We have the technology. We have the capability… all we need is love is the title of the talk I gave at the Future of Technology in Education 2010 on Friday.
FOTE10 is more technology focussed then many of the events I attend but my talk concentrated on teachers/lecturers and their importance in the successful implementation of educational technologies. My talk in brief:
We have the technology
The technology is here and continues to arrive and has great potential uses in education. But teachers don’t fully utilise what we already have and understanding why is necessary to ensure we realise the full benefits of future technologies for education.
Yesterday Steve Wheeler raised a two fingered salute to open another chapter in the ongoing VLE-PLE debate (see VLE vs PLE fight club for an earlier installment). It’s an excellent post but I’m not wholly convinced.
Firstly, some points that Steve and I probably agree upon:
Personal Webs have an important & central role in the future of technology enhanced learning
Wherever appropriate teachers should be given freedom to teach with the web technologies of their choosing
Students should also be encouraged to use the web technologies of their own choosing to support their learning
More focus is needed on the teaching activities and not the tools that enable them
However, unlike Steve, I believe that VLEs (institutionally managed webs for teaching & learning) are here to stay and have an important role in the future:
Not all teachers are tech-savvy ‘edupunks’. Many are not interested in developing and teaching with their own personal webs. Some would need considerable support to do so. This will undoubtedly change over time but for a good while to come many teachers want to be provided with a single, simple, managed & supported platform. Read more…
Yesterday at a staff development session for teachers I asked the following question both within the room and via Twitter, ‘Describe the Future of ICTs in Education… in one word’
I received several answers in the room and within 10-minutes had 16 from Twitter, which I think impressed the participants! (“Now I get Twitter!”) All these answers are combined with the ones from my presentation slides in this Wordle.
Anything you’d like to add? It was a very interesting exercise both in terms of how well it worked as a twitter demonstration but also in terms of the answers.
Microsoft Surface
My presentation was followed by a very interesting one by Gordon Rimmer from the education arm of Microsoft. I may say more about this later but for now a video that took me by suprise as one of the teachers in it is a school friend! So absolutely must be embedded below! And also gives me a great excuse to share the Microsoft Surface parody video too!
A report into “the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies”, Higher Education in a Web2.0 World was published last week.
Both staff and students, according to the report, are struggling to see how social web technologies can be applied to learning. It also highlights that face-to-face teaching really matters to students and I’m pretty certain this is true of teachers too!
However, the report suggests that there is a digital divide between students and teaching staff in terms of more general usage of social technologies. While this is undoubtedly true to a certain extent, there is also a danger of overstating it. It’s like the digital native – digital immigrant labelling, it just isn’t that simple. Many students don’t engage with digital technologies and many teachers do.
Anyway, there is a need, as the report indicates, for staff to:
be technically proficient, i.e. capable of using social web technologies
make effective use of these technologies for teaching/learning (effective e-pedagogies)
keep up-to-date with ongoing developments as web-based ‘resources’ continue to grow
The report goes on to suggest that students could help with this. There is some mileage in this, particularly for 1). But in terms of e-pedagogies it seems more likely that for a while to come students will continue to look to teachers for this?
This morning I delivered a talk on the future of e-learning! I was unusually apprehensive before I started – no familiar faces in the audience, a sector I have limited knowledge of (schools) and a topic that took me slightly out of my comfort zone. I felt it went well though and received some complementary feedback and one offer of work, so not all bad!
My slides are below and along with the presentation links you’ll get a flavour of my themes: open education, participation (communication, collaboration & creation), mobile learning and personalisation. Of course you are missing the real meat, mine & the participants’ voices – but you’ll get the idea. And you can ignore the govt strategy stuff… paid it lip service!
The technology in the room looked state of the art but unfortunately failed to deliver… my attempt to show the Google video below was prevented (I think) by a slow Internet connection, youtube was blocked completely! The room layout, presenter podium and the dual-projection interactive whiteboard were a big let down:
Dual-projection – absolute overkill for a room the size of double garage.
Interactive whiteboard – I have little time for them so didn’t go there but as the next presenter discovered it wasn’t configured/orientated correctly so ultimately unusable.
Podium – too small for the keyboard & mouse to sit side-by-side. No monitor on it, making it impossible to face my audience while doing the demonstration bits and because of the dual projection / room layout I couldn’t actually see the right-hand side of the screen.
It’s such a shame when the technology gets in the way but today it really didn’t need to… a simple PC / data projector with decent, un-filtered Internet access was all I wanted. Oh well, take some inspiration from Buckingham Primary School…
A couple of weeks ago I was in the audience of BBC Radio 4′s Any Questions? Afterwards, once I’d finished admiring Theresa May’s boots, I was chatting, as you do, to a real-life Secretary of State. We started off on safe ground talking about his dad. Once that was covered, I was asked, ‘what do you do?’; Learning Technologist I say, after which an explanation was not unsurprisingly required. Now, it may well be the way I tell ‘em but the Secretary of State was struck dumb and an awkward silence ensued. I kid you not.
Yesterday I attended another M25 meeting where we discussed the varying structures and strategies that our institutions have adopted for developing the use of learning technologies. Speakers from Imperial (or Imperial), City, UEL, LondonMet & LSE showed just how varied the structures, strategies, approaches and levels of funding are. Read more…
Michael Wesch is a Cultural Anthropologist who explores the “impacts of new media on human interaction”. He’s probably best-known for his Web2.0 in 5-mins YouTube video: The Machine is Us/ing Us It has been viewed around 6-million times and has received 20-thousand user ratings and 7000 comments… If you’ve not seen it or any of his other short videos then take a look on YouTube.
Last month he gave the following talk entitled A Portal to Media Literacy at a University of Manitoba conference.
It’s just over an hour and well worth finding time to watch the whole thing. Alternatively, below’s a rough breakdown of what he covers so you can dip in: Read more…
First post since my hols (very nice, thank you!) and I’m flagging up something I found before I hit the beach which follows on from my Future Technologies post.
Scott Leslie has shared his recent presentation on the 2008 Horizon Report – 6 technologies on the horizon for educational institutions. There is also a wiki page with links to explore this further. Interesting stuff. I’m still not clear on one of the long-term horizons: “Social Operating Systems” and would love someone to explain it to me but the examples that Scott lists for it look pretty cool and I’ll definitely be trying some out.
Today I’m dipping into the Eduserv Foundation symposium 2008 “Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?” via the live streaming. If you’re reading this today, join in, it’s free!
The first session of the day is/was by Larry Sanders from New Media Consortium who publish the Horizon Reports. I blogged about the 2008 Report on CLT@LSE earlier this year so if you are new to the reports take a look there or at the Horizon Project wiki.
I missed some of Larry’s talk so what’s been most interesting is how well the live webcast is working – almost feels like you are there! It’s very easy to get distracted in the office though, you need discipline for online attendance to work. There is also a live chat for the online viewers on the streaming page, which during the end-of-talk Q&As is being shown in the conference venue. So the live participants get to see our views and a questioner just referred to some comments in his question to Larry.
Larry’s used of virtual bulleted lists in SecondLife as his presentation tool was questioned both virtually and by a member of the live audience. I have to agree that it didn’t add anything and actually made reading them difficult. Technology for technology’s sake?
We have the technology. We have the capability… all we need is love is the title of the talk I gave at the Future of Technology in Education 2010 on Friday.
The first session of the day is/was by Larry Sanders from New Media Consortium who publish the Horizon Reports. I 
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