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EdMedia04 – Lugano Switzerland

Peter Scott, Thursday 24 Jun 2004

This years Ed Media (June 21-26, 2004) was in the beautiful lakeside setting of Lugano in Switzerland. I was there to catch up with some interesting people and to do a great deal of work on the Prolearn Network of Excellence, which was running a series of parallel events.

It was hot, it was sunny, motor-boats and tourists thronged the lake … but in darkened auditoria in the conference centre and university, EdMedia delegates were talking about the future of education and technology. This year there were some remarkably interesting pieces, especially amongst the invited presentations. Stephen Heppell gave a nice intro to his spin on mobile fun stuff with kids. Agnes Kukulska-Hulme gave a prize-winning presentation of the work of OU language courses and website usability. Grainne Conole did an interesting piece on her learning design toolkit. Jenny Preece spoke about on-line communities and sociability – which fits terribly well with some of our current work.

A number of Prolearn speakers were highlighted during the conference, including Wolfgang Nejdl and Erik Duval who were both giving invited presentations. A short precis of Wolfgang&#39s presentation is already available on ProlearnTV. No doubt others will follow in due course.

One of the nice new features of the conference is the idea of moving some of the talks away from the conventional hour slot for their slideshow, but trying to make it a tad more interactive by pitching the slots as “a conversation with…” which was actually done quite well! To see real engagement at such events is surprising – and a good thing.