NHS takes part in Twitter interview: NHS Salford’s Head of Communications discussed how the public sector is making use of new media. http://www.nma.co.uk/news/nhs-to-take-part-in-twitter-interview-on-reputation-online/3014745.article

Nintendo and Sony show competing 3D visions at convention: Nintendo reveals handheld 3D experience while Sony aims for the 3D TV market.  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/16/technology/16sony.html?src=me&ref=technology

Social networks and blogs now account for 1 in every 4.5 minutes online: A breakdown of the most visited online brand and social media usage internationally.  http://bit.ly/aGy26A

New app helps charities make more money online: The app lets people see their donation by dragging coins into a collection box.  http://mashable.com/2010/06/17/nadanu/

BBC iPlayer viewer numbers reach 95m in May: BBC saw a surge in people using iPlayer, mainly due to general election coverage.  http://www.nma.co.uk/7m-more-people-access-bbc-iplayer-via-computer/3014757.article

3D, fundraising, social networking, Twitter, video

More from the blogosphere…

More details of Acer’s tablet emerge. CEO says 7-inch iPad rival will be released in the fourth quarter of this year.  http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/27/acer-ceo-teases-7-inch-android-tablet-promises-it-for-q4-2010/

Red Letter Day’s launches online community. Gift experience company Red Letter Days is launching its first online community to support a national competition running for its 21st birthday.  http://www.nma.co.uk/news/red-letter-days-launches-online-community/3013956.article

Be Curious Tour 2010 offering digital media masterclasses to anyone on their route. Ewan McIntosh is offering classes to anyone he passes on his road trip of North America.  http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2010/05/becurioustour-us-tour-2010.html

Intercontinental Hotels launches iPhone app. To promote the app, they are offering bonuses for consumers who book rooms using the application.  http://news.carrentals.co.uk/intercontinental-hotels-launches-iphone-app-34211334.html

National Geographic Maps: Tools for adventure making big waves in schools. New e-learning page lets students learn to use maps to find their way, share information, look at patterns, and solve problems in the classroom.  http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=2467

blogs, iPhone, learning, tablet

Wednesday 13^th January sees this year’s BETT Show roll into town. Housed within London’s cavernous Olympia and playing host to 600 exhibitors and almost 30,000 visitors, BETT is the largest educational technology conference in the world.

Every year BETT gives teachers and those involved in education the opportunity to enhance their knowledge of learning through technology. We will be there, catching up with friends, partners and clients – and investigating some of the new developments at the start of an exciting new decade for ICT in education.

The central theme that seems to be coming out of the build up to BETT 2010 is playfulness. Professor Stephen Heppell will be running a new feature at the expo entitled ‘Playful Learning’ – an interactive area where visitors can immerse themselves in educational gaming at its best and use fun technology to overcome learner engagement issues.

Prof Heppell points out that “survey after survey suggests that our UK schoolchildren may be some of the least happy in Europe” and thinks he has the solution: “Playful learning is great fun and has re-energised classrooms, rekindled school-parent relationships and re-engaged brains.”

Other new features for BETT 2010 include the Future Learning Spaces area, which will give visitors a glimpse of what classrooms could look like in several years’ time, and TeachMeet Takeover – thirty minute slots when vendors hand over their stalls to informal, teacher-led discussions.

BETT 2010 looks set to reflect the trends and developments of the past year. The last twelve months has seen the continued rise of social media, and particularly the explosion of Twitter into the mainstream. There has been a degree of acceptance that these media are valid forms of communication for children and young people, with suggestions that they can improve confidence and literacy.

The prominence of these topics is reflected in the seminar programme at the event. Other significant issues of the past year include augmented reality (AR) and eSafety. The former is represented by Futurelab’s Spark, a mobile exhibition which uses 2D AR markers to enhance pupils’ experience in the classroom. Meanwhile Roar Educate’s Us Online seeks to educate pupils on safety, security and good citizenship in the online world.

The Government’s Home Access scheme is being formally launched at BETT 2010. A trial of the scheme – which will seek to remedy the ‘digital divide’ by providing 270,000 low income homes with computers and internet access – “went like a rocket” according to Becta, the government agency in charge of it. The scheme is exciting news for all those working with ICT in education – but it is likely to cause controversy given the state of the economy as a general election approaches.

We will be helping our good friends at QCDA. Since last year’s event we have been working hard together on mycurriculum.com, a website which allows teachers to connect and collaborate with each other by discussing best practice and sharing resources, activities and examples of pupils’ work. QCDA will be showcasing the site on two of their four ‘pods’ so come and check it out at Stand J30.

See you there!

