Learning Without Frontiers 2012 (#LWF12)
Introduction
It was my second, this time successful, attempt to attend the Learning Without Frontiers Conference. Last year I had a ticket but my daughter rather tardily decided to enter the world on the same day that I was supposed to be in London. How inconsiderate. ;-)
This year, however, was a different story: I was not only able to attend the conference but ran a workshop entitled Education for the Apocalypse? with Keri Facer. Keri is Professor of Education at Manchester Metropolitan University and delivered a fantastic talk on the main stage at #LWF12.
Learning Without Frontiers is one of those conferences that creates a real buzz both on-and-offline and, to a some extent, sets the agenda for educational technology for the year. I think it's important before going any further to deal with the issue of cost. The tickets were expensive - extremely expensive but did include a free iPad 2. As a workshop speaker, however, I didn't get (or need) one.
The Festival that runs alongside the conference is completely free of charge, the live stream is free and the tweets coming from conference delegates is free. Graham Brown-Martin's done a fantastic job in getting people to pay that amount of money whilst providing such a great free option, but I do wonder whether he's torpedoed his own conference. Knowing Graham, I doubt it - and it certainly works out well for teachers who can get in for free!
Day 1
Noam Chomsky kicked off #LWF12 with a pre-recorded video from his office at MIT. I smiled with delight as I saw that the first thing he talked about was 'the purpose of education'. For the record he believes that it's to do with Enlightenment values. I wonder if I could convince Graham to let us use that video on the Purpos/ed website? I didn't agree with everything Chomsky said ("technology is neutral"?!) and it went on about a minute too long, but it was well-shot and a high-profile start to the conference.
I can't say the same about Ray Kurzweil's session. He spent what seemed like an eternity rambling about his career whilst displaying the first slide and then whizzed through a generic slide deck. I can only remember the word 'exponential'. Oh, and just talked to the camera the whole time. The next session by the interim CEO of Apps for Good was very worthy but, in contrast to Kurzweil, seemed to speed by without me being able to take much in. Too much coffee?
Thankfully, the next section of Day 1 at #LWF12 was much better. Ellen MacArthur gave an extremely slick and well-argued plea to get behind the 'circle economy' that her foundation is promoting; Keri Facer explained why we need to work together to collaborate for social change. These were the two best talks on Day 1 for me. Jaron Lanier was interesting but I didn't learn much apart from the story of his life and that he plays 10,000 year-old rather random (and awful-sounding) instruments. The guy from the GSMA was poor: it was if he'd watched a couple of TED Talks and read the Guardian to cobble together a presentation.
I skipped the afternoon session on Day 1 to catch up with people like my good friend Nick Dennis, Dai Barnes, Helen Keegan, and others. I used to feel a bit guilt about doing this at conferences, but it's important to maintain and sustain relationships, I think. The Education for the Apocalypse session Keri and I ran from 5pm to 6.30pm was standing room only and had a great atmosphere. It's definitely one we'll have to run again. The evening I spent in the fantastic company of Nick Dennis and Catherine Cronin at Pizza Express.
Day 2
As a father to a 5 year-old boy and a 1 year-old daughter, sleep is an important commodity to me but sometimes a rare one. It surprised me, therefore, to be more tired despite getting a greater number of hours of sleep at my hotel. But then I never sleep that well when I'm away from home.
Upon arriving at #LWF12 for Day 2 the queue for the cloakroom was immense. I managed to talk to the legend that is Dan Sutch for about two minutes during this time. I really must pin that man down to a time and a place for several pints.
Thankfully, I only missed the first part of Lord David Puttnam's introduction. I respect the man greatly but still don't agree with his argument that keyboards are on the way out. Until we can parse audio and video as easily as text, the latter will remain the dominant means of communication online.
Lord Puttnam introduced a fantastic trio of talks:
- Mitch Resnick from MIT who talked about Scratch (a visual programming language) and the 'perpetual kindergarten'.
- Mark Surman and Michelle Levesque from Mozilla who discussed the importance of creating a generation of webmakers through things like Hackasaurus and Open Badges
- Paul Howard-Jones who talked about the neuroscience behind video games and the like. His book is available at Lulu.
I caught Lisa Ma's crazy, crazy session about Cat Ladies and parasites and 'learning from the fringes'. There's some properly out there people in the world. She's one of them (in a good way!)
Whilst I wanted to hear Jesse Schell talk about gamification I had a lunch meeting with Grainne Hamilton from RSC Scotland and a couple of people from the Scottish Qualifications Authority (including Joe Wilson) to talk about Open Badges. It's looking promising.
In the afternoon I enjoyed, as ever, Stephen Heppell's presentation about the wonderful potential of technologies and learners taking control and then Francis Gilbert's polemic about the way in which the way the current UK education system is leads to problems. He discussed everything from Ofsted to the ways in which we don't learn from what works. Both were great talks which cut through some of the fluffy stuff.
I'd promised Alec Patton from the Innovation Unit that I'd come to his session on Getting Your School Engaged but, because the main room was out of sync with the festival, arrived late. I still got to talk through some issues around project-based learning with some teachers, so all was not lost.
Before leaving, I had a quick chat with Mark Surman about the DML Conference 2012 which we're both attending, said goodbye to a few people, and then headed for a pint to continue the conversation with Alec. From there, I successfully managed to navigate the London Underground system to catch my train home which, for anyone who knows me well, is no mean feat. ;-)
Conclusion
I greatly enjoyed #LWF12. Some of the well-known speakers were disappointing, yes, but the majority were informative, engaging and presenting from a solid research basis. As ever, however, it's the people who make a conference worth going to. It's the conversations and the networking.
A note to conference organisers to finish off. It is not acceptable to use coffee and lunch breaks as buffers. If you do this, people will simply stop attending some of the blocks of sessions. Stick to timings. Be ruthless. It makes for a better experience for everyone!
Posted from United Kingdom
