After a day away at the Spatial Memories Design Workshop, I am back at Networked Learning 2014.
The spaces of networked learning
Sian Bayne is introducing the session by saying that spatial dimension have been raised at a number of sessions throughout the conference.
Richard Edwards
When we use the term “networked learning” are we being literal or metaphorically. What is the conceptual significance of the network in networked learning? For me network is inherently relational and therefore spatial. And that informs the we need to think about both networks and learning. Space is often treated like a black box, observed rather than analysed. The classroom, the blackboard… I think it is no coincidence that open learning is so central to networked learning but how do we frame this?
There is the concept of the framed economy of space, David Harvey et al. Focused on space divided by economic conditions, globalisation, urbanisation, inequalities. Then there’s Doreen massey’s feminist concept of space and of time, the gendered nature of such spaces and their orderings. There is the post structuralist idea of space, for instance Sian has used the open striated spaces. And then there is john murray and co’s socialist take on spaces. The power, the practice of associating and disassociating.
There are two particular things that interest me. One in relation to technology, the other our conception of learning. One is computer mediated. Codespace. The “hidden curriculum” of networked learning and digital education. When we think about spatially, we can decentralise the subject. That’s yet to really be teased out but very interesting.
Q&A
Q: what about pedagogues of networked learning?
A: one of things we. Have to think about in our research is to consider when we are using things as analytical concepts versus when we are using the. As pedagogues in practice. I’m interested in network spatial analytically. But one might want to think about them pedagogically, how we might do that in new and interested ways…
Q:
A: one of the things that’s such a Central concept is the nature of learning. Various ways to understand that. For me drawing on spatial theory, and indeed actor network theory, is thinking beyond ourselves and our cognitive engagement with learning, but of learning in relation to other people, other systems… But does that compromise the fundamental understanding of learning. I guess I’m trying to push at how far we can go with this. Assessment for instance… What does decentreing the subject mean for assessment when all of our existing practices are about centering the subject?
Q: if we decentre the subject aren’t we talking about resource management – assessing the environment and the subject…
A: yes in terms of ecology and sustainability in education
Q: so what competencies do we need to do that sort of thing?
A: competencies of relating to others and their environments.
Q: Why can’t an economist do this?
A: they can. But so can others. One of the issues of education is that we think too much about people detached from their context. Part of my work here is about understanding the nature of being human by understanding context, not to deny what it is to be human by denying that context.
MOOCs and spatial theory – jeremy Knox
I’m going to try and apply spatial theory to the MOOC. In particular talking about three different types of spaces: the global institution – a particular sort of space by coursera, Edex, udacity; the homely – the domestication of the global; the overwhelming – another way to think spatially about this problem, the global and the local coming together.
Sofi you look at how big organisations promote themselves, the image of the globe is really rather prominent. Edex shows the globe spinning and the nodes of a network forming in that. Significant because MOOC organisations appropriate the globe to symbolically talk about their reach, but also appropriating the idea of the network for what they want to do, to reach far corners of the world with education.
The other thing they do is have missions and visions. Udacity talk about a mission to bring accessible, adorable, engaging and highly effective higher education to the world. The key word is “bring”. And their publicity strongly suggests who they may be targeting. The MOOC companies both promote and explicitly are trying to reach developing world countries. At the coursera conference recently one of the dashboard metrics is percentage of student so rom the developing world.
I also wanted to talk about the colloquial sign up page features, so coursera talks about “Courserians”. So the way the organisations measure reach is sign ups to the platform, that’s how they measure how far they are getting across the globe. And coursera released a visualisation of how they think of themselves across the world. The image is of a globe and is generated by data. Data is something I haven’t heard much this week but it is significant and is something MOOCs are bringing into the education world. The shading of the coursera map effectively makes the world come into being by the uptake of the platform. And there is a significant difference between who delivers the education, and who it is delivered to.
So there is a dominant form of education here is of transmission. And it is transmission from the developed world – the US predominantly, Europe, Australia – and the developing world.
