Wrap-up on Education Unbound 2008: What a difference a year makes

I much enjoyed participating in last night’s panel discussion at the Education Unbound event in London. Held at Adam Street private members’ club, the vibe was relaxed and informal, with intense discussions continuing well after the panel wound up. Thanks to the folks at Online for inviting me to join what I think proved to be a very successful event. I got to plug some of CARET's new projects, such as EGRET and the stuff we're doing with OpenSocial. Some interesting people I talked to, in random order: Gaia Marcus, a student and journalist from UCL; Jeremiah Alexander, from startup Ideonic; and Nikolas Heyng from Online. It was a much younger professional audience than I’m used to addressing (!), and a very different bunch of people – there were few, if any, representatives from HE, with most of the audience drawn from publishing, media, start-ups, and not-for-profits, with a sprinkling of students and teachers. From my perspective, the only practical “issue” (not the organisers’ fault, I hasten to add) was being sat directly in front of the blinding light of the projector, which lead to jokes among the panellists about being issued with matching sunglasses.

I wasn’t at last year’s event, but Matt Locke (from BBC’s Channel 4), who’s bravely chaired the panels for both events, shared some insights on the differences he saw between the two:

• There was much more agreement this year between the speakers (potentially, both a good and bad thing – leading to less debate, but also, less time wasted on slanging matches and cross-sectoral issues).
• The discussion appears to have moved on from early-stage ideation to implementation issues – topics such as the role of the expert practitioner; how best to create or expand professional development opportunities; technologies; social and educational aspects of balancing on and offline behaviours.

On the train back to Cambridge, I reflected that the following issues seemed to be of common interest to the panellists:

• Professional development and digital literacy for learners and staff.
• How do professionals get informed and educated about all things ICT, outside of the formal ‘umbrellas’ of peak sector bodies and professional organisations (e.g. BECTA, BERA, and ALT in the UK)?
• Locating and sharing effective strategies for dealing with information overload, managing resources, and how to filter to ensure that the information selected / sought / received is of good quality.

So there was lots of common ground, but in the discussion afterwards it emerged that there was a shared feeling among the audience that there were issues of real importance that we just didn’t touch on – due partly to time factors, I suspect, but also perhaps because these are some of the more “difficult” and seemingly intractable problems.

• Socioeconomic dimensions and impacts of informal learning. Moves to informal learning may not benefit – may actively disadvantage –learners who are less socioeconomically privileged.
• Accessibility: in terms of disabilities; differences in preferred or available access devices (phone, desktop, laptop, etc.); dealing with slow connections. How not to ensure that web 2.0 is accessible only to citizens of developed countries. Socioeconomics – again.
• Audit and QA – who does it, who should do it, how do smaller organisations and the third sector in particular access this kind of expertise?