Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)



I'm not sure how many times we need to say this before folks get the message
Fat Boy Slim helps make the point

Saturday, May 01, 2010

OECD Report On Technology in Our Classrooms

The headlines make some interesting reading but there is some really useful meat in this report.

The other  thing to note is as data collection and analysis becomes easier we are going to get lots more studies from OECD and other organisations looking at how education systems and learners are performing around the globe. These are the big things that economists and politicians love.

Global trends are one thing - but folks need to remember that literacy, numeracy and ICT skills are things than can be tackled locally ..worth looking at these and taking some positive action , with your own skills , in your class room/training centre , across your school,college, workplace  , in your local authority or within your sphere if influence local , regional , national .

The report has six key policy implications:
  1. Raise awareness among educators, parents and policy makers of the consequences of increasingly ICT familiarity;
  2. Identify and foster the development of 21st century skills and competences;
  3. Address the second digital divide;
  4. Adopt holistic policy approaches to ICT in education; Adapt school learning environments as computer ratios improve and digital learning resources increase;
  5. Adapt school learning environments as computer ratios improve and digital learning resources increase;
  6. Promote greater computer use at school and experimental research on its effects.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

I finally moved

It has taken me a few months to decide whether to dump blogger for another blogging package. In the end I plumped for a domain through Google and to keep on using blogger rather than Wordpress or one of the other tools out there.
I'll keep my old demon.hompages site for nostalgia or in case I need it for a project at some point.

On the move itself, thank goodness I was able to get back to my blogger file on the old site to post a "this blog has moved notice" and I remembered some HTML. I only realised I had not done this after I had moved everything across to the new domain and I could not get back to make this edit through blogger and had to fall back to looking for Blogger index file and editing it.


I wonder how long it will take folks who follow original blog with RSS feed readers to notice I have moved. It will probably take me a wee while too to sort out redirects and with other tools I use.

Monday, April 19, 2010

This blog has moved

This blog is now located at http://www.joewilsons.net
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://feeds.feedburner.com/joewilsons/xOzd

Jeff Jarvis on Future of the Lecture from TedX

Saturday, February 13, 2010

TeachMeet Second Life 2010

Great Idea / experiment would be good if folk dropped in from FE and other sectors too

Thursday, February 11, 2010

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

This might be just about last post to this blog til I find a new way to host and post. In the meantime here is a wonderful bit of creativity from a school pupil Jamie Bell.
Thanks to Jane Hart for link

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Happy New Year

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Shared with Flock - The Social Web Browser
http://flock.com


I haven't blog posted since early December - but what an amazing time I have had in between.
A holiday of a lifetime with our family in the Philippines -6 islands, an ascent of a live volcano, amazing city life, wonderful beaches to canoe and snorkel off , all the Christmas and New Year Celebrations with a local twist and the food - fantastic everywhere - including a feast at the home of the national celebrity chef Claude Tayag.

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We can't thank the Lazatin, Tayag and Fernandez famillies enough for sharing a very unique Philippino experience with us.

Then a return to a snowy cold Glasgow some frantic sledging with friends , two days in office to try and catch up with all that happening in Scotland and then a week in London at the excellent Learning and Technology World Forum and my annual round of meetings at BETT10.
Lots to report and the year has just started.

Sunday, December 06, 2009

Treat Your Self

I really enjoyed some of the sessions from the IT in the Community Conference - I have high hopes that many of these initiatives will deliver a more Digitally Literate Britain.

