Plymouth e-learning Conference

I gave up a valuable Saturday Christmas shopping day recently to attend a one day e-learning conference at the University of Plymouth. The conference definitely had an academic slant both in the sense that it focussed on areas of e-learning research and in that it was primarily concerned with e-learning in education, and specifically in further and higher education. This isn’t my normal market space but it’s always good to jump silo and see things from a different perspective. In any case the education market has a very different take on e-learning – they see it much more as an enabling technology rather than an alternative to the classroom.

The conference was opened with a short introduction from Professor Peter John (University of Plymouth). He focussed on some key areas of research into the psychology of online communities. Much of this was new to me though some of the references linked into my interest in social computing and also human computer interfaces. Peter’s main theme was affordances.

"An affordance is the property of an object that suggests its possible uses. For example, a person viewing a chair automatically sees that it affords sitting. So does a large rock and a railing. If your goal is to sit, then the sitting affordances offer a simple means for achieving the goal. J. J. Gibson, the eminent perceptual psychologist, first suggested the notion 50 years ago. He said that when a person looks at an object, he directly perceives properties such as its shape, color, size, etc. Further, people perceive its affordances, the things that a person can do with it. Affordances are as much a perceptual property of an object as its color and shape. Gibson's insight was that that perception and action are closely and automatically tied. "
The above extract from Visual Expert Human Factors

Clearly this is an interesting concept in relation to design generally but specifically in relation to the design of user interfaces. See also:

Don Norman (of Neilson Normam Group) on Affordances
Wikilpedia on Affordance

The conference keynote was delivered by Gilly Salmon – currently with the University of Leicester but formerly of the Open University. Gilly has ‘published widely’ (a phrase academics use to indicate status) on e-moderating. Gilly is a lively and interesting speaker and over the course of 40 minutes touched on much from current e-learning research. See the following separate blog entries for a flavour of her ideas:

Physical versus virtual structures
e-learning land
m-learning

The main conference sessions were much less thought provoking for me but a few highlights of the sessions I attended (the conference was a multi-track event) are covered in the following separate entries:

Information or Knowledge?
Real Learners at a Virtual College

Other useful references:

Duke Center for Instructional Technology
VLEs

Finally my neat quote of the day:

“Can you hear me at the back? I’m a distance educator so sometimes the back of my class is thousands of miles away.”