So those nodes delivering the courses… These are institutions with the buildings and architecture up front, used to legitimise the offering. Princeton, Harvard, etc. all present themselves in the MOOC via images of their physical campus, imposing buildings.
The form of transmission in MOOCs is largely video. Either head and shoulders videos, or to a room. I will come back to that…
So we have the idea of transmission in a very one way direction. But one interesting reaction and example against that concept is an institution considering the homely, and to domesticate what can be troubling about the global.
So this is al philright(?) who works at the Kelly writers house. This is where the MOOC is from. This is a significant presentation of the MOOc space. Al invites us in. He’s inviting us into the world of contemporary literary poetry world. It’s authentic. And you can go and visit. In that video you meet those working at that house. All of these people talk about the kitchen, the food, etc, and photographs of the community, this family who have visited the house are prominent. The videos are also notably al and some of his students discussing issues. He does most of the talking though.
And indeed some edinburgh students taking this MOOC tried to recreate the video in their own kitchen. It’s a domestic scene recreated in domestic ways. Students love the video tour, being able to see the place. And many ended their comments by saying “I wish one day I could make it”. Seems to be an acknowledgement that this won’t entirely work, the whole globe can’t visit.
And I wanted to move to the third kind of space. I hope I gotta cross transmission. And welcoming in. Simplistically these seem very separate, but how might we overcome this?
So this Part I’ve called the overwhelming… I am privileged to teach on an eLearning and digital cultures MOOC here. And we encouraged students to create digital artefacts. One of the prominent reactions to that was of overwhelming nene being overwhelmed, lots of somewhat negative comments there… But I wanted to flip that a bit. Some students responded visually to that chaos. We had a visual task in the MOOC, and we saw reimagined Tokyo tube maps, we see people falling through the rabbit hole. I think we saw are action to unfamiliar space – of neither dominant transmission not homeliness – in our MOOC.
But why is this interesting? Well seeing this student image of an overgrown house with the statement “yes, she’s home, she’s just a bit busy with edcmooc”. I like the idea of neither form dominant and structurally… The growth
Q&A
Q: on the buildings front… When you ask them institutions are looking for conversion rates… May want that presentation for that reason
A: certainly one reason for that presentation I think, others too… Not a significant driver for our MOOC, only a few sign ups from it.
Q: that first type of presentation is about imagining yourself there. That second type was about community… What emerged from your space?
A: I’m integer in that… Emerged from students, also from technologies… Interested in what came about spatially, rather than what we designed.
Comment from Christine sinclair: when we were approached to do the MOOC was “just think what you could do with 1000 students” but we had 42k. But it was exploration for us
A: what interested me most here was the focus on the individual and how things come together.
Terry Lynn Thomson – mobile work learning, spatial re orderings and digital fluencies
I am ingested in learning outside formal spaces. Savage , Rupert and law 2010 talk about the digital being bound up with reterritorialising space. Massey 2005 talk about multiplicity. I conducted research with 23 workers in Kenya, Rwanda and Canada and looked at their online learning practices – their engagement with others. Piecing together networks and materialities both with scale and focus, and having to live with fragmentary/also lashing things together… There were interactions that highlighted mobilities. But certain Immobilities were significant…
Many devices that are theoretically mobile do not, in fact, create or enable mobility. Ingold 2012 talks about the tensions of becoming here. Participants described complex cheorographies around his technologies, dictated by task, power supply access, etc. so material and relational practices really made these spaces. The making of mobile space was complex, the physical with the digital. Hemmet 2005 talks about the reassertion of the spatial in these types of ways.
Actually contrary to rhetoric, there are ,any frustrations and Immobilities. And for some of my participants the materials were struggling to become more mobile, in the same way as his gestures of mobility.
So four things here. The issue of digital fluency: flipping from one to one, to many go many; negotiations of openness, etc. so one way educators could support adult learners is to help them find ways through spatial re orderings and mobilities of work learning practices.
