Just a quick one, but I felt this needed more than a single line in the feed on our homepage.  I had an illuminating meeting  at the Leading Edge programme at the SSAT this Monday.  It’’s rare that you meet someone in such total agreement with you as to what technology can do in the classroom, and I would have walked away sufficiently impressed by that occurrence alone were it not for the little demo I got of the SSAT’’s learn AR tool.  You”d think that AR in the classroom would start off as a gimmick but for the most part this stuff goes beyond just allowing students to visualise things more clearly – it allows them to do things they might not otherwise be able to.

Cue a Geiger counter experiment (can”t get a screenshot for love or money) that some schools can”t carry out because they can”t get hold of the right materials: 1 marker for the counter, 1 marker for the radioactive source, and another to represent whatever you””re putting between them to compare the absorption of different materials.  Engaging, safe, cheap, magic.  Not surprised it was a hit at BETT.

augmented reality, classroom, learning, technology

As the dust settles on this year’s BETT Show, bloggers have been frantically sharing their thoughts on the 2010 instalment of the educational technology behemoth.

It was my first time. I had been given many warnings as to the overwhelming nature of an event which brings together 30,000 people amongst more green and purple than a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles convention. But none of the warnings could have prepared me for the sheer scale of BETT.

It was really nice to see mycurriculum.com get a lot of visibility and attention on QCDA’s stand. The website is looking really good now and it was great to see the branding up and demos taking place.

Ray Barker, Director of British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA), the trade association for the educational supply industry, identified two major themes of this year’s BETT in an interview with Teachers TV. Firstly, Mr. Barker said that this year’s show was “very practitioner-led”, with a focus on professional development and training for teachers.

Secondly, he emphasized the importance of “pupil voice, learner voice” and of “the kinds of technologies that young people are using.” Google and YouTube both exhibited for the first time this year, and the Playful Learning area seemed to be a big hit too – at least with the students who were taking part in the gaming. Some bloggers have commented that there may have been too much emphasis on the “playful” and not enough on the “learning” here. The pupils certainly weren’t complaining.

Whatever the value of the games exhibited here, this seems to me to be a worthy shift in attitude (if indeed it is a shift in attitude). The potential for fun on show at BETT – from 3D video to “serious”  gaming – is encouraging. Schools have traditionally tended to fear technology, often feeling more inclined to ban new devices than integrate them into the learning experience.

If BETT 2010 does mark, or at least reflect, a greater willingness to blur the boundaries between work and play and to help pupils enjoy learning more, then this can only be a good thing for young people and those children just entering the education system. In fact I rather envy them.

BESA, BETT, BETT 2010, Education, Game, games, play, Playful Learning, technology

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

The real-time environment of the internet has evolved a concerning dichotomy for fact and fiction. When Michael Jackson died in June, word spread too fast for Google to cope, and the site began blocking any search for “Michael Jackson”. But the lust for up-to-the-minute news could not be kept at bay – word spread through tweets and other micro-blogs regardless. Real time reporting had the edge.

Or did it? On the very same day, Jeff Goldblum was also reported dead, provoking a similar unstoppable surge of rumours and gossip

Real-time internet may be powerful in keeping up-to-date with news, but it most certainly lacks reliability – Jeff Goldblum, as it turns out, is not dead after all. Therein lies the problem. In the explosion of information surrounding extremely recent events, how can we distinguish fact from fiction when we don’t know how the fuse was lit?

Real time is the talk of the internet search town at the moment. Twitter, the biggest contributor to real-time data, continues to grow in popularity and Twitter Search, the only real-time search engine with access to all tweets, is in a powerful position. But a wave of search engines which pull together data from across the web have sprung up recently. Sites like Collecta, OneRiot, and Scoopler broaden real-time search to include blogs, articles, photos, and videos as well as tweets. And in recent months the big players have shown that they want a piece of the action too: Google, Bing and Facebook have all taken steps to keep up with the real-time crowd.

