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.