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ALT Annual Conference 2015: Shaping the future of learning together – submission deadline approaching

The ALT-C 2015 Conference is at the University of Manchester 8-10 September, and will be hugely enjoyable if my experience of previous conferences is anything to go by.  Two excellent keynote speakers have been announced: Laura Czerniewycz who does great work in Open Education and Steve Wheeler , a prolific and popular blogger and tweeter.

The programme will reflect the theme of shaping and sharing learning through breaking down the traditional divisions between stakeholders and between their roles, with a focus on:

Harnessing the power of the crowd – collaboration and connectivist learning;

Social media in learning and teaching;

Open educational practice;

Learners as agents of change;

Participatory approaches to the development of learning technologies.

This has encouraged me to prepare a submission – we have until Friday 13 March.  But what has really excited me is a change to the organisation of the sessions, and to what they might lead to.  Instead of categorising them as workshops, presentations or research papers they are just sessions with clear criteria for audience engagement.  I think that can offer opportunities for creativity for presenters and audience.

There is also an open and flexible concept of education that is dear to my own heart

Here education is considered broadly and includes formal and informal learning settings in schools, colleges, universities, the workplace, homes and communities, at any stage in learners’ lives.

I recommend you to visit the web site and read the Call for Papers. I am a former editor of Research in Learning Technology, and I really welcome the shift of focus from inviting Research Papers for the Conference to supporting authors to develop the work that they present at the conference into a paper for Research in Learning Technology.  As the Call says,

This is a new opportunity we are offering this year with the intention of increasing the work showcased at the conference being published.

This is a wonderful opportunity to increase the relevance of the conference and the journal to each other. I am imagining more conference attenders writing and reading papers from RiLT and elsewhere, and exciting topics, articles and multimedia making their way from the conference to the journal.

One of the aspects that really excites me is the potential for collaboration all through the process – co-authoring the abstract, getting feedback from reviewers, presenting the session and interacting with participants, getting feedback there and via social media, co-writing a research paper, getting feedback from editor and reviewers, rewriting and finally publication, then getting feedback via social media, since RiLT is open access.  I could even recommending blogging as part of the development process – see the rich discussion around this blog post

So go on – submit a session abstract and hopefully I will see you in Manchester in September.