Keynotes

Keynote Lineup Promises Exciting Interactions

Highly interactive sessions are the special marker of the PLE conference series, and keynotes are no exception. Key insights and understanding of what makes a PLE, from personal experience, through individual analysis and with thoughtful speculations on the future directions of this important field. Each of our four keynotes will offer a slightly different perspective on Personal Learning Environments and each guarantees to ensure that their sessions attain the high level of interactions and audience engagement which was established with the first conference in Barcelona.

Scott Wilson

Scott Wilson is an Assistant Director of CETIS. His areas of interest and responsibility include enterprise systems, identity management, personalisation, further education sector issues, and business processes. In January 2005, Scott Wilson published on his weblog a diagram illustrating a future vision for a VLE (and which later became incorporated into the Bolton PLE project). This vision was based around a personal system interacting with a range of Web 2.0 services as well as services offered by institutional systems to create a personal environment to support learning. Scott’s model also explicitly articulated the link between the personal learning environment (and learning process) with the presentation of an electronic portfolio. @scottbw

Cristina Costa

Cristina Costa works at the University of Salford as the Research Technologies development officer. Her role is to champion innovative means of convening and disseminating research activity and promote collaborative research ventures with the use of new web technologies. Her research focuses on the use of participatory media in a changing environment and she is particularly interested in analysing the advantages and also the implications of using the social web for teaching, learning and research. More recently she has been focusing on Digital Scholarship. She was named Learning Technologist of the Year 2010 by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT). @cristinacost

Riina Vuorikari

Riina Vuorikari has worked for European Schoolnet (EUN) since 2002. Her doctoral thesis, completed in 2009, dealt with systems that allow both top-down and bottom-up approaches for information and knowledge management, namely learning resource repositories that use both conventional metadata (e.g. LOM) and social metadata (e.g. tags, ratings, comments). Her continuing research aims at better understanding, capturing and modelling of contextual information within Technology Enhanced Learning in a multilingual and multicultural context. She co-chairs the workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL) and currently works on a new theme of 1:1 computing in educational setting and manages the Acer-European Schoolnet pedagogical netbook pilot.
Riina will explore the Teachers’ collaboration networks, why do some teachers get the “virus”? Her unkeynote will use the fishbowl technique to allow spontaneous interventions with the audience.
@vuorikari

Dr. Leslie Carr

Dr. Leslie Carr is a senior lecturer in the Web and Internet Sciences Research Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. Dr. Carr is a co-Director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre, where he studies the impact of Open Access and Open Data on the scientific and scholarly research processes. As well as being the Project Director of a number of JISC projects including dotAC, DepositMO and KeepIt he is also the technical director of the EPrints Repository Software Team, director of EPrints Commercial Services and manager of the ECS research repository. @lescarr

As ever we expect a highly active back channel via twitter, and for those not able to travel to the UK, an opportunity for virtual participation and interaction. You can see full details of each of the speakers proposed topic in the last version of our newsletter.