June 20th, 20081st SocialLearn workshop goes down a storm
Yesterday we finished the first SocialLearn workshop, with about 25 OU students, associate lecturers (OU learning mentors) and alumni. It’s been a busy 24 hours since yesterday when we gathered at lunchtime in the beautiful grounds of Horwood House in the Bucks countryside.
It’s always great to meet up with new people in the OU community, and this was a particularly energetic, passionate bunch with strong views on our topic, the “OU+Web 2.0”. It’s fair to say that there was a lot of excitement about what we’re doing in SL, as well as some pointed but friendly critique!
The Ning social network worked well as a place to introduce ourselves in advance and seed a few discussions, and then ran as a parallel virtual space alongside the face-face discussions and activities. Discussion and feedback continues even as I write. We now have a multimedia archive of the event (sorry, this one’s private at present) which we’re analysing, and using to tune the workshop in a few weeks’ time for the many non-OU people who wanted to join us!
Quite a few participants have blogged this now: I’ll use Liam Green-Hughes‘ post as a nice launchpad into the others…
Jo Badge asked if this is a new OU philosophy, Nigel Gibson reflected that the event was a chance to “an opportunity to share space with some really imaginative, smart, intelligent, bright, awesomely clever and switched-on people” […] Martin Weller reflected on the use of Twitter and how it added an extra dimension to the workshop.
And Gráinne Conole has posted some photos to show that even though there was a heck of a lot going on in Ning and Twitter, people did also talk to each other f-f occasionally…
Many, many thanks to you all for your engagement 🙂 Next up: Workshop 2.0 — inviting in the rest of the world.
Simon
July 4th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
[…] It’s a good feeling when you plan a creative event that comes off, and that’s how it feels now we’ve just waved goodbye to the second group of workshop participants who came to hear what we’ve been working on for the last 6 months in the SocialLearn project. This workshop received pretty much the same reactions as those I blogged for Workshop 1… […]