Round (-up) 3. Fight.

• Mobile phones and literacy in rural communities: MILLEE is studying how underprivileged children can acquire language literacy outside the classroom. http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/mobile-phones-literacy

• Nearly 5 years later, “@gmail” set for a UK comeback: After compulsory switch to cumbersome “@googlemail” because of a legal dispute, “@gmail” to become available again. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/03/gmail-uk/

• Mozilla gets it right, moves identity management into Firefox: Mozilla puts its browser in charge of your online logins through a new menu item in the main toolbar. http://www.webmonkey.com/2010/04/mozilla-gets-it-right-moves-identity-management-into-firefox/

• Apple iPad to be handled with care, publishers warned: Publishers warned that publishing opportunities for iPad will come with strings attached. http://www.nma.co.uk/news/apple-ipad-to-be-handled-with-care-publishers-warned/3012923.article

• Assessment using technology: BECTA booklet reveals that few teachers are making use of useful technology which can assess and suggest learning tasks. http://blog.core-ed.net/derek/2010/05/assessment-using-technology.html

blogs, Education, email, ipad, literacy, Mobile, Publishing, web

The second instalment…

• Is a new form of digital divide emerging?: What is the relationship between technology use and educational performance in science?
• http://andysblackhole.blogspot.com/2010/04/interested-in-biggger-picture-take-look.html

• Be the search engine: Geocaching adds an additional physical element to location-based social networking sites like Foursquare and Gowalla. 
• http://jwtto.wordpress.com/2010/04/22/be-the-search-engine/

• ePublish yourself: Not-for-profit website ePad Bud – the YouTube of children’s ebooks – is hugely motivating in the classroom.
• http://ilearntechnology.com/?p=2319

• Spotify takes aim at iTunes, befriends Facebook: Spotify upgraded its service by integrating social features to let users connect with friends and share music.
• http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/spotify-takes-aim-at-itunes-befriends-facebook/

• 100-year-old with impaired vision discovers the iPad: The intuitive way in which the iPad works seems to open doors to the elderly.
• http://edu.blogs.com/edublogs/2010/04/100-year-old-with-impaired-vision-discovers-the-ipad.html

accessibility, blogs, Education, epad, foursquare, ipad, location, spotify, Usability

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

“Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words” – Shailesh Nalawadi, Product Manager for Google Goggles.

Google’s new Goggles project allows users to gain access to information about an item or location simply by pointing their phone at it. So the phone can connect to reviews of a restaurant, the history of a landmark, or price comparisons for a book – all without any text having been inputted.

The technology works in conjunction with a mobile phone camera; the user takes a photograph of an object and the application scans it, comparing elements of that digital image against its database of images. When it finds a match, Google tells the user the name of what they’re looking at, and provides a list of results linking through to the relevant web pages and news stories.

The results can then be saved as a history, allowing the user to refer back to these links of interest. As the results are programmed to be relevant and are adjusted to each object: if the user takes a photo of an artwork, the results include the artist’’s biography; whereas for a landmark, the phone provides historical background information.

Google Goggles also uses optical character recognition to identify text, allowing items such as business cards to be snapped and scanned to make phone calls and to add as a contact in your phone directory. Some results don’t even require a photo to be taken due to integration of GPS, augmented reality and digital compass technology. Simply pointing the phone at a location (a business or shop for example) allows the app to place a button with the company name at the bottom of the screen. This can then be touched to load information from a web search.

Google Goggles demonstrates the potential for computer vision technology, but it is not at its full strength yet (hence it is being released by Google Labs). At the moment users will be able to lookup things like CD, DVD and book covers, wines, barcodes, businesses, artworks, logos and landmarks with great success but other objects will not work so well. Cars, animals and food are still in need of development to be photographically understood. Despite the immaturity of the technology, Google states that Goggles can recognise tens of millions of objects and places.

Google also claims that the technology has the potential for face recognition. So in theory a mobile phone could provide personal information on anyone in its viewfinder. Clearly this raises some pretty major privacy issues – and there are currently no plans to release this feature of Goggles. As Vic Gundotra, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, has said, “We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place.”

With this new technology comes exciting prospects for education. Visual search allows for a more interactive and creative form of learning; education can be taken outside the classroom without the need to carry text books for reference. And the fact that these searches can be stored in a history allows for retaining and referring back to this knowledge later.

For example, a class could visit an art gallery on a school trip and simply take photos of the exhibits without having to make a note of the artist. This allows for a liberated experience not tied to pens and paper. Web links generated by these photos would allow a student to purchase a(n e-)book about the artist before they have even left the gallery.

