I try to visit the Online Educa Berlin every couple of years because it is really the largest conference on e-learning. This year there was almost 2.200 participants from 108 countries. The largest delegation was naturally from the Germany but on the second place were the Danish then the Finnish and on the forth place  the British participants. I like Educa because there are lots of ways there to meet people and talk to them. Apart from exhibition booths, there are discussion session, topic lunches and informal gatherings. There are always good keynote speakers and sessions cover almost all possible topics.

This year keynote speaker was Talal Abu-Ghazaleh who talked about "Learning for All in the Digital Age". He said that changes and repairing isn’t enough, that we have to be creative and re/invent new things in education. Routine thinking isn’t enough and we should give more time to creative thinking.

Second keynote was Adrian Sannier with “The third way”. His presentation was quite a performance. He is skilled orator. He was also saying that we should reinvent the culture of traditional institutions otherwise emerging institutions will blow them away.  The only way to survive is to make cultural change in the institution. He pointed out three issues:

• Team Sport- no more individual teachers working for themselves and the only owners of specific information
• Keep score- if we prepare and design content, lectures, courses we should measure how they behave
• Fix what’s broken

 Last speaker was Charles Leadbeaterwho talked about learning strategies for changes in our approaches towards knowledge society. He shared his experience about education he gathered travelling arounf the world. In many places in the world (Africa, India, South America) education is very important as it brings, along with technology, a hope for better tomorrow for this people and they consider education almost as religion. Education provides them with choice in their lives. It made me think on Croatian education system. Have we forgot about  the importance of education? It seems that we care less about it then before. Another important issue he was talking about was that in education we should try to pull people into by motivating them and not pushing.

Afterwards I have listened presentations on the future of academic conferencing where presenters shared their experience and ideas in organizing online conferences. Especially Interested to me was conference to be held next year "Follow the Sun" as it will be fully online conferences using Adobe Connect, Second Life and Moodle.

It was interesting, are we going to abandon 2f conferences? Certainly existing model of f2f conferences (sessions with presentations) doesn't meet expectations of participants any more and there has to be more additional program and interactivity around it. Is the Online Educa going to be only online next year? 

Afterwards I moved to session on e-portfolio. I hoped there will be some talk about  using e-portoflio as the assessment tool but the main emphasis was on e-portfolio as a tool for self presentation to the future emplyers. There were statements that use of the e-portfolio increased tutors’ knowledge of learning in the other areas of course, about raising potentials of e-portfolio and so on. Presenters were mostly new in that field and that were their first experiences. I was interested especially in presentation “Mahara E-portfolio networking Platform as a Tool in RPL”

Well, you might ask what is RPL? It states for Recognizing Prior Learning. Presentation was from Helsinki University of Applied Sciences. They have started to use Maharain autumn this year and presentation was about Mahara as a very short course how to use it. They were talking about possibility to connect Moodle and Mahara and that in new Moodle 2.0 there is a possibility to export data from Moodle to Mahara. I know that the Finnish people are very advanced in the development and use of technology but in this case we (the University of Zagreb) are better. We have integrated Moodle and Mahara almost two years ago and we have single sign on. We offered this tool to the academic community and are trying to pull them into it. We have users who use it for self presentation but our focus is now to show them how it can be used in teaching and learning as an assessment tool. Well, when I shared my experience with the audience lots of them were surprised that we have been using Mahara for so long already. E-portfolio is not quite a new tool but it seems as it still has to be discovered. Discussion moved to topic of how to use it as a tool for self presentation to the employers and how to connect schools, labour market and employers.

On Friday plenaries were divided on the Academic and the Corporate sector. There was strong emphasis on the corporate sector this year and there were even sessions  called "Business Educa".

I followed the Academic plenary. I would excerpt presentation from Josie Fraser. She was talking about digital literacy's and learning communities. Did you know that number of users on the Facebook has increased from February to July this year for a 100 millions and that there were 500 million users in July ? Number is increasing rapidly. That is 19% of entire European population.

She also stated three models of literacy:

• Functional
• Socio-cultural
• Transformational

She has defined digital literacy as digital tool knowledge+critical thinking+social engagement. Digital literacy is a life long practice with skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices.

There are always a lots of exhibitors. I would say that news are exhibitors from Africa and I was positively surprised with number of Polish exhibitors and their ICT solutions.  They have developed the tool for plagiarism which can be integrated in Moodle.

I went to the Business Educa session to see how different are these session from others. I have chosen session called "Learning in three dimensions, maybe four" . Besides f2f speakers there were announced two virtual speakers. I said announced because technology misbehaved :)) We waited and waited  as they tested and tried to connect but at the end we could hear one speaker briefly through someones' notebook and that was that. They have tried to connect them through the Skye but it didn't work. Well, when we finally focused on the f2f speakers we have lost concentration. There was a presentation about games, should we be doing them at work ? Speakers says YES as they help to learn new and unlearn the old context. So everyone, get the Call of Duty and learn :))

To me, new "discovery"  is Bert de Coutere from IBM, Belgium. He has written the book on "Homo Competens" which I'm reading at the moment. He said that with virtual worlds geography is history and we have "death of distance". Well, he has certainly read Virilio. We are moving into immersive world. Also they have made training courses for their managers in SL. They have created rooms there people are sitting at the table as to make them feel as the part of the group. I especially liked the world map which they have put on the floor and participants standed on the map at the place where are coming from.