I’m delighted to have been selected on a scholarship with the STELLAR Network of Excellence in Technology Enhanced Learning to attend a summer school next month in Ohrid, Macedonia. The Sixth Joint European Summer School on Technology Enhanced Learning 2010 takes place from 7th-11th June, and aims to encourage critical thinking about the role of learning technologies around three research ‘Grand Challenges’:

• Connecting learners
• Orchestrating learning
• Contextualising learning environments

I greatly value the many opportunities my Higher Education has given me to study alongside international students; for their friendship, perspectives and cultural diversity, and this is my first chance to engage in academic work abroad since starting my PhD. I sometimes feel academic discourses in e-learning and learning technologies tend towards a North American bias, marginalising valuable European (particularly non-UK) research in a global field. So I’m hoping this event will provide an opportunity meet up with fellow PhD students from across the continent and establish sustainable links for the future.

It looks like a packed programme of seminars and workshops, with plenty of opportunities for networking, and I’m hoping to stay on for a couple of days for extra sightseeing.

More to come on this no doubt…

I was happy to attend the lecture by Roy Pea at the official opening of the LSRI at the University of Nottingham last night. In the first half, he presented an overview of the learning implications of the paradigm shift – a term I’m happy to use if he is – in participatory culture through Web 2.0 technologies, largely referencing the recently published report of the NSF Task Force on Cyberlearning which Pea co-authored. In the second half, he focused on his work around collaborative video discourse and his involvement in the DIVER Project. The lecture was video-recorded and will, no doubt, be available on the LSRI website very soon.

My university copy of Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning is peppered with comments in the margins. It seems there have been two students at work here; one, using what appears to have been a big fat 2B, has merely scrawled largely illegible keywords around numerous underlined passages, whilst another, using a sharper pencil which has dug indelibly into the pages, has written several in-depth comments which display an insightful reading of the text.

I tended to ignore such distractions, but since reading David Weinberger’s excellent Everything is Miscellaneous, I have begun to take more notice. Predicting a day when they will be cheaper than paperbacks (p.222), he highlights the capability of electronic books to collate readers’ annotations. He sees this as contributing to the public metadata of the text, which will enrich a third-order, collaborative reading process. The potential within education is obvious; multi-perspective layers of student annotation contextualised with the original text. But beyond this, the shift towards reading as a socialised activity, borne out by the meteoric rise in the number of book clubs, has demonstrated a collective desire to share thoughts with others who have read the same books.