I returned from the E-Learn 2006 conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, which was from October 13-17. This was my first time to attend the E-Learn conference. I had registered to attend the tutorial sessions on Friday, (a day before the conference started for everyone). Each was scheduled for three hours. The first session I went to was "Blended Learning Situations, Solutions, and Several Stunning Surprises", by Curt Bonk, professor at Indiana University. He talked about blended learning and gave several examples etc. Obviously, I won't be able to share everything I learned there, but let me share ten trends of blended learning I learned with everyone.

Trend 1- Many institutions are using Moodle as their CMS. Moodle is a free and open source Course Management System.

Trend 2 - Web 2.0 is becoming a buzzword.

Trend 3 - Accessible technology is a big concern for blended learning. More people are getting access to technology and Internet connections that facilitate learning.

Trend 4 - The Wikipedia Revolution is emerging (this includes Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiversity, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikispecies, Wikimedia). I have used Wikipedia several times but didn't realize there were so many other types of wikis until this conference.

Trend 5 - Social Networking softwares like MySpace and Facebook are quite popular.

Trend 6 - There is a growth of Online learning in high schools. More students are taking online classes before going to college.

Trend 7 - Online books and scholarship is emerging. Textbooks are becoming available online for students to read.

Trend 8 - Digital storytelling and movie making is emerging.

Trend 9 - Podcasting and Vodcasting are appearing. Podcasts are sent through RSS feeds or aggregators and can be viewed on a portable mobile device like ipod. Vodcasting includes a video in the podcast.

Trend 10 - Video Blogging - has appeared. Here, content is distributed through video, World Wide Web, text and images, which can be viewed on mobile devices (commonly known as vlogs). After discussing the trends, Curt split us up in groups. Each group discussed from a list of models which ones they liked and provided reasons for picking those. We selected Harvey Singh's blended learning and work, models of blending and institutional-level blending. My group had two people from South Africa and it was interesting to listen to their viewpoints. Each person brought unique perspectives from their own institutions and influenced the choice of our blended learning models. We wrote down all the responses and then I presented our group's choice and the reasons for our selections to everyone. Each group that presented had selected a different model as their choice. During the second half of the tutorial we discussed possible solutions to blended learning and I won a million dollars for suggesting a possible solution. (I will show you all a picture of it, someday). I enjoyed and learned so much from the tutorial. Watch this space for more details from the conference.