BESA, BETT, BETT 2010, conference, Education, event, exhibition, expo, ICT, schools, technology

On 30th June Channel 4 education hosted “What Comes Next?”, its summer conference.  The attendees were what Flux calls “an eclectic mix of digital media and education professionals“, and the day was characterised by an inspiring degree of enthusiasm from both audience and speakers alike.  Below are some soundbites which stuck out in my head – not necessarily direct quotes, these snippets may have fallen victim to my unreliable memory and atrocious handwriting:

‘Culture eats strategy for Breakfast’

Zenna Atkins, Chair of Ofsted, impressed upon us that government can come up with strategy until it’’s blue in the face, but unless a culture is nurtured in which that strategy can flourish, be that an approach to education or anything else, it’’s fighting a losing battle from the off.  I couldn”t agree more.  But creating that culture is a problem of complexity and sophistication, as I”m sure Zenna realises.  It might be politically naive of me to suggest this, but I imagine a great deal of strategy aims at precisely that.

I was also struck by one thing that she said might characterise the future – an increasing modularity of life.  That is to say, a movement away from a life split into dedicated chunks of work, rest and play.  We”ll all be alternating between them much more rapidly, to the point where we”re mostly doing all three at the same time.  I was under the impression that this was just how idiot twenty somethings like me lived.  It’’s reassuring, in a way, that this is a wider phenomenon.

“We are built for face to face interaction…

…and technology provides a barrier to that.”

Or so says Shaun Bailey, co-founder of My Generation, and a prospective Conservative Candidate for the constituency of Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush.  The idea being that as a species, human beings are best at talking to each other face to face – which is an easy thing to forget when you”re playing Call of Duty 4 live with people in Beijing, Toronto and Johannesburg, all at the same time.  I”m always wary, though, of the picture so often painted of people permanently plugged into machines alone in darkened rooms whilst the sun shines brightly in an outside, personal and social world which they have left behind.  In addition to facilitating long distance communication, technology also gives rise to curious idiosyncracies in face to face encounters, like the way in which we watch  youtube with our friends.  I”ll grant that Shaun was simply recommending caution (he himself admits that technology is a wonderful thing), but I don”t think the slope is quite that slippery.

“The picture of me sitting around watching TV with the family is an anomaly.”

David Smith, Head of ICT at St Paul’’s School, Barnes, (who I have since had the pleasure of talking to in person), suggested that the kind of collaboration and crowd generated content, that has characterised Web 2.0,  is a return to form.  Curiously reminiscent of Tim Berners-Lee”’’s comments that so-called web 2.0 was what the internet was for all along.  David went on to describe some very interesting things that his students have been doing with facebook to complement lessons.  When it’’s so simple to set up a facebook group to allow pupils to collaborate on classroom assignments, you have to wonder whether the case against schools banning the site has gained a little more weight.

‘Pumping technology into classrooms for no reason is an awful idea.

Using technology to promote learning outside of the classroom, is a good idea.’

Donald Clark, co-founder of Epic Group and hailed as an e-learning expert, attacked what many would call technological development in the classroom with alarming ferocity.  I agree that  “technology”, a word which I”ve often found myself saying so many times I barely know what it means any more, is often thought of as an educational panacea;  it’’s an attitude like that which means schools get kitted out with interactive whiteboards with no training for staff, and there are apparently plans for electronic tablet desks to be introduced too, which Donald found witheringly laughable.  I admire his fervour and agree with his views.  I also find him a little scary.

No tags

Are bank bonuses and MP expenses just sensationalist news fodder or genuinely a sign of our times? Do we live in a time without morals?

These and other questions will be debated at the UK’s first philosophy and music festival which takes place in Hay on Wye on 22nd-31st May (at the same time as the Hay Literary Festival). It is organised by our sister organisation, the Institute of Art and Ideas. OCC has designed the festival website.

With the overall theme: ‘Crunch. Values and Belief in a new era’ the Philosophy Sessions examine where we are and where we might go from here.  The festival brings together a celebrated cast of speakers including philosophers Simon Blackburn, Susan Neiman, AC Grayling, sociologists Steve Fuller, Zygmunt Bauman, and political theorists Will Hutton, Phillip Blond, Geoff Mulgan.  Evenings are host to musical sets from performers including Michael Nyman, Baka Beyond, Stephen Fretwell and many more; as well as daily comedy sketches come from the likes of Ed Aczel and Robin Ince. For more information or to book tickets visit www.howthelightgetsin.org.

You can become a fan of the festival on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/pages/hay-on-wye/How-the-light-gets-in-festival-at-hay-2009/ and for those who tweet, you can follow us on Twitter on http://twitter.com/howthelightgets.

