It has been quite a while since I last posted on this blog, but a lot has happened, including my falling ill with a virus infection. I tested positive for Covid-19 and then spent just over a month slowly recovering, but I’m now hopefully on the mend. I did hear a young lad not so long back ask his Mum if she’d had to live through the previous 18 Covid outbreaks. Perish the thought. 

Yesterday was a great first session of Online Educa Berlin’s virtual event. Ironically, although OEB has traded on its ‘Online’ moniker for three decades, this was the first fully online event, and the organisers have to be congratulated on their swift organisation after being forced to take this route. It’s not the same as sitting with other delegates at the Hotel Intercontinental on Budapesterstrasse or experiencing the chill air and the glittering lights on Ku-Damm, or sampling the gluhwein in the wonderful Weihnachstmarken but it’s the next best thing. Perhaps in future OEB events, the organisers will create a more hybrid conference where online and f2f sessions combine seamlessly. We shall see.

The sessions I saw and participated in, including a lively and insightful keynote session from OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, ably chaired by the ever urbane Donald H Taylor, and sessions on online learning protocols and strategies during Covid-19 from old friends Gila Kurtz and Eran Gal (Israel) and the future of education with Gilly Salmon (UK) and Ulf-Daniel Ehlers (Germany) were engaging, thought provoking and informative. 

A lot has been crammed into OEB 2020, which is probably why it’s being held over 5 days instead of the traditional 3 days. I will continue to participate in the next few days in between my online tutorial sessions with my own students, and will enjoy the presentations and interactions, but it will be a welcome relief to meet people face to face again next year at OEB 2021 in Berlin, between December 1-3.  

#OEB20 by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.