Allison Littlejohn gave a great keynote today. Not rabble rousing but clear, measured and wise. The stuff that really interested me was her notion of blending, which took a very total-ecology view, recognising the complex tensions between the top down and bottom up, private and public, virtual and real.  This is a notable departure from earlier naive views of blending, highly situated in the real world of the learner rather than that of the teacher.  I particularly liked her visualisation of the move from dependence to independence, looking at it in terms of a variety of dimensions of space, tools, activity and time. Clear discussion of the challenges of blending the private, the privileged and the public. One small thing that came up as an aside surprised me a lot though, given the nature of the conference - she asked how many people had heard of IMS-LD and there were maybe a dozen or so of us, in a hall full of hundreds of e-learning people. Amazing.

I'm currently sitting i an interesting presentation from the University of Hertfordshire, talking about getting a computer science placement student into an e-learning role. Excellent process of bringing the student along and involving him in the complete research process. Seems to work nicely from everyone's perspective. I especially like the fact that it is as much about faculty learning from him as about the student learning from them. Great stuff!

Original: https://community.brighton.ac.uk/pg/blog/jd29/read/80601/edmedia-day-2
By: Jon Dron
Posted: June 27, 2007, 11:11 am