ALT Conference - day 2

Brian, Wytze, Sandra and Nico,
originally uploaded by Frank Kresin.

So, back to work then... Hard to do, because this morning there was a very disruptive message.
Anyway: Scott Wilson has put his presentation online on his weblog.
Friday, April 7 (2006) was the second day of the ALT Spring Conference 2006. This was the day for the so-called research seminar, where the experts had a full day to produce an outline for a whitepaper on a subject. I was a participant in the seminar on the implications that Web 2.0 and the net generation will (or should?) have on our education(al systems). Here are a few of my personal observations of this day:

• Change is slow in our institutions regarding integrating Web 2.0 technology in our teaching in learning processes. It is to some degree all about the money: as long as our management is much more concerned with other subjects (like very expensive ERP implementations) elearning is doomed to be a sort of byproduct...
• Change will only happen if there is a real real real problem ("the burning platform")
  
• All but one participant in the workshop would really like the Web of Confidence scenario to happen.
• I am quite sure that the all-in-one VLE's of today will not fit into this Web of Confidence scenario. That might also be why we still hang on to them so much! We would rather not change to something that is very uncertain... And by "we" I mean just about every human being: by nature we are all quite hesistant when it comes to change, isn't it?
• I really liked Brian Kelly's observations and advice during the day: watch out for the vendor fundamentalists, or open source fundamentalists etc

More stuff and the raw results of the workshop can be found at the wiki. By the way: the wiki was fun to use in the workshop. It made it a really really productive day!
Pictures to be found on Flickr.