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Francesc Pedro reports back from:
The EU eLearning Conference in Espoo (Finland), July 3-6 2006
I was invited to present the New Millenium Learner (CERI forthcoming proposed project 2007-2008) in the EU eLearning Conference, a major event organised annually where academics, industry representatives and policy makers meet to network and share the results of their projects in this field. For the program and abstracts of the conference click here.
I participated in a parallel session on the foresight for learning. The session was chaired by Yves Punie, senior researcher at the EU IPTS. He introduced the topic by way of presenting the results of a previous workshop in Seville, view the conclusions. Yves Punie also presented some interesting data about the growth of blogging, social software and the like. This was followed by MRP Kasvi, from the Finnish Green Party, who made a very interesting speech on their Commission about the Future and the works they are carrying out in this area.
The conference offered very good examples of the increasing attention being paid by universities to OER, including the examples of the UK Open University and the Dutch equivalent, but also the Spanish UNED, the Finnish Virtual University and even the EADTU –the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities.
A number of universities appear to be paying increasing attention to computer games both as a field of sociological analysis and as a promising area for education. There is also an EU funded initiative for a development of a new game, called Crimcity, which shows this is a vastly unexplored area.
Finally, it is worth noting a very interesting speech on the development of e-learning in China. Prof. Gilsung Song, from the Tsinghua University in Beijing, kept all the audience focused on the rapid evolution of e-learning and the pace of growth –just to give an indication, she estimated the current number of users of university-provided e-learning courses to be around 25 million. A most interesting lesson was how the Chinese government appear to be controlling the whole system, its main goals and the pace of the evolution in a very particular pathway to their own concept of China as a knowledge society.
Download Francesc Pedro's powerpoint presentation on the New Millenium Learner [PDF 442 KB]
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