This mobile learning style could engender a sense of adventure and exploration while still linking learners to reference material. Classes could strolls around a new city, capturing images to discover the history of buildings and landmarks. Google Labs state in their accompanying video that they envisage Google Goggles being able to discover the species of plant from a leaf. An added bonus to this visual search ensures that the students need not worry about spelling mistakes and the phrasing of searches in order to gain the results that they require.

Neither the technology behind the application nor the concept is entirely new. Quick Response (QR) codes are two-dimensional barcodes which link to online content when the user takes a photo of one on their camera phone. A simple piece of software enables the phone read the URL encoded within the QR code, and the user is taken directly to that site in the mobile browser.

Image-based searching isn”t completely new either. Prior attempts at the technology include Nokia’’s Point and Find and Amazon’s image recognition search released in October. The most similar product on the market is an application called IQ Engines. But this has a much more commercial focus – connecting mobile users with reviews, prices and purchase links. It remains to be seen whether Google can bring the technology into the mainstream.

Culture, digital, Education, future, google, learning, qr codes, search, technology

Bow Street Runner represents Channel 4 Education’s first real foray into the world of delivering informal education via alternate-reality games. This one takes the users – it is aimed at the C4 Education heartland of 14-19yr olds – into an immersive environment, using impressive 3-d backgrounds blended with live-action video shot on green screen. It is a broadband experience.

Not only is it a gripping and an exciting game, but its high production values are clear. But you would expect quality video to be shot by a broadcaster of C4’s stature. Still, it is well executed by the C4 production team and Littleloud, the company that made it. You play the part of a Bow Street Runner, a pre-cursor to the modern police force aimed at helping magistrates bring criminals to justice. Played out over five ‘episodes’, you will encounter a range of crimes and will be expected to collect evidence, interview actors, solves puzzles and eventually put your case to the magistrates. Be warned – you aren’t guaranteed a happy ending if your skills aren’t up to the task.

The health warning on the launch page – presumably demanded by the lawyers to avoid the insurmountable online watershed hurdle – will do a nice line in attracting users to click on the launch icon, not a million miles from those teenagers channel flicking in anticipation of the now-infamous C4 red triangle. And much like those teenagers, perhaps they will be drawn into a piece of genuinely engaging work, like those arthouse films in the 80s.

“This game is designed to provide an historically accurate – and therefore grim, violent and salacious – depiction of life”.

My own tiny gripes are that the ’subtitles off’ icon reminds me of the Windows minimise window icon, and that whilst you can mute the sound, you cannot skip the intro. Accessibility-wise you can tab around the navigation but not the in-game elements (presumably a deliberate choice as it’s hide and seek with those). You cannot pause, go back or save. The in-scene scrolling is pretty smooth, and this is a Beta release – the first episode should be ‘hard launched’ on March 6th 2008.

The critics who argue that the game is inaccessible to a schools network audience, or is not mapped to a curriculum, miss the point. The remit of C4 is to offer unmediated, inspiring and possibly controversial content to 14-19yr olds first, and the most progressive of teachers second. Formal education just isn’t their bag – and most likely turns this audience off.

The game itself is not especially innovative – see the BBC’s CDX for example and the idea of delivering informal learning in this way is not new – the BBC also has a strong track record in this field. But, as ever C4 are pushing the boundaries. The content has an edgier feel and is more gritty than you might find over at auntie.

Flash blended video is a fantastic medium for online games & marketing, especially in the realm of delivering informal education. See BBC WebWise or Vodafone Journey for excellent examples of blended interactive flash video.

Where C4 really are innovating is by the wholesale spending of their education budget on interactive content rather than telly. Whilst other broadcasters (OK – the BBC) have large interactive budgets, C4 are the first to take such a big leap, and finally show some real confidence in the medium as a meaningful force for change in their market.

C4 have a defined audience (14-19 years of age) and so they are placing their content where this audience, diverse as it is, can be found. Specifically, this is not watching TV in the mornings during term time (or at least it shouldn’t be). C4 are launching wholeheartedly into the web. Crucially, in another leap of faith, they are also branching out their content onto other platforms such as bebo; MySpace and Facebook. Surely other content providers will follow.

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Happy New Year!

The Online team attended BETT last week to meet with our friends in the industry and to see what new offerings were on the market.

We had a few products on display on our clients’ stands, including BEAM Education’s Number Challenge, which was nominated for a BETT Award, and the prototype of a product we are building for QCA.

Teachers TV has a great synopsis of some of the themes of the event, including a few demos of new offerings from various suppliers:

http://www.teachers.tv/video/24216

See you at the Education Show!

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