JTEL Summer School at Ohrid
This is a report of the week I have spent at the JTEL Summer School 2010, a very nice meeting of lecturers and Phd students from every country in Europe (and beyond). The program (intense but also active and funny) has been composed by students presentations (after breakfast), lectures (before lunch) and workshops (after lunch). Therefore, not a succession of keynote speakers, rather a very interactive experience where students have a very important role, even in the organization of some sessions. I think that it is fair to send my congratulations to all the organization committee for working in every detail and making this possible every year. Obviously, another important ingredient of the recipe has been the marvellous environment of Lake Ohrid, where the Hotel Granit is based, a few kilometres from the city of Ohrid (declared World Heritage by UNESCO), and the excellent weather that we have enjoyed.
Attending the JTEL Summer School has been a very interesting experience that I would recommend to any Phd student in the TEL domain. In the first place, I think that it is very important to present, obviously at a work in progress stage, the focus, methodology and preliminary findings of a Phd research, because it is a very good opportunity for feedback. This feedback would certainly triggers a personal reflection and self-evaluation. It is also a natural way for setting connections with others lecturers or students working in similar fields, which will help the student to develop his own personal learning network. Finally, when you listen the presentations of so many Phd projects you don't only obtain an overview of the the different trends of research in the domain; you also reach a better understanding of the disciplines that are relevant to TEL and you are in a better position to situate your particular research in this multidisciplinary field.
The organization of the JTEL school proposed 3 challenges (connecting learners, orchestrating learning and contextualising learning) which have served to organize the sessions in the program. I will also use this topics for relating the content of these sessions. Not all of them, obviously, I'm still not ready to follow parallel sessions simultaneously.
Connecting learners was the motto of Monday sessions. Sue Timmis, from the University of Bristol, made a very interesting reflection on this topic, challenging some common assumptions on users, online learners and design. In the afternoon we had a very interactive workshop with John Cook, Carl Smith and Graham Attwell about mobile devices apps and learning. This strand had also a students session, coordinated by Andriani Piki, where we did a bibliographic revision. But I think we can also group other sessions that did not happen on Monday under the umbrella of connection, for instance the very productive discussion on strategies to stimulate a community of practice of doctoral students around STELLAR, led by Nina Heinze and Erik Duval's presentation on Research 2.0.
Orchestating learning was the focus of Tuesday sessions. According to Dillembourg and Fisher (2006), orchestration is related to "the process of productively coordinating supportive interventions across multiple learning activities occurring at multiple social levels". Eventually, this topic can be considered as a new term for instructional design, as Graham Attwell and others pointed out, but we need also to acknowledge that there is an specific work around this term related to TEL. A good overview and some results of an experiment in a secondary school where exposed by Ingo Kollar. Moreover, the students session, coordinated by Luis Prieto, introduced through a sketch the basic issues around orchestration, specially the debate between directed and self-directed learning.
The third strand was introduced by Denis Gillet who conducted a debate on the meaning on context: environments, competences, actions, artefacts, people, purposes, devices. This discussion was followed by a very interesting students revision leaded by Moshe Leiba. Traian Rebedea and Fridolin Wild workshop on Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning is also, in my opinion, related to this strand.
I only mentioned above a very short selection of the contributions to this school. I have favorited some other presentations in Slideshare that I think are also very interesting.(update, a lot of students presentations at TELSS10 Slideshare user). However, I think that I cannot finish this post without having including a short mention to Daniel Burgos, who conducted a insightful (and relevant) discussion on how to write proposal (everyone agreed), the Riina Vuorikari presentation on 1:1 laptop at schools, the special Sound of the Bazaar Radio program conducted by Graham Attwell team (link to podcast) and the Webquest session conducted by Maria Perifanou where all students participated.
