SocialLearn

You are invited to attend a workshop to hear about the OU’s SocialLearn project, and to contribute your views on social learning and teaching in a Web 2.0 world.

We are bringing together participants from educational institutions and business from across the country to discuss the potential and the pitfalls of learning, mentoring, and doing business on the Open, Social, Free and For-Fee Web.

• What are the characteristics of web-native learners, and what tools do they want/need?
• What new learning/business opportunities – and risks – are opened up by social networking and media sharing tools?
• What do you think of the prototype tools that we will preview?
• Do we need to reframe our ideas of learning and teaching?
• What is a university, if many of its current services were disaggregated to specialist providers on the Web?

If interested, please email SociaLearn with a brief statement of your background, and what you would hope to add to these discussions.

On confirmation of your place, you will be invited to join the social network that provides our 24/7 space before, during and after the event. All accommodation, food and reasonable travel costs are covered. The workshop is a 24 hour event from noon 1-2 July, at Horwood House, near Milton Keynes.

Places have filled very quickly, so book fast. You are very welcome to contact the workshop coordinator if you have any enquiries:
Simon Buckingham Shum

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