Q&A
Q: how do you educate around these mobilities
A: I don’t know, what do you think?
Q: seems tricky…but needed…
A: some school areas around the world attempt to do this, but in the context of a world where many adults do not have that understanding… Lots of questions here…
Q: I’ve been a learning technologist for a while, quite good at this… But still don’t understand everything… Don’t we need to educate ourselves before educating others,..
A: one of my participants Makori, an it consultant, took an online course, took the idea of one authoritative sources, and he had so many devices, wanted an iPad but
Q: I encouraged my students to share an app they find really useful. One way to address this is to be transparent and open, rather than apologetic for using devices
A: well one of the interesting things about entrepreneurs and the self employed is that this stuff is so time consuming, so difficult, can be so hidden
Q: how do you educate for digital fluency. Doesn’t use really do that?
A: technologies can educate you but if that’s how you want to learn… Well that’s about how you choose to be critical… I do think that all technologies try to lead you down a certain path… So I don’t know how you do that exactly.
Policy networks, database pedagogues and the new spaces of algorithmic governance in education – Ben williamson
I want to talk about new sorts of actors in education. Some on schools, some relating back to that. But I want to talk about several elements. The idea of policy mobilities – new structures and styles of decentralised, educational policy and network governance. To talk about mobile bodies and algorithmic traces. And finally the kind of mobile code spaces.
So I really want to ask questions about how new policy networks are seek b to reimagine education. Trying to map relationships between new kinds of actors and relationships between actors, and also the COde acts in Education project (link?).
Part of this idea is about government not being just my about central government, but also actors across public and private and third sectors. We see flows of policies from, say, private sector flowing into ouboic sector. Hultqvest 2001(?) talks about such flows.
In education we see educational governemce through mobile cross sector policy. Et works – govt departments and initiatives, commercial companies, NGOs, philanthropic organisations for instance. Steve ball (2012) has written about this wide range of actors in educations policy.
For me I am interested in the idea of their sectors, local controls think tank demos, nominet trust, the young foundation, nests, big society network, the innovation unit. All of these organisations seek to reimagine and reconfigure ouboic space through networks and digital platforms, they are also connected to a global picture of organisations nudge think tanks and policies are on the move, partly through these networks.
So we see these cross sector policy networks, labs, intermediaries, reimagining education. Moving from a sort of bureocratic place to a more individualised data driven concept.
So going to mobile bodies I want to talk about networked learning, database pedagogues, and the distribution of learners and learning.
So I wanted to start with the RSA, the Royal society of arts. They have a programme called Open Minds with particular curriculum eye, and they are also looking at using networks – see n squared report by Paul Or,arod. They blend the technical and the social networks at the heart of oublic sector learning.
The second area is The Innovation Unit’s report in learning futures – a report talking about institutions as “base camps”, in “learning commons” and “extended learning relationships”. And discussion of an innovation ecosystem. The same organisation has created reports like 10 ideas for 21st century education – calling for radical re imaginings of education, the disappearance of classrooms as spaces. Talking by out tailored and individualised learning. And particularly computer generated playlists of videos, seminars, small discussion groups, and 1:1 learning. Also a lot here about digital expertise, social networking for peer to peer research. And you can see here a collapse across institutions and relationships… By new kinds of actors.
And I wanted to also look at the education foundation – claims to be first independent think tank for education in the uk. One of their big reports has been a We book guide for educators, and taking that tool, mobilising it to the educational domain. That as an infrastructure it is transferable. Some complexities here, the horizontal nature of Facebook connections may not be what we want to reshape all educational relationships to be.
So we see a new expert knowledge and vocabularies of human behaviour and socialite based on theories from social media… Of digital commons, of smart mobs… Many of these are coming from places like Facebook. Facebook have an in house sociologist and data science team, those practices are coming through these kinds of actors into what we do… As if our networked social brains have evolved to demand networked social media. This may reflect Hacking 2007 ideas of addressing kinds of people, who others (Facebook say) imagine we are.
