ELECTRICCHALK

As with most of these things I’ll be coming to different conclusions about how I felt about the JISC 2010 conference for a while but this is how I see it 48 hours after the conference itself. You can catch up with goings on by downloading the virtual goodie bag from JISC events.

I set out what I was going to try and achieve in my last post and by and large I managed them (with the exception of doing AudioBoos)

It was good to spend time with the Netskills team, getting more of a feel for what their different areas of expertise are and how they fit into the bigger JISC picture. It was also good to start making contact with a few people from the other JISC Advance services and beyond. There wasn’t a huge amount of time to chat but I enjoyed making the initial connections.

I feel the conference marked the end of the beginning for me at Netskills and now I need to settle down and do something productive although, going by my performance the day after the conference, I’m not off to a great start.  ;)

As for the conference itself here are my headline points:

• Martin Bean’s keynote was great (he’s the charismatic VC of the Open University and worth catching if you can). He outlined many of the trends and challenges facing HE today, principally:
  • How to turn the tidal wave of new information into meaningful knowledge.
  • The need to break down barriers between the education sectors and allow people to move in and out of education freely
  • As class sizes grow the face to face time with tutors will become too scarce and valuable to waste on straight information download sessions. This has many implications for whether to make this information freely available as OER.
  • As fees increase then students will demand more that the way HE and FE operates meets their lifestyle and work style needs.
  • The OU is exploiting the use of informal learning opportunities to generate interest in their offerings. YouTube Edu and iTunes U act as megaphones for the OU.
• The Parallel session on Research-Led Teaching was interesting (especially Gilly Salmon’s explanation of the Media Zoo at Leicester Uni) but I left feeling that all three presenters had interpreted the brief differently and therefore I was a little muddled.
• I appreciated the fact that the session on ePortfolios focussed on pedagogy rather than analysing the different tools available. I started this job a little sceptical about the future of ePortfolios but I’m now more convinced of their value. The different speakers gave a really good account of how eportfolios can impact learning.
• I was ambivalent about the final keynote by Bill St. Arnaud on the need for Green IT. What he was saying was hugely important  but his style of delivery left me unmoved and I think with a topic as emotive as that I would liked to have seen a bit more of his passion. He did present some innovative ideas which you can see in his (rather detailed) slideshow.

I surprised myself a wee bit as I’m usually a bit of a wall-hugger at conferences but made the decision early on to be more forthcoming which paid off in meeting some interesting people. It’s quite nice to properly meet some people I’d only known through Twitter before.

Martin Bean's Keynote

That’s a tiny snapshot of what happened, though. I’m sure further reflections will pepper future posts.

You can get another JISC newbie’s views by looking at Doug Belshaw’s conference blog or reading back through the #jisc10 hashtag.