Reflections on the Ten Competence Conference Manchester

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I was fortunate enough to attend the Ten Competence http://www.tencompetence.org/

 project Conference at the G-Mex in Manchester last week.  There were a wide variety of speakers and presentations and I was particularily impressed with one of the final sessions including presentations by Mark Johnson, Graham Attwell and our own Scott Wilson. Scott has seemed to have grasped the torch in respect of Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM) applying it the complex educational field, I could sense Professor Oleg Liber at the back of the session beaming with approval. Grahams presentation served to remind us all why we are in education a rallying call for transformational change.
http://www.tencompetence.org/files/gmex/tenc-gmex-prog.pdf

Parallel session 10: Support for social engagement in Lifelong Competence Development: Chair Bill

Olivier

Designing systems for managing dynamic collaborative research processes, Scott Wilson, Ernie Ghiglione,

Yoichi Takayama, James Dalziel

Personal Technologies and Masks: Issues of Persona and Identity in Professional Practice and Learner

Development, Mark Johnson, Claire Brierley

Supporting Social Interaction in an “Intelligent” Competence Development System, Bertrand Sereno, Eleni

Boursinou, Albert Angehrn

Social Software, Personal Learning Environments and Lifelong Competence Development, Graham Attwell

Reflections on EUN Conference Brussells Nov 27,28,29

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I had the unenviable task of chairing the Learning Interoperability Framework Europe (LIFE) discussion booklet. On the whole, I believe the session went reasonably well, indeed Frans Van Asche, said it had been the most successful EUN discussion around these themes. It did strike me that there were a number of EU ministry policy advisers present and I guess many understood very little of what we were talking about (confirmed by a discussion with a french colleague at the end of the event). I tried to encourage questioning with limited success, I’m sure many present were embarrassed to ask even “simple” questions.http://insight.eun.org/ww/en/pub/insight/interoperability/developments/life_final_roadmap.htm

Reflecting on this issue, we do need to reflect on the on the language and vocabulary we use when addressing  this kind of (mixed) audience, we need to engage more people in the general discussion.

Overall I enjoyed the conferenc and manged to have meaningful discussions (round the watercooler ) with many European colleagues ( Including one of the commisioners).

JISC HEA Collaboration Activities

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I was fortunate to be invited to a two day meeting at the NCSL (National College of School Leadership) in Nottingham og the jisc and HEA to discuss future collaboration between the two organisations.

What became clear to me during the meeting is that there is considerable exisitng joint activity and that just mapping the two organisations activitiies and in the case of JISC programmes would prove a very worthwhile exercise. Two new posts are to be created, one in each instituion , who will act in a “ liason ” type role.

On a personal note I much valued meeting various HEA people , particularuily those in the subject Centres and I found John Robertson’s notion of JISC being top down programme driven and HEA horizontal discipline driven very useful in understanding the roles of the organisations.

It will be interesting to see how this may develop over the coming months

Welcome to Paul’s Work Blog

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Hello, I’d like to say that this is the “dawn” of a new era: with the launch of this Blog, but have to be honest in admitting that I have tried on three occasions to start blogging and after a couple of postings have lost interest, i’m obviously not an intuitive blogger. I am however in the greater interests of JISC CETIS giving the process another shot.

In addition to posting about JISC CETIS management issues I’m also going to talk a little about my research interests, the two are definitely not mutually exclusive as there seems to be a real interest in using digital games or digital games technologies in education, I’ll also talk a little about my experience in  http://secondlife.com/  and the second life educational community.