And that brings us to the issue of database pedagogues. Data is increasingly important to our understanding of pedagogy. Mackenzie (2012) talks about this centrality of a databases to the world.
Nests digital education programme very much focuses on learning analytics which gathers data about the learner in order to generate ideas or prescriptions for further learning. So we see things like Knewton. It gathers data on the learner, uses psychometric data etc. to “personalise” the data to the learner. So the learner is visualised and understood as data, metrics, numbers, and increasingly visualisations… The actor is transformed in order to be acted upon.
beluga markets itself as a smart service able to behave with intelligence, combines “intelligent data” collected by educational institutions with students own social media “off put data” to reshape the experience for the learner.
These code spaces are about automated and anticipatory governing and data doppelgänger a, production of objectified individuals whose data is used to classify and sort the individuals into types.
So we can see then that these kinds of activities, these kinds of bodies… Urey 2007 talks about us not as private corporeal bodies, but as bodies distibuted across systems through our trails etc.
So what I’ve begun to try to trace out is the idea of networked governance with wide range of players seeking to reimagine education through vocabularies, expert knowledges and techniques of dpnetworks and database providers. Governance through code spaces, understanding the learner through data traces. Activating learns through automatic pedagogues
Q&A
Q: I’m not convinced the network is determining the governance but reflecting those back for financial/political reason. And much of this data reflects growing commercialization of the student, data use mirrors that used in corporate contexts.
A: There is flow between these sectors and some of that is from government to these organisations.
Q) what methods are you using here?
A: that’s exactly the focus of methodological workshops we have been running. Partly with data scientists and programmers. Need hybrid methods, beyond more comfy social science. Ethics. I’m trying to follow the actors… Tracing the ideas and how they coalesce. I don’t tend to go and speak to them, although I have spokent to the director of research at demos on their new social media analysis tools
Q: all sorts of discourses about understanding the learner. We have the official discourse. Why is this policy move towards disruption, removing gates to traditional education. Where’s it going. What’s the benefits.
A: not sure I can answer that directly, I’m more interested in tracing the routes. Looking at a book edited by Martin law and ? Rice. They look back to the worlds fairs and this fascination with data goes a long way back.
Disrupting the illusion of sameness: the importance of making place visibke in online learning – Phil Sheil and Jen Ross
Jen isn’t here today as she is en route to Dallas. I want to use her journey to start thinking about maps… So her route from Heathrow to Dallas passes many cities… Comparing that airline map to this map of a journey by elephant – very detailed, very differnt.
So I will come back to maps… In education we see these ideas of learners quietly reading. Learners works together in ordered structured spaces. But I don’t think these imaginings particularly gel with the formal learning environments… Blackboard collaborate for instance. Some spaces reflect sameness.s they literally reflect our own faces back to us. Drawing on Sulla and djallalwer? Talk about education beyond the nation state, as a response to globalisation. But how may the realities be similar or differnt.
Some of my own colleagues work in Africa where only five hours of power were available. One student required a synchronous session be rescheduled because of restrictions on internet access in Egypt.
So Jen and I wanted to reflect on out own students. Students were able to indicate where they were located on the map, or favourite places… In some cases mini biographies emerge, often with temporal aspects “I work here, I live here, I went to a conference here.”. This allowed students to show spaces important to them…
Second example from the DiCE group, one task was creation of my digital postcard from participants on the MSc in a digital education: a photo, some text, some sound. For instance a computer with a cat and the noise of purring.
So Jen and I wanted to think about sameness and difference in digital education contexts.
Q&A
Q: could you talk more about distanced cosmopolitanism
A: particularly about dan Alger wrote an earlier paper on embodiment which is also interesting here.
Q: have you looked at how the student imagined the student
A: no but that would be interesting. But on that world map the staff took place too.
Q: I was talking to someone yesterday about imposter syndrome… Maybe that understanding of how the students imagine us might have a real impact for us as teachers.
