The Wales-Wide Web

On the road for the next few weeks at a series of meetings and conferences and will try to give flavour of the events as I go.

The first - tomorrow is the European Fifth Framework Summit - Researching Technologies for Tomorrow's Learning: K2 knowledge sharing and looking at the future event. It is being held in Amsterdamm and rather remarkably I am the keynote speaker for this event.

My paper is on pedagogy and e-learning and tries ot provide some sort of history of the development and implementation of pedagogies for e-learning.

The paper can be found here.

Comments welcomed as always.

I'm in Amsterdam at the European Commission Framework 5 K2 conference on "Researching Technologies for Tomorrows' Learning. There are about sixty participants from some 25 countries. In the morning there was an icebreaker followed by an exhibition. Participants circulated amongst booths showing the results and progress on about ten EU Framework projects on e-learning. Big emphasis on networking and nice atmosphere. Incidentally the conference is in an old church - now used as a left wing debating centre. Makes a change from boring hotels.

Projects were quite 'ordinary' - for instance one was looking at use of video in universities using the Maratech product. Another was developing metadata categories and tools using learning styles. Not sure how much these projects will advance our understanding of the use of ICT for learning. Problem seems to me twofold.

Firstly it is the EC which is driving the agenda and they frequently get it wrong! I don't agree with the learning styles stuff but it came out of the EC's obsession with personalisation of the learning process.

Secondly - as a community of practice we have yet to define our own agenda and so are following others' roadmaps. We need to get our own act together at European level.

My key note speech seems to have been well received with lots of people wanting to talk afterwards. Great interest in the idea of open content and lots of people what to know how we can organise it. Will try to get my presentation on the web in next 24 hours.