JISC

From New Zealand to Dubai, 145 delegates from 12 different countries came together to interact with a single speaker, Charlie Leadbeater at the opening keynote session of the JISC online e-learning conference.

The session broke all previous records for delegate numbers at a JISC online conference session, demonstrating both the appeal of the speaker, a leading thinker on innovation and strategy, and growing support for the flexibility and green credentials of an online conference.

Charlie Leadbeater presented delegates with an e-learning conundrum: Where do you put resources to achieve maximum innovation in education – on improving or reforming mainstream formal education, or on supporting supplementary and alternative approaches, like the community-based projects pioneered in the slums of India?

Using a quadrant to explore the tension between formal and informal learning, Leadbeater expressed the belief that radical innovation is likely to come from the margins rather than the mainstream. Follow the conference on Twitter using #jiscel09

Delegates were invited over and over to share their views through text and polling tools, giving the session a lively and personal feel.

One participant commented: “It is rare to see that level of interaction between a presenter and his audience”, as Charlie paused to absorb the audience’s views before building them into his presentation.

Leadbeater argued that we should be seeking approaches that ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ change, and stop asking how to improve the system and start asking how we can better support learning.

He said: ‘If you start by asking how technology can be used to improve current approaches you'll end up with incremental innovation. If you start from outside you will see different possibilities. Then the question is how to enable that kind of innovation to happen and to go to scale. Too often this kind of approach is marginalised or completely informal – like kids learning through games and YouTube.”

This theme of turning to learners for inspiration in innovation was continued later in the day, in a keynote session led by Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe in which mythical views about learners were hotly debated.

120 delegates joined them to debate the key capabilities of a 21^st century graduate and the unexpected results of researching into learners’ expectations of technology use in universities. Rhona Sharpe asserted: “There is no evidence that learners are demanding more cutting-edge technology for learning: in fact they are often more conservative than their tutors.”

Elsewhere, delegates are invited to undertake some learning themselves by trying out Elluminate, Second Life, digital video making, pedagogy planning and assessment tools in a new area aptly named the ‘Have-a-Go’ area.

An enjoyable mix of showcase and activity, the Have-a-Go area features the work of some of the JISC services and project teams from the JISC e-Learning programme.

The conference continues today, for more information see the conference page

Podcast: Getting to grips with the Innovating e-Learning online conference
(Duration 5:58)