Wider discussion
Q: Ben, that was an interesting overview. What is exciting, what is concerning… How does this data and doppelgänger a stuff relate to, say, open minded news
A – Ben: I’m not opposed to data analytics… A long as we area ware of how the data is generated… And how the system is interpreting the data and understanding the learner. Vying little critical work on that area. I am interested to better understand that. And what goes into those sorts of technical fix for defined problems
Q: what is the panel excited about. And what are you worried about.
A – Ben: I’m excited about the opportunity for research in layered code spaces here.. Software lays on top of but also underplays everything, managing how educational institutions function.
A – sian: exciting but real challenge is that the institution is so bound to campus, and to nation state. And difficult to think about how we challenge that
A – robin: I came out of foucoultian and Marxist analysis so I, concerned about those analytics… In terms of MOOCs and the monetisation of it… Obvious way to do this is to sell user data on as Facebook and Google do. But I remain optimistic about the use of technology for citizen science and citizen social science.
Comment: I’m fascinated by visualisations, by the manipulation a and map projections that distort reality. A lot of this is the methods questions… There area. Load of people structuring the language that shapes the world we engage in. Because they talk in code. Literally. I know that some digital humanities people coopt that, say “oh I, the social scientist”. How do we have a dialogue rather than handing social science over to those coding
A – jeremy: I think the key thing is to not draw the line. Seems to be driven by computer science, social network analysis… So we Need to engage. That code that underlies it…. We have this thing where we have to visualise to understand the code… And that could be more productive
Comment: numbers have been important for a long time. Combine that, with the visual, and the data doppelgänger who can be brought and sold… Is that a way to instantiate, to create a more sophisticated other self? In to way that may be easier to move, or commodify…
A-Ben: john hannay(?) talks about we make spaces manageable… Making the individual knowable, inspectable etc. we don’t often see the data, but the visualisation that is one step away…
A- sian: maybe that’s how we decentralise assessment – look at a students visuals at the end of the course!
Comment: isn’t half the problem that I don’t know my doppelgänger until I come up against some sort of problem – rejection for a mortgage or something?
A – Ben: and that data is constantly being recombined, reshaped, it’s an active practice or active accomplishment. Like rutherford’s work on a data analytics in children’s services
Comment: but I’m a really minor part of that dominant system, I’m a very small part of this…
A – Terry: I think when we talk about mobilities… Those maps, those spaces all disappear when points on a map… But doing that, reimagining the spaces, takes away from the specifity of space and the context…
Comment: I’ve been in conversations about big data and visualisations… Often presented with a visualisation as a done deal..
A-Ben: the concept of data not being theory free but not being an educational theory
Comment: or the issue of “we don’t need theory, we have data!”
A – robin: for us as educators the idea of education and learning sire ally hollowed out. There isn’t one shared understanding. We need to strongly re articulate what we mean by educational spaces or learning spaces. To some extend all spaces are learning spaces. Bernstein was against the idea of all spaces being pedagogised but, to some extent, that’s what we do.
Conference plenary
Christine Sinclair is introducing the discussion session. And we will be starting hearing impressions from different people on what has been taking place, what we have been doing. And we should have time for some discussions afterwards.
Jeffrey on the hot seat discussions
These take place ahead of the conferences. They are an opportunity for discussion, for reflection, often amongst those with more robust perspectives. The discussions took place on a site linked from the main site. You can find each of these online, including some who weren’t about to join us at the conference in person.
These discussions are about widening nerve extending the space… We look for input, to hear reflections on those discussions. So I want to recognise and thank those involved. These are exciting opportunities to have that sort of interactions. Eve heard really interesting papers here, and discussion, but there isn’t always opportunity to dig a little deeper. To engage in dialogue, to engage where this really happens. To understand what networked learning is really all about, and to put into practice what it is we talk about. And I hope we can get more direct input – if you took part, what was that experience like. Please do think about that, what could we do, and how can we look at that In the future.
