Alec Couros and Graham Attwell have been paired together as co-keynotes at the PLE Conference in Barcelona, Spain, July 8-9. The organizers have asked us to do something different than a typical keynote, so we have been thinking about an unKeynote format. In keeping with the theme of the conference (PLEs), we’re hoping that individuals in our network would be willing to help us frame what this might look like.

This is a short video - the first in a new series of Sounds of the Bazaar videos - made as a contribution to a workshop on 'Technology-enhanced learning in the context of technological, societal and cultural transformation' being held on November 30 to December 1 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria.

Womble will enable workers to appropriate the mobile phone as a Personal Learning Maturing Environment (PLME). It provides contextualising of WBL problem-solving, interaction and knowledge maturing via a user-owned mobile PLE. The demonstrator develops a prototype Womble (Work Oriented MoBile Learning Environment). Specifically, the project will extend the current implementation of mPLE and structured learning dialogue frameworks, such as Dialogue Games and InterLoc, providing worker with a joined-up mobile PLME services. A social software ‘substrate’ and multi-user / multi-media spaces will provide workers with the ability collaborate with co-workers. At the most basic level, Womble services will, for example, allow workers to tag fellow work colleagues (contacts); when a problem arises this service will enable collaborative problem solving. At a more advanced stage (in the future) a ‘lite’ dialogue game service, that can be linked to the tagging of personal competencies, will be available to scaffold workers in their active collaboration and ‘on the spot’ problem solving.

Publications

2009

In September, we organised a symposium on Personal Learning Environments at the the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009), "an international attempt to promote the dialogue for the main aspects of the Knowledge Society towards a better world for all."

Embedded in the 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society we had a symposium that was related to the topic of Personal Learning Environments. Graham Attwell, Maria Perifanou, Cristina Costa, Ricardo Torres and me presented complementary papers talking about PLEs, Digital Identity, Contextual Learning and Communities of Practice. It was a great platform to present ideas about challenging aspect of mobile learning and the first international conference where the Widget (Messaging) Server developed by UPB could be presented in action.