Do you want to start planning your trip to Aveiro to participate in the PLE Conference but you don’t know how to get there or where to stay?
If that’s the case, go to the Getting here page on the PLE Conference website where you can find information about how to get to University of Aveiro and about accommodation possibilities. We will have some rooms available in the University residences at a very good price!
Participate in PLE Conference (#PLEConf) is also an opportunity to know (or know better) the city of Aveiro. There are several attractions in this city including cathedrals, beaches and canals. Aveiro is also known for its traditional sweets – “ovos moles” – made from egs.
To whet your appetite, we invite you to see the videos “Pieces from Aveiro” and “More pieces from Aveiro“. Well, it’s not for nothing that the city of Aveiro is sometimes called “The Portuguese Venice”.
The deadline for Workshop proposals was extended. You can now submit your proposal until March 16, 2012!
We look forward to seeing you in Aveiro or Melbourne!
We are not sure if you noticed one of the major changes of this year’s PLE Conference. Well, it is pretty easy to explain. After reviewing all the events of the conference and how we could make them more open and participative we came to the conclusion that the only event in which participants don’t have a major role is in choosing keynote speakers.
And that’s the main reason we decided to go a step further and let the participants themselves propose the keynote speakers for day 2 of the conference in the Aveiro venue. It is an easy process: when you submit an abstract to the conference you’ll just have to add two names that, as a team, you believe could have an awesome performance as keynote speakers. Ideally all proposals should be gender balanced (i.e. a team composed by a man and a woman) and preferably from different countries.
Now for the q&a: can you propose yourself as a keynote speaker? Of course you can! Can you propose other person and not include yourself? Sure you can. Do you have to propose names that are coming to the conference? Not necessarily although that could help with the logistics.
And that’s it. Please begin the thinking process and help us choose the best keynoters for day 2!
[This is a cross-post from Joyce’s blog at www.cats-pyjamas.net]
I’m really looking forward to the PLE Conference 11-13 July 2012. The conference continues to innovate in many ways. Organisationally we’ve expanded the conference to two locations, Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia and Universidade de Aveiro in Portugal, spreading the opportunity for sharing scholarship around the PLN and PLE topics and effectively making this a blended conference. How neat! (Of course, one of the venue organisers for Melbourne is yours truly so I’m a little bias…;-))
The two locations have a joint Call for Papers out with the closing date for abstracts on 16 March 2012, and the deadline for final papers on 13 May 2012. I’m hoping to encourage you all to write an abstract, submit it and join us!
I was very lucky to attend the first PLE Conference in Barcelona and some firsts are simply things which cannot be guaranteed for subsequent events. This first iteration was a veritable who’s who of networked learning with Alec Couros, Steve Wheeler, Graham Atwell, Ilona Buchem and many others in the field attending. Besides the excitement of this, it being the first conference, it also meant that much of the PLE work presented, was completely new to the other attendees. So it was like finding a treasure trove of PLE/PLN research. Also Ricardo Torres Kompen was just the best venue organiser/host, his attention to detail and calmness without peer.
So what are elements of the PLE Conference that continue to make it THE event for any networked scholar/educator to attend? 
Well some of us “PLE goers” have shared our experiences and reasons on this Corkboard for you to read. But I thought I would expand on my reasons below, using some of the artefacts I collected in 2010.
1. Connecting with those you are already connected with
I’m a Twitter evangelist, and an enthousiastic Facebook user. I love communicating with social media because they allow me to connect with like-minded people, people who intersect my interest niche. And I love it whenever I meet these people in real life (so much so that I’ve got a So you’re real after all! set on Flickr). Not because of the coincidence, nor the look-who-I-met factor, but because thanks to social media filtering, it is always an intense and very enjoyable occasion to meet one of these connections. We have so much to say and share with each other, and can build so much on each other’s ideas in a very short time, fueling our interests and thinking until we meet again. All of the people at the PLE Conference are of this variety. Alec Couros touches on this too in the interview I did with him.
It’s been really neat that people who have been connected over years, you yourself included, someone I haven’t had a chance to meet … Actually, you build a sense of friendship over a long time… and when you actually get to meet each other,… you can get right to the sort-of deep conversations. Because these deep conversations have been going on for a long time. That’s really the difference with the dry academic sterile type conference…When you come to a place, you can actually just get to the matter, get to the content that you’re looking for. I think that’s really quite powerful. – Alec Couros
2. This is a growing field!
Personal learning environments, personal learning networks, networked learning. It’s all very new but maturing rapidly. In his video interview Graham talks about 5 or 6 years old and PLE scholarship needing some space to come of age.