Also arriving on my radar some excellent presentations from Google Conference Breakthrough Learning in the Digital Age from October 09 now on YouTube. ( thanks Helen Barrett for this )

Day 1: Opening Panel: Recapturing Our Innovation Edge: America’s Urgent Education Challenge - Linda Darling-Hammond, Joel I. Klein, Mitchell Kapor, Jonathan F. Miller, Kavitark Shriram
Day 1: Dinner keynote: Geoff Canada
Day 2: Session I. The Next Revolution in Learning: How Digital Culture is Shaping Where and How Children Learn - Gary E. Knell, Mizuko Ito, James Steyer, Reed Hastings
Day 2: Session II. Literacy 2.0: Creative Strategies to Prepare 21st Century Learners - Nichole Pinkard, Benjamin Bederson, Allison Druin, Karen Cator, Marissa Mayer, Daniel Russell
Day 2: Session III. New Learning Designs: Scaling Innovation to Reverse the Dropout Crisis - Jason Levy, Larry Rosenstock, Katie Salen, Rey Ramsey
Day 2: Session IV: Teachers for a Digital Age: New Strategies to Transform Practice - Anthony S. Bryk, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Marshall (Mike) S. Smith, Ellen Moir, Esther Wojcicki
Day 2: Closing Panel: Breakthrough Ideas to Drive Student Success: Action Steps for the Nation - Blair Levin, Jim Shelton, Barbara Chow, Susan Gendron, Elliot Schrage, Kathy Hurley

Tonight I missed Edtech Roundup Teachmeet On-line Conference - again you can catch the proceedings here.

Hope you are noticing too - these are not sterile academic presentations - they are about the future and using the technology of the future.

Nice way to end the year - looking into the future. I'd recommend stopping wrapping your presents to sample some of these proceedings.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Ch..Ch..Ch. . Changes

In the damp, dark, fag-end of the year it is easy to forget how much is going on in a wee place like Scotland to drive on the knowledge economy in School, College, University, Community and Workbased learning. Each sector is in its own way facing large transitional challenges
  • Schools - dealing with Curriculum for Excellence, New Inspection Framework and roll out of GLOW
  • Colleges - new Inspection Framework, national certificate developments, impact of recession and Curriculum for Excellence, emergence of Scotland's Colleges as a support agency.
  • Workplace - UK Vocational Reform Programme and impact on Scotland, impact of recession, emergence of Skills Development Scotland as policy and support agency.
  • Community Based - struggling with funding cutbacks at all levels and looking for new models of support
  • University - perhaps not enough change but deep anxieties around funding.
There can be high levels of introspection in each of these sectors which can detract from their support for life long learning and the needs of our citizens. Schools can overly focus on schooling whatever that may be without reference to wider economy and vocational needs of learners. Colleges and work-based learning on too narrow a vocational skill set without looking at core skills , personal and social development and transferable skills. Community learning on engagement with but not progression for learners and Universities stuck on research while being inconsistent on skills , retention and the learning and teaching experience they offer.

Some of these challenges are not new - but there are increasingly useful internal and external developments that can drive change.

Monday, November 16, 2009

E- Assessment in Practice

Last week I spent two days attending and presenting at the E-Assessment in Practice Conference held at the UK Defence Academy Shrivenham. A few things jumped out.

MCQ ( multiple choice questions) Mainly in corporate space but now reaching down to most levels of employee, organisations around the world use on-line MCQ tests as a means of hiring, firing and auditing staff understanding of procedures ( compliance). Success at interview could be based on your personality profile and in some tightly regulated environments redundancy looms for those who cannot pass six monthly tests around procedures and product knowledge. For all the science and ingenuity that these systems have - I have seen this coming for a wee while, I am uncomfortable with the methodology and practices used here ( for instance American Real Estate Agents are traditionally tightly assessed in this way , go figure ! ) - but teachers and learners do need to know these are the standard employer practices that lie ahead.

Advances in on-line test generation and feedback systems for Maths , Physics and Engineering . Two or three systems were presented that allow both the automatic creation of mathematical problems and the automation of feedback to learners. These systems are really clever and feedback from learners does seem positive. These systems do seem very soulless but then I suppose this may be in keeping with the cold rationale of Science. They are designed to give learners almost limitless practice with computer generated feedback in areas like differentiation, algebra and calculus where undergraduates struggle. My question in this perhaps unfairly would be around the quality of the teaching input. Some of these systems look like closed loops that allow researchers to get on with research while undergraduates communicate with computers - but this may be unjustified cynicism.

