contact me with suggestions.

Written by Pamela McLean