Rhodes sunshine and genuine community learning at ICICTE

This year’s ICICTE conference, my second visit but it’s been a while, was a good learning experience.

learning experience at Greek Night, Aresh not listening!

The link here to the conference website shows the visual evidence, photos from every day of the conference and a great way to remember the names of new friends.

here are Antonis and Olga from Greece, Andrea and myself from Brighton, Aresh from London, Liam and Stephen from New Zealand

As always with conferences, you can choose to have the best conference ever, or you can be passive. The difference is made by being proactive, being open to questions and asking them frequently, being prepared to find common ground and really attending to speakers. All offer some great learning – particularly if good time-keeping means you can really choose ones which interest you.

view from hotel room to Turkey

I enjoyed sessions on digital identity – good paper by Carolyn Woodley, assessment – good paper by Bostock from Keele – and Facebook – our final session which included a lovely example of interesting students in maths by putting up a Facebook page for a revered ancient mathematician and attracting friends. The latter session was where I delivered my paper right at the end of conference on Facebook: perceptions of purpose, learning from the experience of retailers which, like the others, can be found in the ICICTE website where the proceedings are downloadable. Can also be found on the public prezi site.

Andrea Benn delivered her paper at the start of conference so between us we bookended the event, talking about our new Business with Enterprise course based on PBL – lots of differing definitions of this among the audience and some useful experience shared.

A highlight was the keynote from Michael Grahame Moore and his presence throughout the conference – here at the Philospher’s Cafe:

Michael Moore at ICICTE 2011

His ideas about the vertical disaggregation of HE learning struck a chord, a world of aggregated learners and disaggregated (by merit across the world) resources for learning. And an absolute belief in the power of online interaction and affective communication.

Although the work didn’t end with the conference (have netbook, will work), a few days afterwards in the warm blanket of Rhodes sunshine was an exceptional treat.