Image from OEB website 2019

It’s been a few years since I last spoke at Online Educa in Berlin (OEB). It’s one of my favourite European cities, and I took my wife there last Christmas for a short break. I have fond memories of OEB, including the Marlene (Dietrich) Bar, live lounge piano entertainment, some great keynote speakers, some excellent food and great company…. and the endless rows of vendors, all trying to flog you something. I also remember the Christmas lights, wrapping up warm, and of course the gluhwein and frankfurters at the Christmas markets (sehr schön!), especially around the old Gedächtniskirche in Ku’Damm. Most of all I remember the icy cold wind because OEB is always hosted around the last few weeks before the festivities. Usually the snow and ice were magical but sometimes they could be an absolute menace if the conditions were right.

My first appearance at the event was way back in 1998, and I think I spoke there on at least half a dozen other occasions. But it has been several years since I last attended OEB. It was my great joy then, to be invited to give not one, but two presentations for the event this year. The first, in conjunction with EADL will be a workshop on the future of distance education, where I will focus on the new technologies, theories and practices that are emerging in this field. This will be on the pre-conference afternoon, Wednesday 27 November (Session A5).

My second, is an invited Spotlight presentation for the main conference on the following day, Thursday 28th in the afternoon. This session will be more focused on corporate learning and development, where I will examine work based learning and digital transformation of organisations. In preparation for these presentations I was invited to write a short piece for the OEB newsletter. The link is here for further reading. It’s called ‘Is there time for learning in the workplace?’

Back to Berlin by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.