But what exactly is real-time search and why is everyone so excited about it? Traditionally, search engines like Google have organised their results based on authority. Sites have authority if they have grown slowly and organically over time. Real-time search engines, on the other hand, sort their results by how recent they are. Through these search engines, users can access a river of the latest information on whatever topic they choose.

Increasingly people are turning to the web to find out what is happening right now – the recent protests in Iran are a perfect example (and a frequently mentioned one). But when you search for a term in a traditional search engine the results look very similar day after day. If a volcano is erupting, followers on the web do not want to read an old article about the properties of lava, however authoritative it may be. With the real-time web your results will be different every time, and often refresh before your eyes. So no out-of-date articles, and no need to wait for news; users have access to up-to-the-minute comments and images. They can find out what is happening at the heart of a demonstration or at the site of a volcanic eruption as the event is taking place.

The real-time web also tells you what topics everyone’s talking about.  Most real-time search engines display trending topics, the most popular at that moment, and many can sort results by categories such as sport or entertainment. Want to know what your colleagues will be talking about at work tomorrow? A real-time search will probably tell you.

But a real-time search will probably also tell you all the information you didn’t want to know, or didn’t care about. Aside from rumours becoming gospel faster than you think possible, the current main disadvantage of real-time search engines is their inability to filter unwanted messages or irrelevant noise from results. The river just keeps on flowing regardless of what it has picked up along the way.

Collecta have openly stated they are currently paying no regard to relevancy in their results. Oneriot, however, have begun to experiment with reliability by introducing Pulserank, a toolbar which not only takes into account the freshness of the information, but also the authority of the website and person posting the information, alongside the velocity of the information passing around the whole web. The potential for the tool is huge, but although this seems like a reasonable approach, it may not catch something important as fast as simply watching the unadulterated stream.

Although far from fully effective, the Pulserank toolbar does pave the way for the necessary filters which real-time searching will require as the phenomenon grows. More users will undoubtedly lead to more spam and more noise being generated, increasing the need for an effective filter barrier. The challenge for real-time search engines is to combine recency, relevancy and reliability in their results without becoming elitist and losing the organic chatter of the online crowd.

Problems aside, the current animation surrounding the technology should lead to exciting developments. One such possibility being the use of real-time internet searching as an alert system – by signaling variations in the stream of mentions for a particular query, any abnormal rise in the quantity of chatter would trigger a notification. So the future of real-time search is bright, if hazy. Entrepreneur Edo Segal believes that old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment.

Culture, future, google, news, real-time, search, technology

‘Hi John, what did you do this weekend?’

‘Not much – Friday night I stayed in, but on Saturday a friend was having a youtube party, so I had quite a late one.’

Not true.  No-one I know had a youtube party on Saturday, and the notion of a youtube party is not something you are expected to know about, but are actually not aware of because you can’t keep up with the edgy new media vanguard.  However, it’s a sentence which I think is closer to being a standard piece of conversation than you might think, and here is why.

A funny thing happened to me the other night.  I was having a drink at a friend’s flat when someone mentioned a clip on youtube that they thought was funny .  Without a moment’s hesitation a laptop was produced and we all sat down to watch it, oh how we laughed.  Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, you might say.  However, what (quite naturally) happened next was that someone else stifled their chuckles enough to suggest another video, which we all watched and laughed heartily (again).  This went on for a good half hour, until we all got a little embarrassed and decided to stop being so damned geeky. 

Half an hour.  Isn’t that quite a lot?

I don’t expect this kind of an encounter is a rare occurrence.  It’s certainly happened to me a good couple of times and I imagine 80% of the student population do it all the time.  But if you think about it, prolonged, communal youtubery is quite an interesting phenomenon, for 2 reasons:  1, it brings an element of  face to face social interaction to the medium which I’m not sure the people who hailed the revolution of web 2.0 ever really meant.  2, this face to face interaction brings with it a whole set of intriguing social rules and dynamics.

