Cheryl and I have both got papers on the programme for the ELFAsia 2013 conference at Hong Kong Baptist University. It’s great to be back to this fantastic conference again after last year’s forum in Beijing. It’s really refreshing to come to a conference where there are so many folks from Universities across Asia to hear what’s going on here. Seeing how colleagues cope with really huge economies of scale in the Chinese Universities is an important reminder of how small our cohorts are in he UK and what we are competing with in terms of efficiency and what we have to offer in terms of close student contact and support.

Highlights for me have been:

– the plenary given by Dr Eva Wong and Dr Leevan Ling from HKBU. The amazing work they have done here to design and build a graduate attributes structure is truly impressive. This is the kind of ‘bigger picture’ that our work on the EBEAM project wants to slot into. She acknowledges that these are early days. As I mentioned to her over a coffee break: they have some of the jigsaw puzzle pieces that we don’t have and we think we have some of the others that they don’t have.
– the keynote from Mark Pegrum at U of Western Australia on mobile learning. What really made this paper stand out from the crowd of the hundreds of others that I’ve heard on the topic is just how well theorised it was. He offered some exciting case studies – but it left me reflecting that the things that we are going to be assessing in the future will be very different to how things are today. Finding ways to manage all of this material in an EAM that doesn’t make academics collapse under the strain is vital.