Comment: as an experience of a newcomer to the conference for me it was great just to read everyone’s comments and get into it… Although tricky to get into the discussions sometimes. Display sometimes quite confusing, sometimes hard to follow… So layout could be easier to navigate.
Christine: it was in Ning this year wasn’t it?
Jeffrey: yes, we’ve used ning for the last two but other technologies before
Terry Lynn: I found it so useful taking ideas from those hit seats to feed into our paper, that was an incredible gift for us.
Martin: that was part of the idea of them… Not sure many have mentioned the hot seats during their presentations
Terry Lynn: we did that.
Christine: thanks to Jeffrey for the hot seats and the SCHED.
Jeffrey: yes, and feedback welcome on both of those.
Marshall dozier – doctoral symposium
Reporting on behalf of group of Tim fawns! Phil Sheil and jeremy Knox. Like all good students we made a bit of trouble. And like all good parties there were gate crackers and that made the sessions all the more fun. We questioned multimodality. We were introduced to the idea of “Skatology of digital sociology” from Tim o’Keefe. We also benefitted from mentors stirring up our discussions at the session. And we came to a really messy and interesting collective understanding of digital technologies.
Christine: the twitter feed really captures that event. And many of those who saw that wished they’d been three!
Marshall: like all good parties!
Reflections on the conference – steve fuller
Thank you for inviting me as an outsider. I’ve been trying to figure out just what this community is. The conference has run for 18 years when clearly networked learning meant something else entirely.
Are you a professional grouping? Neil Selwyn”s opening talk, which not all agreed with, called for that sense of criticality that might enable you to colonise an authoritative space in a productive way. Let me say where I would more strongly sit, which is this so of grouping in relation to the institution and the higher education organisation. How will this group be seen by HE administrators looking at the problems and concerns. You need a more defined idea of the university – it is not just a space. But this group is in a good space to understand this as a group looking at technologies mediating all aspects of the university today.
The other side is of this is research… My senses is of importing to this field, not exporting – although digital droppings may be a great contribution here – but where are the contributions, the concepts feeding out to other fields. Of you want to develop this field professionally you need to develop it in a more serious way…
One thing that frustrates me about this, and other fields with a support type function is that of observation, looking in. But it seems there is more of my responsibility not just to observe but to see problems at head, issues coming up and to offer suggestions and advice. And that means that I think you have a privileged and positive impact that you could make.
Comment: I think networked learning thinks of itself as being critical. You describe it as in support role. I understand that in a technical way. But there is increasingly a professional world of educational technology but networked learning sees itself as a serious and rigorous research event, at distance from a field that is professionally located in support role, where literature is often grey and funded by those with a particular agenda. But I took from your talk that we have to articulate that better so that others can see and understand it.
Comment: I really like that idea of colonising networked learning. I was thinking also after Neil’s keynote, talking about being critical and having the agenda of pessimism. But I’d like to see more positivism and action. Wondering how we could make something similar. I think at edinburgh you have maybe done that with the MOOC! But I’d like to think about how we. Can do that more.
Comment: Steve’s observations as. An outsider who has spent sometime with us are really worth us thinking about, particularly if we have set up artificial boundaries around ourselves, rather than crying out if we feel misunderstood – I say this as so done from a field that has complained about being misunderstood but it has been their/own fault.
Comments on the conference by former co-chair David
As a conference we really come from the perspective of pedagaoguey as a focus rather than technology. We came in around open pedagaoguey in 1998. We’ve moved away from that towards concepts like online trust, communities in online learning… And how that has been exhibited throughout the conferences. And more recently in the book series coming out of the conferences. How that has captured the feeling coming out of networked learning… Seeing the shifts and history of the space.
