Terry Anderson

** You are receiving this message because you were registered in the May, 2008 online conference: Shaping Our Future: Toward a Pan-Canadian E-leaning Research Agenda **

Dear Participants:

It is now a year since we talked, typed, and listened to each other during our online consultation - Shaping Our Future: Toward a Pan-Canadian E-leaning Research Agenda.

The publication by the Canada Council on Learning's State of E-learning in Canada 2009 report on May 21, 2009 reminded us of the importance of a Pan-Canadian research agenda, and that we had not really publicized the result of this work. The final report on the conference is available at
http://scope.bccampus.ca/mod/resource/view.php?id=1891 (PDF 1.4 MB).

We hope you will find the report of value and forward the link to those who may find it of interest.

Obviously much is happening related to e-learning in Canada but as many commentators reacting to the CCL report noted, there is much left to be done - not the least of which is solid research, using multiple methods and informing many communities.

Here are some noteworthy blog posts in response to the CCL report:

http://terrya.edublogs.org/2009/05/25/canadas-lost-e-learning-decade/
http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=49069
http://www.brandon-hall.com/workplacelearningtoday/?p=4984

If you have suggestions about next steps for continuing our dialogue together, contact us or drop a note in the "One year later" forum on the SOF2008 conference site.

From your SOF2008 conference facilitators,

Terry Anderson, terrya@athabascau.ca
George Siemens, george_siemens@umanitoba.ca
Sylvia Currie, scurrie@bccampus.ca
Paul Stacey, pstacey@bccampus.ca

(Edited by Sylvia Currie - original submission Monday, 8 June 2009, 02:43 PM)

I hope that many of the 235 registrants to this conference will join us for a brief wrap up tomorrow morning on Elluminate. But I realize that a few of us have other responsibilities, so I wanted to begin an asynch reflection thread.

First a thanks for all of you for hanging in!! Having 356 messages- (make that 357 messages with this one), descend into one's email or RSS box, can be a bit overwhelming. We were a bit "all over the place" but we wanted to keep the discussion as open as possible, and so did very little overt or heavy handed moderating. Thanks for your contributions, your attention and your patience!

Thanks as well to Sylvia, George and Paul for their energies and talents facilitating the show, to SCoPE and BC campus for hosting us and Elluminate for the real-time room. And finally a big thank you to our 6 key note presenters!

We didn't get a complete and polished Research Agenda (yet!) but we didn't spend nearly the time or MONEY that the Irish did , and I think we made progress. I have a better understanding of the issues and complexity of developing and coordinating work among a wide group of committed yet divergent researchers and practitioners. As well we leave a legacy of an agenda in progress (still time to edit those WIKI pages ), the archives of some great discussions and presentations. And hopefully each of you knows a few more colleagues with whom you can turn to for support and ideas in future endeavors.

We intend to leave the wiki and this site operational for at least a few more weeks, but wanted to formally end the conference after three weeks as promised. Thus, we plan to close the discussion forums early next week.

We would like to ask each of you to take the time to complete the online survey. It will help us get a sense of who we are as a community and of your suggestions, interests and priorities. If you have comments or thoughts outside of the survey questions, which you would like to share with the organizers, just use any open ended question to voice your ideas. They will be read!

Till tomorrow!
Terry

It was suggested during George and heather's talk that it might be useful to generate a formal declaration from this conference. It COULD be modelled after the Open Educational Resources document produced by an informal group in Capetown last year.

Such a declaration may generate interest , blog response and even press attention (as noted by Gilbert). But it may seem a bit pretentious and we would have to be careful of the wording.

I'd like to get a few opinions on the value of making such a public statement, before we try to see if we can reach a consensus on the content. Would you find such a document useful? Useful to whom?

Thanks
Terry

George, Paul and I met this morning to draft a schedule for our final week of this conference. A online conference, by definition has an end point. However, we do want to create an artifact document, to consolidate our deliberations and learning during these three weeks- as well as to serve a number of promotion and education functions. We are also thinking how best to insure that the e-learning research network developed during the past few weeks can keep evolving.

So we are gathering a number of graphical overviews previously or about to be posted (try your hand!!) that will help serve as a "table of contents" for a wiki generated final report. We then invite all of you to add or document ideas you either proposed, or were generated during the presentations or discussions.

We will be meeting on Monday morning (same Elluminate room) at the usual (10:00Am mountain time) to discuss the broad components and organization of the final document. We especially invite those with time and energy to help with this important part of the project this week.

During the week, we will be building the document and will use the Moodle forum to document progress and discuss emergent issues.

We will meet a final session next Friday (same time, same place) to celebrate our accomplishments and talk about next steps.

Enjoy the weekend and come back Monday!!!

We heard of number of discussions in Gilbert's talk about the challenges of working and funding both practitioners and academic researchers. Obviously action research by and for practitioners is one model noted by a number of text messages. There is also design based research that usually engages both professional researchers and those active in a specific education context.

A pan Canadian e-learning research agenda, should have a place for both, but also mechanisms to increased the effectiveness of their knowledge development, sharing and 'mobilization'.

Have you suggestions or concerns that we should specifically mention in our agenda related to this necessary, but often challenging partnership?