So it’s day two of Ascilite 2009.

I walked slightly late into the opening session, which was a presentation from Blackboard (who are the Premier Sponsor of Ascilite 2009). Despite chuckling at a few things that the presenter said (there is no way whatsoever that Blackboard can be described as an open platform). There were some interesting developments from Blackboard on how they are integrating Web 2.0 services into Blackboard. Those of you who have read my recent posts on the VLE is Dead debate will know that I wrote then that the VLE can be a tool to enhance and enrich learning and be a portal to a world of Web 2.0 tools and services. Now when I wrote this I was in the main referring to Moodle, the open source VLE. It would appear that either customers have been asking, or that Blackboard is fearful of the open VLE or Web 2.0 and are now making their product more open to plugging in services and tools that are available on the Web.

After that we had the ever excellent Professor Gráinne Conole, who delivered her keynote, entitled: Pushing the boundaries into the unknown, trajectories of user behaviour in new frontiers.

I enjoyed her presentation, and I was also attempting to live blog her keynote on Cloudworks; not sure if I made a success of that. Live blogging is an art, and not one I think I have mastered yet. Maybe it’s because I am more of a reflective person. This blog article for example is been written at 6.30pm, quite a few hours after Gráinne delivered her keynote.

Cloudworks is really starting to grow on me as a collective tool. The resources on the VLE is Dead debate for example have made it much easier to direct people to the superb collection of blog articles on the subject. Gráinne’s overview of the site and the ways in which it can be used was very illuminating.

After Gráinne came Peter Mellow who very cleverly used the two projectors to deliver two linked presentations. Though first we were all made to stand up.

He made some really interesting points on how we have been doing exactly the same thing for the last two thousand years in education…

Over the rest of the day I attended a variety of sessions, some good, some excellent and some, well some not so good.

Tonight is the conference dinner in the SkyTower, should be fun and a great chance to discuss and continue the conversation.

This morning I was at one of the Symposia at Ascilite 2009, Cascading Change: The role of social software and social media in educational intervention and transformation.

In recent years social media and social software tools and practices have been applied in numerous implementation and pilot studies in higher. Some have been driven by explicit educational goals, while others seem to have been inspired by the attractive, technical flexibility of an emerging decentralized landscape of loosely-coupled, networked tools and services and its alleged potential for changing the dominant patterns of institutional provision of ICT in education. This symposium brings together a diverse and international group of researchers to explore the problems and limitations of using social media as a leverage point for second-order change in higher education. It aims to engage contributors and the audience in theoretical and empirical reflection on possible directions for further conceptual and methodological development in that area.

This was an interesting debate and as is usually the case there wasn’t sufficient time for a lot of discussion. I was hoping with the Twitterfall screen up that we could have an online debate, however Twitter decided to have a big fail. Ah well.

One of the questions that came up was why with all these “interventions” why is change so slow or not happening.

My opinion is that these changes or interventions we make that we report at these conferences are always small and tiny and therefore can’t make a huge differences. We need to make major interventions at a institutional or even at a societal level if we are to effect fundamental change.

I also wonder if the culture of how we work is also a barrier to systematic change. In HE especially with a focus on research and publication, there is less incentive to effect change and more incentive to carry on researching and attending conferences and getting papers published.

People with the power to effect change do not (in the main) attend such conferences and therefore such changes do not happen at an institutional level.

Of course change does happen at an institutional level, but often with administrative systems rather than teaching and learning. For example does your institution use e-mail or MIS ?

As with the MIT OpenCourseWare and other similar initiatives in this area we can see that sometimes there can be fundamental shifts in the ways institutions work.

So how do we move things along…