Home back from Barcelona, where I ran a workshop with Paulo Simões titled “Twitter: the heart of your PLE?” at the PLE Conference 2010, hosted at Citilab in Cornellá. Here’s the presentation we used to support the workshop (we’ve got some nice feedback
).
Workshop #PLE_BCN – Twitter, The Heart of your #PLE ? on Prezi
This was a great event, full of ideas and experimentation, in a very informal atmosphere that provided great chances for interesting conversations and sharing. If you want to follow some of the participants, check out the ple-bcn Twitter list that Paulo Simões created. The organization was top-notch, thanks to a great organizing committee.
Many things PLE-related were covered, but the hottest topic was undoubtedly the possible relationship between individual PLEs and institutional VLEs, with some good ideas on how to develop institutionally supported PLEs that are interoperable with individual PLEs and provide a PLE experience for those who haven’t developed their own PLE yet. New acronyms emerged to characterize this concept, such as iPLE (institutionally supported PLE – Oskar Casquero et al), HIPLE (Hybrid PLE – Ismael Peña-López) or CLE (Cloud Learning Environment – Steve Wheeler & Manish Malik), but the juri is still out on what the best designation might be. SAPO Campus seems to be ahead of the competition and has attracted a lot of praise for their “brilliant work”, as Graham Attwell put it. Check some interesting posts revolving around this discussion.
The conference had a great presence on Twitter, so the #ple_bcn hashtag will provide plenty of information on what went on, and you can find presentations on Slideshare (it’s still not very populated, so a search for “PLE_BCN” will give you more results at the moment). All videos of the conference are hosted on the PLE2010CONF group channel. The photo coverage was impressive and can be explored on Flickr by searching “pleconference” and “plebcn“.
Two and a half very intensive days (if you count the ROLE workshop on wednesday afternoon), but it wasn’t all work. In fact, some of the best learning conversations took place during breaks and wine tasting sessions. Here’s two of the most entertaining moments of the conference. In the first, Ricardo TorresKompen dances with Jane Challinor in impressive style (via Gemma Tur); in the second, Joyce Seitzinger amazes us with her singing and ukelele playing live for “Sounds of the Bazar“.
PLE2010 was such a great experience that the talk now is about “Where will PLE 2011 take place?”. Here’s a picture of the closing session (via Citilab-Cornellá), that had both moving and hilarious moments: the well deserved standing ovation Ricardo TorresKompen received and Linda Castañeda translating Jordi Adell with a twist.
Yesterday I received the Armando Rocha Trindade Award for the best Master’s dissertation in the field of distance education for my work “Da Web 2.0 ao e-Learning 2.0: Aprender na Rede”. It felt good, of course, and I’m excited that the prize is the publication by Universidade Aberta. For an online version of the dissertation (with plenty of multimedia content) go here, if you can read Portuguese (otherwise, you can read the abstract to get a gist of it). I would love to translate it into English, but I just can’t find the time to do it.
Once I get some pictures of the ceremony I’ll update this post.
The 1st conference of the Master’s in eLearning Pedagogy (MPEL), labeled “myMpel 2010″, took place last Friday, 14 May, at Fundação Portuguesa das Comunicações in Lisbon. It started out as an idea for an informal meeting among teachers and students from the 4 editions of the master’s program to exchange ideas and experiences, organized by Lina Morgado as the Master’s Coordinator, strongly supported by an engaged group of students from MPEL 3. In the end, it came out as a great academic conference shared by many people around the world through Elluminate (where some presentations were broadcasted), Twitter – #mpelconf – and the social site created to support the conference, with a handful of presentations, both from teachers and students, which were really worth attending. It was also a great opportunity for informal exchanges.
All considered, I’d say it was a perfect day and one to stand as a milestone in MPeL’s history.
I contributed with a presentation titled “Os PLE – Ambientes Pessoais de Aprendizagem na Universidade Aberta” [PT].
Tags: mympel2010, ple
A new issue of the journal “Educação, Formação & Tecnologias” [PT] – Vol. 2, No. 2 (2009) – is out. I contributed with an article on PLEs – “Personal Learning Environments: Contributos para uma discussão do conceito” [PT] (direct link to PDF).
Here’s the presentation I gave with João Ventura (IST) at the XIII Conference of the Ibero-American Associaiton for Distance Higher Education (AIESAD), which took place in Lisbon and Coruche from 16 to 18 September, 2009. The title of the article is “Blended Learning no Ensino Superior – Um Programa de Formação em e-Learning para Professores da Universidade Técnica de Lisboa”. Besides me, the authors of the article were João Ventura, Instituto Superior Técnico, Isabel Neto, Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária, Henrique Ribeiro, Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Luís Madeira de Carvalho, Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária, and Sandra Balão, Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas.
The video is amateur, but I think you get the mood and substance of the presentation. I include the slides here too. You can read the article at Scribd.
Tags: aiesad, presentation
She must be trying to tell me something. Or is it Mimi 2.0?
Yesterday I had the public defence of my master’s dissertation. The title is “From Web 2.0 to eLearning 2.0: Learning in the network”, somewhat exploratory and theoretical, without a practical study, as is more common. Profª Maria João Gomes, from University of Minho, was the best one can expect: very competent and very nice.
It went very well and the company was excellent, which is always a double joy.
For those interested in these subjects, I made an online version which is available at http://orfeu.org/weblearning20/.
Tags: dissertation, yes!
“Classical music with shining eyes”, by Benjamin Zander, is one of the many pearls that can be found at TedTalks. It’s really worth watching. From the idea of “one buttock playing” to Zander’s definition of himself and of the director’s role, so near to the essence of being a teacher, in my view, it’s around 20 minutes of true inspiration.




