Education Unbound 08

I'm looking forward to attending this year's Education Unbound event, organised by digital agency Online Creative Communications. I'll be joining Futurelab learning researcher Dan Sutch, teacher and web 2.0 advocate David Noble, and co-founder of the "School of Everything", Andy Gibson, on the speakers' panel for the evening event. Channel 4's Matt Locke will be cat-herding, ahem, moderating what I'm sure will be a very lively discussion on all things related to learning and social media. Last year's event, which focused partly on the impact of social media on educational publishing, was reportedly thought-provoking - see previous participant Ewan McIntosh's lucid dissection of the 2007 event.

I'm expecting the discussion this year to highlight social media's role in informal learning contexts, including recent "open teaching" initiatives, which have obviously generated a lot of media interest and debate (the recent Chronicle article representing what was, from my perspective, a somewhat underwhelming and thin introduction to some of the issues). Issues around microblogging services and the emergence of what danah boyd (and others) have called "crowd effects" will doubtless also get an airing. I'm hoping that there will be space for discussion of mobile and pervasive devices, as well as experiential learning.