Sometimes, the discourse and the dialogue … around PLEs tends to gets lost in the big conferences, and especially tends to get lost behind educational technology, and I don’t see PLEs as being primarily about educational technology. – Graham Atwell
3. Now in the Southern Hemisphere!
In 2010 Colin Warren and I (pictured here) were 2 out of maybe 6 Asia-Pacific participants. Most of the research presented was conducted in Europe, in the European context, with European funding models, in European higher education institutions. Of course, Asian, Pacific, Australian and New Zealand organisations work in different contexts, with different funding models, different education systems, policies, cultural differences, geographical differences, etc. So our uses, considerations and views of PLEs, PLNs and personalized learning will be different too. Having the PLE Conference in Melbourne, allows more people outside Europe to contribute to the body of work.
4. Anything goes
If you’re tired of traditional paper presentations, would like to try a different approach, a PLE Conference is the ideal place to mix it up . In her video interview, co-organiser of the 2010 conference Cristina Costa says:
We wanted to challenge how conferences have been done for decades.
And they did:
The conference organisers are using the successes above to inspire this year’s event, but we also have a call out for you to put your thinking caps on and devise other presentation options. Your imagination will be the limit…
5. Creativity is rewarded (and very much appreciated)
As you can see from some of the examples I gave above, creativity is rewarded and appreciated at a PLE Conference. In fact, it starts right as you walk in the door and create your own badge (or put on the one you made earlier). After all, what is more personal than how you introduce yourself to others?
PLE Conference Badges, a gallery on Flickr.
And this theme of personalization and creativity runs through the whole conference. Whereas traditional conferences leave behind only a few torn paper posters, crumpled standard badges and a thick book of proceedings (most of the time only available to attendees and those who pay for access), the PLE Conference leaves in its wake a trail of open artefacts, like a rich twitter archive, YouTube and Vimeo videos, blog posts by the participants, Flickr photos documenting the event, creative slidedecks on Slideshare, and collectively taken notes in Google Docs. We look forward to seeing where you take it this year…
6. You can be on your iPhone and not be rude
And last but not least, at a PLE Conference, everyone is like you. We are all committed to monitoring our streams, to finding those juicy tidbits, to sharing what we hear, to publicly posing our questions or comments. And so it is perfectly all right for you to whip out your iPhone, smartphone, iPad or whatever device of your choice, in the middle of a conversation. In fact, we encourage it. After all, you’re amplifying and sharing what we’re all learning about PLEs, aren’t you?
See you all in July!
Well since this is a participatory conference, we’re asking you all to join in – add your post-it here and let future participants know what they can gain from engaging with the PLE conference, whether they choose to participate online, in Melbourne or Aveiro.
The board is open so please share your view of the PLE experience: What do you get out of attending? Why would you like to go? What do look forward to at the PLE conference 2012?
Check out the board and get inspired – there’s already a lot of good reasons why you should join us in Aveiro, Melbourne or online for the #PLEconf 2012
When we first launched the PLE conference we wanted to do something different. “Why is it that the best part of conferences is the time you spend with colleagues outside the conference?”, we asked. “How can we make the conference sessions as entertaining as the social?” “How can we encourage people to learn from each other, rather than sitting passively watching powerpoint slides?”
And we wanted the conference to be open and accessible to as many interested people as possible including young researchers.
At the same time we realised that formal paper submissions were important in gaining support from universities for travel and attendance at the conference. We also acknowledged that journal publications remain important for career development for many researchers.
So we tried to balance all these things. We issued a call for formal paper proposals but at the same time encouraged submissions in other formats – workshops, bring-a laptop demos, and pecha keucha sessions. And when we were designing the programme we tried to build in unconferencing sessions as well as more traditional formats. We also said that even if you submit a formal paper, you can still use less traditional ways of delivering that paper. We tried to support people in working together in collaborative sessions. We also invented the unkeynotes where keynote speakers were challenged themselves to find new and collaborative ways of engaging with the audience.
Even small things can make a difference. Rather than provide the usual uniform conference badges we asked participants to make their own, to reflect their PLEs.
It seems to have worked. The PLE conference is not the biggest educational technology event, neither would we want it to be. But feedback constantly refers to the warmth of the atmosphere, the mutual support and the intensity of the learning experience.
2012 sees the third PLE conference, building on the previous events in Barcelona and Southampton. And yet again this year we want to push out the boundaries – to do something new. So this year conference takes place not in one venue but in two. And although the venues are interlinked by people and personal networks they are geographically a long distance apart. The conference will take place in Aveiro in Portugal and in Melbourne in Australia on 11 – 13 July 2012. Both events share a common organising committee and call for proposals. Both events will share common electronic spaces and spaces for networking. And we are hoping that despite the time differences we will be able to share some of the sessions through the use of technology.
One conference – two venues – PLE2012 is going to be a lot of fun.
