SOLSTICE - eLearning Conference

SOLSTICE is learning program at Edge Hill University. From the program has grown an annual conference looking primarily at eLearning practice across the UK. This year's conference concluded yesterday and had the tagline elearning and learning environments for the future'.

The conference extends over one and half days but for the majority of attendees (including myself) it is a one day event. There is quite a packed program. As well as two keynote speakers and closing summary. There are two sessions looking at systems in more detail and a collection of summary presentations (3) with discussions. Several sessions run concurrently and you chose according to preference. It means that in one day you will have covered about 8 areas, which is a lot. I think some of the presentations suffered because they were reduced to 15 minute slots, which is too short.

I attend breakout sessions on

• How can we make our online content interesting? by Lindsey Martin - Edge Hill University & Mark Roche -Manchester Metropolitan University


• Connecting Students, which had 3 presentations:
  
  
  • Dark Ages or Brave New World? Learning Environments for Future Learners by Nicole Cargill-Kipar - Heriot-Watt University.
  
  
  • Harnessing the Power of Distributed Learning: the Potential Benefits for Higher Education in the United Kingdom by Sue Folley & Dr Cath Ellis - University of Huddersfield.
  
  
  • mLearning a disruptive technology for UK Higher Education by Peter Bird - Manchester Metropolitan University.
  
  
• How many virtual learning spaces do students need? by Neil Currant & Professor Peter Hartley - University of Bradford


• The Wireless Interactive Lecture Demonstrator (WILD) by Dr Darren Mundy & James Proctor - University of Hull

The Keynote by Eric Hamilton - Associate Dean and Professor of Education at Pepperdine University, USA was inspiring. He looked at encouraging the use of connectivity to facilitate better connected learners calling it the "interactive bandwidth" to facilitate better "group flow". Clearly a US sports fan (he is American) he used examples from basketball and baseball to illustrate his arguments. Given a predominately English audience perhaps not the best choice of analogies but entertaining and thought provoking all the same.

The biggest surprise for me was just how new the use of digital systems e.g the Web and mobile phones etc.. remains in UK experience. Little technology demonstrated or referred too was 'new ' in Web terms but Web 2.0 and all that implies remains very much uncharted territory in education. A good example is the area of the Virtual Learning Environments. Prof. Mark Stiles in his article for UKSG "Death of the VLE" puts forward the argument that the large monolithic systems that increasingly dominate elearing at the Higher Education Level really are not the best tools for the Web 2.0 we are rapidly moving into. However for many attendees these large monolithic systems were exactly what dominated their eteaching experiences and the world of widgets and rapid development and deployment was still a long way off.