Thoughts on the 2011 Blackboard Usergroup in Durham

The theme of this year's event was around location. The sessions I attended were pretty diverse in their approach to this, but there were a few key themes that stood out for me, so I've tried to collect my thoughts on these below.

Location
What do we mean we we talk about location? A number of ideas were raised around this, which draw attention to the risk of oversimplification in some of the discourse around mobile learning ('you just give a student a smartphone, right?'), and highlight the complexities of supporting learning in a 'mobile' age.

Malcolm Murray spoke about location as points in time and space where learners get together and learning takes place (the slide on Torsten Hagerstrand illustrates this idea). John Traxler echoed this in his observations on locations as physical, social and cultural points of convergence or divergence - opportunities are created when learners have something in common, or even in conflicting opinions (the example of mobile-enabled citizen journalism is a particularly powerful one I think). Carl Smith spoke about the augmented reality, and the learning potential created by introducing virtual locations into physical or subjective ones (there's a good report on his session by Matt Cornock). A lot of these points reflect the ideas of user- or learner-generated contexts, that learners will bring together the people, environment and tools they need for learning (see Cook and Kukulska-Hulme, Traxler and Pettit for more on this). This has a lot of implications for how we think about our models of 'teaching', and demonstrates the increasing irrelevance of the traditional model of transmission (or imposition?) of information in defined physical spaces at defined times.

Crossing boundaries
A 'location' is arguably only defined by its edges, or the boundary around it (physical, personal, social, institutional). Many of the sessions drew attention to the idea of boundaries, permeability and and enabling both staff and students and move between contexts. Some of the discussion in my session on mobile learning illustrated the increasingly uncertain boundaries around how we define 'learning' in the mobile age (my report on the session is on the MALT project blog). Sessions from Simon Davis and Matt Cornock (York), and Mike Cameron (Newcastle, on work carried out at Durham) focused on identifying the position and needs of the learner, how these relate to or conflict with perceived academic ideals, and how we might enable a transition from one position (new student, information consumer) to another (effective independent learner). Sessions from Julian Beckton (Lincoln), Tim Neumann (Institute of Education) and Ralph Holland (South Tyneside College) focused on enabling staff to make a similar journey, to meet the increasing challenges of teaching/facilitating with technology. And for the first time I can remember, there were even sessions on the permeability of the Blackboard VLE, brought about by the wonders of LTI.

Freedom and constraint
A lot of the sessions spoke about the potential of technology to enable more flexible, learner-centred, mobile learning, but there were also a number of comments about the constraints. John Traxler spoke about the potential of mobile for both exploiting and overcoming location, and noted the challenges of cost, connectivity, device constraints, and ubiquity (the intrusion of the digital into formerly social or private space and time). Mike Cameron and Andy Ramsden also spoke about inclusion, and access to/ownership of technology. These were important notes of caution, and raise questions that need to be addressed as we explore the possibilities of mobile learning.

On a lighter note, the conference itself was a great event, well organised and with lots of opportunity to network and catch up with fellow Blackboard users, as well as other suppliers. Some interesting new developments from Bb to look out for (uploading images in Bb mobile, grading rubrics and learning object repositories in Bb 'proper'), and the vibes around upgrade experiences were more positive than last year (see the #durbbu twitter feed for notes on this). Big thanks to the Durham LT team. I will add links to this post if, as and when people post their slides. If you attended I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on my ramblings...