Finally a few things sit better with my universe. Sarah De Freitas did an excellent presentation in developments in Serious Gaming worth looking out for Nano-mission, Flood Sim and the mind control offered by NeuroSky . The QCA presented some good guidance on on-line assessment available from the efutures website and the Open University showcased amazing work around language teaching and assessment http://www.webcef.org/.

And as final footnote of the innovative offerings present from BTL , Tag Learning , OpenSim and others perhaps with exception of NeuroSky we are working out on the frontiers with them.

Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Virtual World of War Poets 1914-1918

A timely resource with Rememberance Sunday approaching but one that should also make us pause and think about our teaching pratice and how they are going to change - when learners can immerse themselves in world's like this or better still build resources like this ..

Sunday, October 18, 2009

A Twibe

Since last year's Scottish Learning Festival I've been encouraging everyone in hearing distance to develop some Scottish Community for educational twitterers in Scotland along the lines of the aggregation for blogs provided by Scotedublogs.

Really so folks can quickly hook up with other Scottish Educational Twitterers quickly and efficiently. I have been using Twibes for about a year with some other UK based projects and finally on Friday , as I was asked again who to follow in Scottish Education, I thought I might as well start the ball rolling.

So if you are reading this work in Scottish Education or have an interest in Scottish Education - schools , colleges, Further Education , work-based or other why not join our twibe.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Did You Know 4.0




Useful wee resource for talking to paper-age- people

Michael Wesch - quote from proceedings of ALT-C 2009

"It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press and a few hundred again before the telegraph.Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges. New types of conversation, argumentation, and collaboration are realized. Using examples from
anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, YouTube, classrooms, and “the future,” this presentation will demonstrate the profound yet often unnoticed ways in which media “mediate” our conversations, classrooms, and institutions. We will then apply these insights to an exploration of the implications for how we may need to rethink how we teach, what we teach, and who we think we are teaching. "



Wednesday, September 09, 2009

The VLE is Dead

Some sectors are just discovering Virtual Learning Environments so it is premature to hail the death of these systems. I think the most telling point is the question to academic audience
How many of you would go to your Virtual Learning Environment to learn anything ?
For this audience a VLE is barren closed sterile environment suitable for learners but not a place where they would go to learn.

Have a listen - excellent speakers and the discussion is really broader than a discussion about the technology it is really a discussion about the organisation of learning within an institutional framework.

This is another excellent session from ALTC2009 . As you might expect I think they are setting the benchmark for using technology to share sessions at the conference.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Transformational Educational Development and made in Scotland

If you want to see a wee glimpse of what the future of learning is then have a look at this presentation
You can't fly through the virtual world depicted in this presentation but pupils and teachers in Scotland will be doing just that soon.



What is important about this isn't just the technological platform (but that will be engaging enough for many) it is the opportunities for learning and the potential for new kinds of collaboration and assessment that platforms like this offer. Well done Derek Robertson and Learning and Teaching Scotland. This is most exciting development I have seen in last couple of years and it is truly transformational
.

The system won't change the skills needed to be a great artist - but in terms of providing a great platform for exemplification and sharing - this is it.

Have a look and be gobsmacked - looking forward to seeing the real thing.

Friday, August 14, 2009

Universal healthcare is terrorist recruitment tool

I thought this was a spoof - but it is not . I have heard and dismissed criticism of American news coverage before - but this is unbelievable. Should be compulsory viewing for politics and modern studies students - how media is manipulated.
Q Is this credible and valid criticism of NHS in UK
Thanks @bengoldacre and @cdmilligan

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Evolution Gif


Found at http://www.changethethought.com/evolution-gif/
Now did this come before of after the Guinness Advert ?
and I do know it is not the reflection of the real evolutionary cycle - in the real one they get a pint of Guinness in the end .. thanks for emails