This regular column offers reviews of worldwide distance learning developments. It provides reports of international conferences and workshops, news of innovations in technology, and reviews of events, people, and institutions connected with open and distance learning practice and theory. Have you been to a distance education conference recently and would like to report on it? Do you have news on a new innovation or event that is significant for the world of distance education? Your news, conference reports, and reviews of international events will be considered for inclusion in future issues of this journal. Please e-mail your contributions to: swheeler@plymouth.ac.uk.“This is a land of Blue Mountains and forest parks, mazy lakes and windswept moors, white Atlantic sands, an inland sea. In fact, it’s a country that is just pretending to be small.” So runs the official publicity blurb for the Northern Ireland tourist board’s online brochure, and many visitors to the province of Northern Ireland would not be disappointed by these descriptions. Northern Ireland (its alternative name is Ulster) is the only part of the United Kingdom that has a common border with a foreign country, and over the years, although it has experienced more than its fair share of “the troubles,” it is beginning to emerge from many decades of political and social upheaval.When Northern Ireland is mentioned, many people even today still imagine a grey rain-lashed land where barbed wire and patrolling soldiers in flak jackets are the norm. Belfast was a city where bloodshed and sectarian violence was once commonplace, and names like Armagh and Enniskillen still evoke fearful memories and sadness. The country’s turbulent and unsettled past, which still today occasionally rears it ugly head, is now receding, but this unsettled history has also helped shape the landscape of the region.There are, for example, the many ruined castles peppering the verdant rolling landscape. Constructed from around the 12th century onwards, and once the symbols of oppression and feudalism, they are now among the finest treasures of Ulster’s inheritance.The roads of the province are easy, with miles of motorway and dual carriageway, and in keeping with the island, the sea is never more than 30 minutes away in any direction. Off on the minor roads, and down the rural lanes, the only traffic jams you are likely to encounter will be errant flocks of sheep or farmers driving herds of cows as they change fields (the cows, not the farmers). In the summer you may have to pull over occasionally to let bands of merry music-makers pass, with their pipes, drums and colourful banners, marching to a festival in a nearby village.The weather is often capricious, but the generous rainfall Ulster enjoys ensures that the land maintains its magical emerald green and, when the wind blows across the land and the clouds depart, the sky is blue and the backdrop of mountains is spectacular. The air is clean, and so sweet that you will want to open the car windows to let the breezes in. Ulster is only 5,500 square miles in area (about the size of Connecticut), which means that nowhere is too far to travel for locals and visitors alike.Have I whetted your appetite for a visit? Well, that is exactly what a colleague of mine did recently when she attended a prestigious conference on computers in education. The CAL series of conferences has been running for over a decade and is always hosted at universities within the United Kingdom. My first experience of the conference was during the CAL97 conference at Exeter University, where I presented a paper on distance learning technologies. CAL (Computer Assisted Learning) conferences are a meeting place for academics and instructional designers from around the world, and this report comes to us from Sue Waite, of the Faculty of Education at the University of Plymouth.Queens University, Belfast, was the venue for the international CAL’03 conference this April (www.cal2003.com/). Its beautiful old buildings alongside one of the oldest botanical gardens in Britain provided an impressive contrast to the cutting edge discussions at a conference entitled “21st Century Learning.” My husband recalled travelling through barbed wire check-points, but the journey from the airport showed the changes in recent years and took me through pretty countryside to what looked to be a lively and open city.The conference was centred on four main themes; emerging contexts for learning, emerging pedagogies, assessment and technology, and emerging technologies for educational contexts. Each theme had several sub-themes:Non-institutionalInformalWork-basedCommunity-basedVLE-basedMy difficulty lay in choosing which papers to attend from the four parallel sessions! I came laden with a large poster and accompanying paper entitled “Our flexible friend: the implications of individual differences for information technology,” and spent two sessions discussing our findings with delegates. Our methodology of close observation of activity of 10 and 11 year olds at a computer screen for their entire school day had yielded some surprising data about individual differences in their use of ICT, superseding expected variation due to gender and attainment. My colleagues and I posited that this might be due to learning style and are now extending our research to further examine this and ICT’s role in supporting creativity in primary schools.Before the conference even began, I had an opportunity to talk about our findings on the motivational aspects of computer work and to find out over dinner how Fiona French from London Metropolitan University used games construction as a motivational factor for first-year students of multimedia coding. The tasks she set had the additional benefit of developing teamwork skills.The next morning, Mike Sharples, from the University of Birmingham, England, gave a keynote address discussing how learning was becoming increasingly curiosity-led with the move to lifelong learning and how forms of technology were merging and supporting this. For example, the possibilities presented by increasingly sophisticated mobiles and handheld computers enabled more “ambient learning,” including new patterns of collaboration, context-sensitive learning, combining everyday life with learning and conversational (interactive) learning. This relationship between technology and learning was also discussed by Jean Underwood from Nottingham Trent University, England, in a very stimulating cross-cultural examination of the new orthography of text messaging, which may offer opportunities to reach more traditionally “non literate” groups. Sarah Price from Sussex University, England, described some of their work on developing technology to encourage active learning. Further details at http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/interact/projects/equator.htmSome papers were from a more technical standpoint; for example, Julie Wilson from BECTa (British Educational Communications and Technology agency) spoke about wireless technologies in schools, and Martin Doherty about m-learning, (learning using mobile technologies and wireless applications). Bridget Cooper powerfully argued the importance of the affective domain in teaching and learning using new technologies. Her work on the “ICT and the Whole Child” and the NIMIS (Networked Interactive Media in Schools) project was the source for her lively presentation.I was particularly interested to attend the presentation “Creativity and New Technologies: an overview of potential and practice,” by Avril Loveless (University of Brighton, England). Her literature review (http://www.nestafuturelab.org/papers.htm) had identified a lack of theorised research articles. Our own research at the University of Plymouth is developing a model for the interrelationship of ICT and Creativity (Wheeler, Waite, & Bromfield, 2002). This includes a social constructivist dimension and develops the idea that problem solving and social interaction are key components of creative action. Rupert Wegerif’s paper about the Thinking Together project (http://www.thinkingtogether.org.uk) also addressed this topic, arguing that pedagogy was key in encouraging discussion for learning together.An international perspective was supported by many contributors from around the world. Benjamin Stingl from the University of Freiburg in Germany talked about virtual seminars with synchronicity that allowed a shared focus. Ali Baykal from Boazici University, Turkey, a visual learner if ever I met one, used a kaleidoscope of cartoons and diagrams to illustrate his views on simulators in instructional systems. Bronwyn Stuckey, from Queensland University of Technology (Australia) offered a structure to make community of practice development more accessible. Johan van Braak of Vrije Universiteit (Free University of Brussels, Belgium) gave a paper based on a rigorous statistical analysis to untangle the background variables that lead to the digital divide. This appeared to be linked more to opportunities for use rather than social class, per se. He found girls were as positive about computers for educational purposes as boys were.Ros Sutherland from Bristol, England spoke in her keynote address about the InterActive project, which involves many partner schools and teachers within them. Their aim was to make the research useful to practitioners in enhancing learning across subject areas through ICT through an iterative process of designing, trailing, evaluating, and re-designing in a community of inquiry involving teachers and children.All this food for thought was well supported by excellent catering and social events organised by the conference committee. Selected papers will be published in a special edition of the international journal Computers and Education for those who would like to know more about the 150 papers presented at this stimulating conference.
Steve Wheeler (Mon,) studied this question.