I talk about practice because even though we are researchers what we look at is so much about practice, about how we put things into practice. But we also see a move towards networks and how networks work in that sort of disembodied ways and what we y to achieve in networks… Away from pedagoguey in some ways… But reflecting our need to attract students. Add we are seeing technology perhaps trying to take over our role? Is it a meaningful thing? How does it compare to the thoughtful pedagogues within networked learning, and the issues of deep learning and pedagoguey? And our values here? I’m not sure about the answer but I am concerned about the possible consequences of disembodied learners understood through their data… So I am interested to look forwards to consider whether we focus on values, on pedagogies, away from MOOCs for attracting students…
Comments on the conference from former co-chair – Vivienne
I will take a different tack but that will surprise no one who knows both David and I. Networked learning has always been concerned with the role of the university and the insitution. We do aim to be mindful of the role of the individual in the networked world. We have always been thoughtful about who we ask, what our responsibilities are to ourselves and to others in this world. And with the huge range of papers this week we need to be critically thoughtful and aware about how technology is changing how we engage with, make sense of, and respond to the world.
Comment, Sian Bayne, university of edinburgh: what I’ve seen networked learning become is something we desperately needas a. Field. A space for critical space for discussion around what technology is doing to learning. We were so excited to host it here as it is the key thing in the year. So I hope we continue doing this and focusing on sometimes risky research in this space.
Vivienne: I was discussing with colleagues why this conference has become this space… I think it is because the networked learning raises those issues… So the networked learning becomes to disappear
Comment: I want to put in a plea for networked learning to not just be about technology, to not just be about HE. There are plenty of conferences for both of those. The interesting stuff here is about the impact of technology of learning, and of learning outside and beyond the university.
Martin (current cochair): the external factors have more pushed that. Maybe we need to think about articulating better the pedagogical theories we are developing, informing practices for learning. For me it’s profession learning, networked spaces… Not just HE for me.
Comment: I want to refer back to David’s comments… The axiomatic nature of networked learning makes it special, and different, and those underpinnings are crucial to differentiate us from other fields we touch shoulders with regularly.
Comment: my take on this is that in 1998 university websites were left to departments, development was very open… And we have moved away from that. We may not just be about technology but we have to engage, we have to udmerstand,otherwise we fail to understand the code. How else to avoid Facebook funding some policy somewhere that shapes our world. We have to engage with technologists, and to understand the code.
Steven: I agree with all of that.
Comment: we invited Judy Marshall to the last event, some scratched their heads as she applied sustainability to networked learning… But what other technology conference would do that! I also want to guard against seeing the social network as the meaning of networks… I would move against that. We need to think of networks in that broader sense…
Jeffrey: there are some nice definitions on the website there. Much of the discussion is about what networked learning means… It sounds like all of the possible understandings are valid… And useful when explaining to others what we are doing when we attend these events. And when we think about what was that, how does this apply to us… ?
Christine: I think that’s a very nice point to leave this discussion on! And with that over to our conference co-chairs martin and Donald?
Martin: I think that’s a nice point, reflection and bringing things together, for the next conference, our tenth anniversary. I was wondering how many review papers we actually have. Maybe for the next conference it might be a nice theme to think about… As well as looking back, to look forward.
Donald: I think that is a good idea… We know that the conference will be… Somewhere… In 2016. Probably also within Europe. Watch this space! I think it’s been a wonderful conference. And we have a huge list of people to thank.
So we would like to thank our keynotes steve fuller, and to neil Selwyn in absentia (steve receives a gift, and notes he has homework!), thank you to sian Bayne, Christine Sinclair and fiona Lennox, and Jen Ross and Hamish Macleod for all of their work organising this. Thank you to Marshall dozier, jeremy know, Phil Sheils, and Tim fawns for a wonderful wonderful doctoral symposium. Thank you also to Louise and the staff at the conference centre. And thanks to Jeffrey for the hot seats! And thank you to tom and to steve wright for their work on the hot seats. Thanks again for all the hot seat presenters. And there are two other people to thank. Alice jesmont and Chris jones, for those that know the, Alice continues, in many way, the spine of the conference providing administrative continuity. And finally we’d like to thank David and Vivienne for all of their work on the conference since 1998… And with that safe journeys home and we will see you in two years time!
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