Just think what this technology could bring to interactive learning
and what a great way to sell and Apple Ap
................................Really what it says in the heading. I will play with this from time to time. A mixture of education and domestic ...............................observations.
Just think what this technology could bring to interactive learning
and what a great way to sell and Apple Ap
Great Idea / experiment would be good if folk dropped in from FE and other sectors too
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
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 ..
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. "
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.
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
Home and reflecting on all the debate last week both the formal and the invaluable networking that happens at events of this kind. Some of the questions circulating at the conference we in Scotland have found our own answers too.
Most of the discussion was progressive and out on the frontiers of learning that in the main the Scottish education system operates in.
Some of the questions suggested a legacy we may have left behind
I was asked if we still have an 11+ exam and without it what do our secondary schools use for selection .Another delegate described why learners sometimes need beaten and was surprised to know that corporal punishment was now banned even in Scottish private schools.
Others were the kind we still get on the home front about why we need National Qualifications – Bologna Process, European Qualifications Framework and Global Standards - is the short hand answer – but it is clear we have way to promote understanding when civil servants don’t understand systems.
Biggest challenge to my thinking is how far the private sector operates in developing countries in running education systems and how much private companies are penetrating even the English system. They offer everything from inspection services to the building and running of schools for governments and local authorities. I think we only have operations like this in the special school sector in Scotland but I am sure they will be looking to sell on services wherever they can. Staffed mainly by ex public sector folk – owned by and profit driven for public or private shareholders and in some cases former educational publishers – will be interesting to see how this manifests itself in our system.
Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia have transformed in 30 years and flying back through Dubai, a city that in 25 years has erupted in a desert – it is nice to know that both places have a thirst and affinity for UK awards. Malaysia wants to be an education hub for all of its neighbours by 2017 and I hope we can do a lot to help them meet their target. I met a lot of customers interested in offering Scottish Vocational Qualifications and lots of customers interested in learning more about the Scottish Education system.
On one level there is something strange about the diverse group of countries that form the Commonwealth and at least for me a bit uncomfortable when you think of the imperial past.
The Commonwealth is a family of 53 different countries among them 12 on the UN list of least developed countries in the world.
Yet when you meet the learners, teachers, university vice chancellors, Ministers and agencies from all of these countries you can see at once what we have in common and while we all start in different places the aims and ambitions of the Commonwealth for learners you can see at once how our simple common bond can help us work together.
The agenda is a simple yet complex one.
The millennium goals
· Advocating for 2015 to be the year that children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.
· Affirming the importance of eliminating gender disparities in education by 2015
· Utilising the technology, facilities and efficiencies afforded by open and distance learning to overcome barriers and combating the digital divide in education.
· Improving quality in education through signalling the importance of the role played by teachers, addressing their status, retention and mobility whilst at the same time advancing the importance of the management, training and development of this critical resource in education.
· Supporting the assurance of education in difficult circumstances through addressing the challenges of education delivery during situations of crisis, conflict, post-conflict and natural disasters and providing guidelines to improve preparedness for emergencies.
· Mitigating the impact of HIV/AIDS on education systems by way of establishing the role and importance of education as a “social vaccine” against HIV/AIDS through professorial chairs for research and advocacy and dissemination of good practices in countries which address head-long the challenge of the pandemic in their populations
Some of the stories from conference are truly humbling –
Village Children in Bangladesh organizing locally to persuade a landowner to give them land to build a school and then selling their blood to a private hospital to raise the funds to build the school – so for first time the villagers have access to a primary school.
Growing evidence from countries stricken by famine that learners arriving in primary school have already been damaged developmentally through malnutrition.
Made me reflect on newspaper headline as I left that 1 in 9 learners in Glasgow come from family with addiction issues.
While we worry about changes in our own internal systems - we need to be aware of the challenges that educators face around the world. How can we leverage curriculum investment in Scotland to support the rest of the world ?
Now if we could only get our stakeholders to cope with this - we could develop new curriculum in quick time and collaborate with educationalists and learners as we do it ..mmm
Picked up this neat JISC video from Joan Walker in the latest Scottish JISC Regional Support Centre News Letter. There is a lot school sector could pick up from this monthly publication and from great work that JISC do all across UK. A lot of concerns around copyright and IPR have been addressed in FE and HE sectors.
Need to persuade them to add feed to Scotedublogs
It was great news that GLOW picked up an award and it is good to see too that Scotland won another prize at the IMS Global Learning Consortium for AccessApps and in addition that JISC UK Scooped a number of awards at the ceremony.
It easy to forget how much Scotland and the UK are pushing frontiers in on-line learning.
The University of Melbourne study showed that people who use the Internet for personal reasons at work are about 9 percent more productive that those who do not.
Have a few things to Blog about but coudn't resist. Expect to see advert made like this in next six months
Another subject close to my heart..organisations and teachers need to get out there and share publically all your learning materials. Learners don't come to you for your notes they come to you for the human service experience. Let's give knowledge away free. If you open your resources you open your doors to new forms of partnership and working with communities locally and globally. JISC have mapped out a way forward on this.
JISC is about to publish a range of open learning materials . See JISC Open Educational Content:Pilot Phase for details. There are already a number of global initiatives.
Open University (UK) Open Content Initiative
Rice Connexions
Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative
UNESCO Open Training Platform
MIT OCW
National Repository of Online Courses
The JISC materials will be released through JORUM (national repository). These will be open access learning materials in open formats with open licences. You can re-mix , re-edit and use in ways you need them.
I am about to do whole presentation . They are all available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/03/jiscconference09/programme.aspx . I was ambushed by Mike Coulter at end of day .. academics have been looking at elearning for a very long time statement haunts me a bit .. but there is some briliant global practice that needs to be adopted outside HE.