Let me elaborate point 1.  Web 2.0 was (is?)  all about (among other things) people easily creating and sharing content with one another, with the web providing a means by which to do so.  People thought it was great that a guy from Uruguay could make a video about knitting which could be viewed, responded to and commented on by my grandma in Poland, or a janitor in Delaware, or the Queen.  It introduced openness of communication.  But what it also did was introduce content that could be discussed and shared in a personal context, not just by people firing off links at each other down the information superhighway, but shown to one another after dinner, whilst you’re getting ready for a night out, pointed at whilst crowding around a monitor in the office.  It provided content people could physically take someone by the hand and show to them, which is an altogether different thing.

Which leads to point 2.  For years marketing gurus have been mindful of the fact that you are much more likely to buy something if it’s recommended by a friend.  In focus groups we’ve run here at Online, we’ve heard that it’s important to someone sharing a link to something on the internet that they preserve some kind of  reputation.  If you post lots of trash on your friends’ walls you exhibit a certain lack of credibility that is not insignificant.  This kind of thing manifests itself wonderfully if you bring it into a face to face group dynamic.  Picture the scene: my friends and I have worked ourselves into a cheerful youtube frenzy via a string of  Japanese TV shows, childhood nostalgia,  dramatic rodents, and Hungarian rappers.  Then someone enthusiastically types in a link to this.  The group tries to get into it, but it’s a slow starter, and they fall into an awkward silence.  Energy drops.  Suggestor tries to pick it back up with this one, but it’s worse.  Mumbles excuses.  Gets coat.

Similarly you musn’t over share.  You’ve got to let everyone in the audience have their say, otherwise they feel left out.  You can get the youtube samaritans, who in the face of their friend’s poorly chosen pat them on the shoulder and reassure them that it was funny, really.  Picking a youtube video to share with people in this context requires a judgement of mood and possession / lack of sense of humour.  You need to deal with those maladroit ‘Hang on, we need to wait for it to load’ moments. You need to be sensitive to what certain people might find impressive, and what leaves them utterly nonplussed.  You need to be consider whether they’ve just had their lunch.

I’ll be the first to admit that it’s possible to over-analyse this.  But in thinking about how these technologies are changing communication we mustn’t neglect the possibility that it opens up new ways to interact with the person next to you, not just the Delaware janitor thousands of miles away.  Of course all of these communal internet encounters (’social surf sessions‘, if you will) occur as afterthoughts to what you or I might call ‘normal’ social situations – people just fall into them.  But 5 years ago no-one could possibly have imagined the way in which youtube wanders into our everyday exchanges now.  5 years hence?  Get your party invitations ready.

technology, web_2.0, youtube

So the media outcry about Street View continues. Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) today defended the roll-out of Google Street View to UK cities by saying that “We agree with the concerns over privacy… The way we address it is by allowing people to opt out, literally to take anything we capture that is inappropriate out… and we do it as quickly as we possibly can.”

Schmidt missed the point with great precision: the reason that many people feel uneasy about Street View is that it is impossible to find out if you are somewhere in there. You can’t opt out if you don’t know whether or where you are even included. Faced with this vast volume of information, it is simply impossible to manage your own digital identity. You don’t know what of you is out there, or how you appear (regardless of how many guilty secrets could have been snapped by Google’s roving cameras).

This is particularly significant if we consider that schools and universities spend considerable time and effort emphasising the importance of digital identities, teaching Twitter literacy, or interview technique (dangers of scandalous photos or inappropriate comments appearing in internet search). Many of us spend a good proportion of free time managing our online identities, whether through Twitter, Facebook, blogging, or massively multiplayer gaming. That people are concerned about the unknowable possibility of their presence on Street View is hardly surprising, regardless of whether they have something to hide.

Still, is it not a bit bizarre that citizens of one of the most CCTV-observed countries on the planet are concerned about a few static frames online? We could regard Street View as an exercise in open access to information, surely a step in the right direction, toward databases that presume freedom of information rather than hide from it.

Indeed, in the wake of exposure of inappropriate surveillance by our own government, it is slightly amusing that Street View now has a black hole where the Houses of Parliament used to be. However worried we might get about practices of surveillance, it is perhaps comforting that the centre of our state feels exactly the same as we do.

censorship, google, street_view, surveillance, technology, web_2.0