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Here at Cranfield University in deepest Bedfordshire, with no phone signal (3 network) or access to the campus wifi network; no Eduroam, so no live tweeting (lucky you). However there is a "graphic recorder" who will be sketching the event and posting the drawings on a large white board (pic to follow).

Professor David Stephenson opens the conference by asserting the entrepreneurial culture of the university. Cranfield is interesting to me for several reasons. Few universities (or Business Schools) have quite such close contacts with large, high technology manufacturing companies. Prof. Stephenson emphasises the high capabilities of the Cranfield academic community.

Dr David Walker from Dundee University is the keynote. He will be speaking about "Realising the promise of e-assessment". Which is interesting because despite their allegiance to technology in general, Cranfield is pedagogically conservative when it comes to learning technologies, preserving a techno-deterministic, content-centred view of e-learning, and an antipathy to adopting LT: just like everywhere, really. 

Walker asks a good question: where does assessment start? He will be putting forward a model of mature institutional approach to e-assessment based on the University of Dundee's experience, where Walker heads the e-assessment team, based in the Learning Resources department. E-assessment has been on the brink of transforming education for 30 years: "end-to-end electronic assessment processes where ICT is used for the presentation of assessment and the recording of responses" (JISC). Definition has broadened from MCQ. Walker emphasises the importance of curricular alignment in e-assessment. Quotes Ray Land. Walker takes a strong social constructive perspective: "Academics do not create learning, learners do."

Walker asserts that e-assessment is likely to start with summative assessment of learning, driven by efficiency needs. But, he warns, if we start here and there is no preceding formative e-assessment or e-learning activities in the curriculum there is lack of alignment. He gives the example of students typing all their essays and then having to hand-write exams. Summative assessment is high stakes activity requiring validity, reliability, credibility, fidelity, fairness and transparency. E-assessment can help in all these areas. But, high salience for the assessed and the assessors leads to high anxiety. Therefore U of Dundee encourages a lot of formative e-assessment including, reflective journals and scientific logs as well as "traditional" MCQs. He suggests a wide conceptualisation of e-assessment including the use of simple appropriate technology (VLE, Dropbox) to administer submission and MS Word insert comment to annotate scripts. If e-assessment is only thought of as MCQs, it is seen as both difficult and empoverishing.

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In light of the Gulf oil well catastrophe and the financial services collapse, I am reminded of the joke about a true believer (TB).
Neighbour comes up says, "Ain't you heard the news? Big flood coming. Better get to high ground for safety."
TB says, "My faith in god will keep me safe."
As the waters begin to rise a big truck with a loud hailer calls everyone to climb on board to safety.
TB says, "My faith in god will keep me safe."
As the water reaches the ground floor a man in a boat comes and offers a lift to safety.
TB says, "My faith in god will keep me safe."
As the water reaches the roof a helicopter drops a rope ladder and the pilot says, "Climb up to safety."
TB says, "My faith in god will keep me safe."
As the water reaches his nose he cries out, "My God! I have put all my faith in you, why have you not kept me safe?"
A booming voice from heaven says, "I set you a neighbour, I sent you a truck, I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter! What more do you want, already?

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More thoughts arising from Stephen Downes digest of the current Facebook privacy brouhaha (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52445). Ben Werdmuller von Elgg suggests that certain kinds of organisation: educational, corporate/commercial, and probably – implicitly – military/security are walled gardens which nevertheless require – or strongly desire – the social networking functionality of systems like Facebook. But, they also require reasonably secure privacy for various reasons. And many of us might want such privacy, whether we require it or not. Ben argues, rightly IMO, that this was the model that drove the adoption of federated email in the '80s. He speculates that should there be a challenge to the hegemony of Facebook, it might emerge from such organisations (http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52446).

Federated walled gardens – community gardens (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/10/goodman) is an interesting model. The UK access federation (http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/) – were it not aimed to protect publishers' and universities' privileged access to markets – provides one example. Some people defend VLEs because they provide such "safe spaces" (e.g. Michael Seery http://michaelseery.com/home/index.php/2010/04/vles-are-they-dead-or-not/ James Clay http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/category/100-ways/). The problem with such federations is that they, as yet, have insufficiently porous boundaries. You are in or you are out. There needs to be a means for members of any federation to let others from other federations to connect to them without that thereby giving access to all the other members of the federation. Would there still need to be a few "Pirate Bays" (http://thepiratebay.org/) to act as hubs? Profile directories? How would widely distributed databases of private information work in such a scenario? Facebook works well as a hub because "everyone" is there. One of the things that I liked about Diaspora (http://www.joindiaspora.com/) – still under the radar of its hype – is that they do not reject Facebook, but see it as simply a node, a federation, in a wider vision of federated social networking. A problem with the "old" Internet was that, despite the egalitarian ideology of the pioneers, it was an elite network. But, like TV in the '50s, when comm tech goes massive, the common mass (i.e. all of us) get exploited by new elites without an egalitarian ideology. This is the real dilemma of the commons, or as Žižek would have it, the communist hypothesis.

Ultimately @downes is right: critical literacy is the only "answer" (Facebook and, sadly, 4chan http://www.4chan.org/ are still posing the questions from two different perspectives). But, having worked in and around community development education for 25 years, the resilience and creativity of the powerful is awesome (and I do not use that word with sophomoric casuallness, viz Facebook), and the subjugation of the excluded would-be consumer so effectively accomplished, that at times I feel like retreating to some monastary (another walled garden) to stare at my navel and weep. Time to take a deep breath and plunge back into the estates on the margins. Because, while I might prefer to live in a communist utopia, I do not want to withdraw from the world to do so. I want to retain doubt and scepticism of even my own position. I want to hang out with my friends arguing many points, wherever they may choose to federate, and I want to be able to invite them back to mine. I want public spaces, private spaces (both commercial and personal) and all the spaces in between.

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