report - Online Educa 2006

Well, the conference is finally staggering towards its end and it has been a very busy few days with lots of excellent opportunities for networking and sharing information. As with all such events, the standard of the presentations was very variable. You know the sort of thing, really promising sounding title and ultimately very disappointing delivery. Of course, there were some good presentations too that provided a bit of inspiration and got people talking.

I was at a different parallel session to one in which, so a couple of my Irish colleagues reported, an American speaker made some jokey remark about "drunken Irishmen" - not the sort of thing you'd expect at an international conference. Apparently he himself looked rough after the night before and went on about "our boys" in Iraq. Seems he must have skipped International Relations 101 in his rush to be a senior manager at an IT company.

Back to the substance though of the event. Some interesting presentations on topics such as using games to motivate, disengaged school students. Euan MacKenzie of 3MRT chatted with me about that on the podcast I've been preparing for release next week. (and their game "InQuizitor" is available from their website). Gilly Salmon spoke of her approach to encouraging academic staff in Leicester to put aside their fears of the use of Learning Technologies by establishing a "Media Zoo", following the metaphor through with a website linking to various projects.

Anyway, that's just a quick, initial report, more to follow later, on my return.