Yesterday I visited the
ALT Spring Conference 2006, titled "New connections, new challenges". This conference was organized by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) from the UK, in assocation with SURF. The conference was held at Leiden University, in the beautiful Kamerlingh Onnes gebouw.
The Thursday morning was filled with an opening keynote that I missed, so I can't really comment on that. The rest of the morning was filled with three parallel sessions, from which I attended the session by Scott Wilson. He talked about the all too popular subject of Web 2.0. But he shared with us some interesting observations, as far I am concerned. I'd like to share them with my readers. So here we go...
Scott made an interesting, but very subtle distiction between 'personalized' and 'personal'. Today we are seeing a lot of personalizable websites, but this is still within the boundaries that have been defined behorehand, he notes. But in the future we will see more and more personal websites or tools (we already see this in the proliferation of cell phones, pda's and mp3 players). A clear example of this trend is the fact that a lot of people, especially younger people, already have their own weblog, so their personal space on the net.
Another interesting note that Scott made was that the future student (the net generation) will have high expectations, such as that they expect features like collaborative filtering being available in the systems that the institution is making available to them.
Scott's talk got really interesting when he talked about recent research that he is involved in; this was really too short in my opinion. This revolved around the notion of a personal learning toolkit (PLT). He asserted that this is not to be seen as an all-in-one technological solution that some company should start making, but more of a concept. A PLT could be the combination of a weblog, a flickr photoset, a Gmail acccount and an del.icio.us account (Scott calls these things 'instruments', which I rather like as a term) for one and for another student it could be another combination. This notion of PLT reminds me of the notion of the 'learning workbench' that was introced recently by the now-retired Prof dr Betty Collis from my University of Twente.
More info on the personal page of
Scott.
