Paradise gained

EDEN conference day two, and a good start from one of our keynotes, the OU's Grainne Conole who spoke on the learner experience and raised several key issues of support, peer networking and 'net generation' response to new and emerging technologies.

Talks that have stood out above the rest are: Niall Sclater (Open University - check out his blog) who spoke about collaborative learning using wikis, Catherine McLoughlin (Australian Catholic University) on podcasting and its use to motivate distance learners and Gottfried Csanyi (Vienna University of Technology) who covered the topic of ICT and informal learning.

I still maintain that although the content at EDEN is improving year on year, there is still a quality gap - most papers were 'this is what we did, and this is how we did it...' - and little in the way of critical evaluation and research based analysis. Most people go to EDEN to network, and I suppose this is its great success story. More from the conference next week when I have had time to reflect a little more, and am a little less travel weary....