I don´t want to miss giving a short review on last years »Mobility Shifts« Conference at Parsons New School. Subtitled »an international Future Of Learning Summit« The well organized event assembled an interesting crowd of people that are practically and theoretically investigating on the emerging opportunities that mobile communication technologies offer for the field of education. The conference program was devided in three main sections: »Learning Without a School?«, »Digital Fluencies for a Mobile World« and »Learning from Global Digital Learning Projects«.
Many participants and speakers originated in the field of Design but a lot of other disciplines where present on stage and in the audience. Among them some heavyweights like Lew Manovich or Henry Jenkins. The way how interests, people and research fields merged in the various sessions was a highlight and showed how deeply the topic is rooted in basic societal structures. The expansive variety of approaches to the basic topic revealed interesting starting points for further deepening investigations.
Unfortunately the largely dispersed setting of conference and only few common events made it impossible get a feeling for the conference crowd as a whole, which would have been worth. The relevance of the subject and the interesting speakers line-up deserves to gain a second issue in any case.