Snow drifts and super-powers

Online Educa is as frenetic and cosmopolitan as I can remember from my last visit here two years ago. It's also very white this year - we are in the middle of a blizzard as I write this. The snow drifts are building, and several of us are wondering if we will actually get home this week. Held at the end of each year in Berlin, Educa bills itself as the premier European technology supported learning and training conference. Now in its 16th year, OEB has delegates from 108 nations, and is always held in the silubrious Hotel Intercontinental. There is a huge concourse, the Marlene Dietrich Bar and acres of space for the corporates to tout their wares. But the conference is, if you can peel back the veneer of commercialism, also a great place to network with some great people. I can't list the number of people I have met and had conversations with in the last 24 hours, but my personal learning network is growing by the hour.

This morning we enjoyed listening to the first three keynote speakers in the main hall. The diminuitive Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, President of the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT Development was first up. In an endearing, self effacing manner ("Shakespeare said 'sometimes idiots are right' and if you think I'm an idiot, I may also be right"), Talal talked about some of the priorities for promoting learning in the digital age and talked about how change can be managed. The 'old hands' at such events had probably heard a lot of this already, but for the 'virgin' (I'm using session chair Harold Elletson's expressions here) there was much to consider in the light of change implementation.

Second keynote speaker Adrian Sannier was a sharp contrast and an even sharper operator. He is a big wheel at Pearson, but if anyone expected some hard sell tactics, they were wrong. Adrian also called for change. He presented a fast paced, humour laced critique of current schooling practices and made in my estimation, a profound statement. We are now all endowed with three superpowers, he said. Firstly we are all telepathic - we can transmit our thoughts and feeling to others over great distances now. Secondly, we all have total recall, and we can even remember things we never knew. Thirdly, we all have photographic memories, and can share these memories with great clarity and high resolution. He was of course referring to social networks, search engines and mobile phone photography, all tools we have already taken for granted.

Finally, a quieter, thoughtful presentation from the most impressive Charles Leadbeater (pictured above), who brought us down to earth with a pragmatic, wide ranging commentary on the state of schools worldwide. Charles gave us plenty to consider around the notion of disruptive and sustaining change in schools, and left us with the thought that the future of education will not be based on doing things to people with technology. Instead, we should be doing things with people.

More from Online Educa Berlin in this post.

Snowdrifts and super-powers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.