No tags

So.  The BETT show is over.  Online CC spent a great deal of time at the event, which for the second year in a row struck me as an unholy marriage of a livestock pen and a telesales call.  I only spent a day at Olympia, but the experience sapped my strength so much that it felt like a week.

I don’t have much of a problem admitting that I didn’t like BETT – it seems to be pretty much unanimously agreed by everyone I spoke to there that time at a show like BETT takes its toll; which isn’t to say that the whole thing is pointless or uninteresting of course.  It’s a very good thing for people in the industry to get together like this, and every year some real gems come up, which  make the over-priced refreshments and crawling through Learning Management Software stands worth it.

Take Rafi.ki, for example. Rafi.ki is an online learning community which builds partnerships between schools all over the world.  Pupils exchange information with one another, embark on projects together, and make friends.  Simple?  Yes.  Worthwhile?  Undoubtedly.  Successful?  It seems so.  The gent on the stand (one John Macnutt, lovely guy) pointed out that on facebook, most children simply collect people who are already their friends and remain in those groups.  Here was something that allowed children to make new friends, and work together on projects that can be extremely valuable.

Or Roar Educate’s  “Us Online“, an ‘online learning module’ which allows children to learn about what exactly you can do on the internet, via the experience of a set of fictional characters.  I saw a demonstrator show how a learner can help a girl set up a myspace page, from choosing her screen name and picture to making friends; and it’s only once you’ve set up a profile picture of the character in her underwear and befriendied a suspicious individual called fluffybunny73 who says he ‘likes to play’ that the program takes you step by step through what you’ve done that might have gotten you into such a situation.  This kind of digital literacy is working its way up the agenda as people accept that things like Myspace are now a fact of life, and learning through experience and simulation is a great way to get across the idea that your actions in the digital realm are not without consequences.

Or Pixton, a really fun site that allows people to (fairly) easily create and share their own webcomics.  I don’t know a great deal about ‘Pixton for Schools‘, but there’s been a lot of talk about video games’ ability to present content to children.  Comics, as another staple of my youth, show real potential to do the same.

Rambling around the upper levels I stumbled across some charming gents from Rolling Sound, who run multimedia courses for schools, community groups and young people ‘at risk’.  Roll 7 is a recent expansion of Rolling Sound, and are a company making socially responsible video games, actively recruiting from the young people that complete courses at Rolling Sound.  Their flagship piece is a game called ‘Dead Ends‘, which managed to make it onto Channel 4 News in its treatment of knife crime.  It’s even got Jon Snow in it.   I also almost tripped over Serious Games Interactive’s very small stall; these guys make a series of games called ‘Global Conflicts’, which aim to inform on the (extremely complex) issues behind some of the most intractable and damaging conflicts in the world.  As ever, I’m a sucker for video games and so must admit to taking a disproportionate amount of interest in stalls like this…

Finally, I did a double take at the back of Olympia Grand Hall when I walked a stand where grown men and women seemed to be playing Dance Dance Revolution on the kind of wet-pour rubber surface that you get on playground floors.  It turned out to be Smartus by Lappset, an intriguing hybrid of digital game based learning and physical exercise – whether it’s stepping on marked tiles in the right order, or running round posts as quickly as you can, Smartus has developed installations for playgrounds or indoor halls which have children taking orders from weather friendly consoles.  Though I didn’t partake myself, I imagine it to be like performing mental arithmetic whilst playing ‘tag’.

I’m not sure I like the sound of that.

BETT, marketing, Publishing

Last week Online ventured north to the 2008 Scottish Learning Festival … always worth the trip because of the buzz around the show (and the fact that it’s far more manageable than London’s rather overwhelming BETT show).

The show itself is ok, but the talks, meetings (e.g. Teachmeet) and case studies on offer around the festival is where the good stuff happens. Channel 4 was there to showcase their latest education projects (e.g. The Insiders), and LT Scotland impressed with their attitude towards and demonstrable results of the use of commercial games in schools. Who knew that the Nintendo Wii and games such as ‘Endless Ocean’ could be such an effective learning tool! LT Scotland’s Derek Robertson clearly does and has been busy ‘evangelising’ and persuading students, teachers and parents through his work at the Sottish Centre for Games and Learning – Consolarium. He has just been nominated for special achievement award at the upcoming Handheld Learning show, and I can see why.

They even found time to organise a Guitar Hero competition between schools on Glow, Scotland’s national learning ‘intranet’, with the final taking place at the show, which livened things up a bit.

Even a talk on classroom voting technologies and devices proved to be a lot more interesting than expected. These things have moved on a lot since I last paid attention to them. In fact they do their best to appear and function much like a mobile phone. How long, I wonder, before students will be able (and allowed) to use their own phones?

learning, technology, Wii