The Role of New Media in Vocational Education

I spend a lot of the time trying to explain things that George Siemens seems to have developed a knack for.  Link above links to two really useful presentations.Sharing is an essential part of a globalised learning community too.The map of use of on-line communities is particularly  interesting as Linked-in  became  a community of 100 million users last week .What strikes me most is that these communities and ways of working still exist in a parallel universe to much of the corporate culture in both the public and private sectors.

View more presentations from gsiemens

Meta Data in Music and everything else

3D Data from Decibel on Vimeo.

I am not sure how this arrived on my desktop this morning - but it is a great example of how metadata changes both the means of production and the means of consumption .

Scottish Parliament Dissolution

The Scottish Parliament election takes place on 5th May 2011, and the formal election period begins on 23 March following dissolution of Parliament. While I  do not write directly about Government policy within Scotland, I currently work for a non departmental public body and as such I must remain neutral during this time.

I expect my blogging and twitter activity  be lower over the next 45 days.

You can find  Scottish Parliamentary Guidance here

The Finland Phenomenon: Inside the World's Most Surprising School System

As hype continues around Finland's amazing educational achievemennts cynic in me
suspects that we might be about to get 5 years of Finnish system bashing .

In meantime sit back and enjoy the hype.

New Improved ScotEdublogs

John Johnstone  and  Robert Jones  have once again been  updating the platform that Scotedublogs sits on .They are stars and I was glad that SQA could continue provide some support for this . These guys should get a medal !

News of updated platform here

The SQA make regular use of the RSS Feed on Scotedublogs. It is a fantastic barometer of activity across Scotland – The new Times Ed ;-)

There is still a lot more we could do to promote Scotedublogs as a means to link up bloggers in Schools to those in Further Education and Workbased Learning.

Remember if If you are a Scots Educational blogger you can do your bit to support ScotEduBlogs too:

• Make sure your blog is listed.
• Make sure the tags on your listing describe your blog.
• Link from your blog to ScotEduBlogs (there are some images and help on the wiki).

If you check out my sidebar and you can see ScotEduBlog Logo. If you work in Education in Scotland you should have a look at getting your blog listed.

I Digress Digress.it

What is digress.it and why use it? from University of Lincoln on Vimeo.

I was enjoying looking around the excellent http://jiscpress.org/ and wondered
what made it work.  Wordpress and Digress.it make for a superb combination.
You can see how this could be future for lots of things .. just think a living national curriculum.

Open but Tough

Open but Tough from Commonwealth of Learning on Vimeo.

Here are some very sage words from Sir John Daniels on open education and on
assessment and certification. Some very good thinking driving the creation of the Commonwealth of
Learning's resources

1964 JOHNNY SEVEN OMA TOY GUN COMMERCIAL

Amused friend's kids have finished with antique toy we passed on when we cleared family home and wonders if I want it back. Not sure there will be much left of it.
It was the toy gun to have in ancient times.I inherited it from my cousin at some point in late 1960's .

Times have changed, now we try and discourage our kids from playing with guns. Wonder what they use to "clear bunkers" these days ?

Future of Mobile Learning

Near and far contemplating (nfc)

View more presentations from andyjb.

Here is a great presentation from Andy Black on what is just around the corner for learning. I'm hopeful that Andy gets to keep exploring this territory as he moves from Becta into the corridors of the Westminster Govt.  Hoping too in the austere times ahead we find flexible ways to get our learners in to this creative space.

Time will tell but in meantime lots of food for thought for #ediff and other debates.

Rethinking Education

Guessing I'll see this a lot of times over next few months.

But real question is how are we are using these changes to shift education ?

Do you value the links and connections your learners make ?

Would you trust your learners to contribute responsibly to the sum of human

knowledge ?

How ready are you to support collaborative learning ?

Do you use primary data or real research in your class ?

How authentic are the assessments you set?

Which school , college , university has really changed the way it offers things ?

Scottish Twits Education Weekly

To track my own interests across Scottish Education I get a newspaper format report delivered each Monday morning. The report self publishes and provides a really a simple aggregation of what folk in Scottish Education are discussing on twitter. It is very easy to set up once you have identified your sources.

The newspaper is generated through the aggregation of the Scottish Education Twitter Community.
http://twitter.com/joecar/scottish-education-twits


The content is as interesting as the technique for harvesting data - it also highlights the type of discussion that is going on about Scottish Education and helps highlight some of the  lead opinion formers. Note  those who participate in discussions and move issues on here are not on the whole the usual suspects - education departments of higher education , the national education bodies in a formal capacity , the education trade unions, the education professional bodies, the educational press,  rather it is those who choose to use blogs and tweets and work in the Web2.0 space - A criticism would be that these are  the views of a technically enabled clique rather than that of grassroots teachers opinion  but it presents  a no less valid a view on  some of the challenges facing education.

Have a look at this weeks issue here -
http://paper.li/joecar/scottish-education-twits

How To Create Your Own Paper.li


To create a Paper.li newspaper of your own, sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account and click on “Create a Newspaper”. You can create a paper based on:
a Twitter user , a Twitter tag a Twitter list a Facebook search Or a custom Twitter search.


The custom paper allows you to query Twitter with a more complex search term than just a #tag. You can also restrict the Twitter users that can contribute content to the paper by specifying a Twitter list.

A week and a headfull #LWF11 #EWF11 #ELB2011 #BETT2011

It is really useful to start the year immersed in ideas and that is often what happens around the BETT Conference in January. Here are some reflections and reports on a week among educational policy makers , educators , educational technologists and the business interests that circle education in the UK and globally.

I'll try and capture each event in a few bullets and offer some follow up links.

#LWF11 Learning Without Frontiers

The Conference was aimed to be about disruptive education and did it well through informed and engaging speakers who in the main made good use of data to flag up the opportunities that lie ahead for education. David Muir has made a great job of blogging many of the sessions.

• The education service that globally becomes the next facebook will turn up side down education as we know it - this was the underlying thesis.
• Lots of focus on arrival of tablet devices or next generation mobile phones - not much mention of my favourite $100 lap-tops but these are part of solution - one solution a device, built by tech group Raspberry Pi, will provide students with access to a full PC experience. The USB-powered device includes wireless networking, a Linux OS, an ARM processor, an HDMI output. Richard Braben wants to trial the device later in the year radical in that was very low cost.
• Speaker after speaker suggested that games industry and a large education partner may be the place to watch - new consoles and immersive games , growing on-line communities around these and their ever more sophisticated delivery platforms . Stephen Heppell predicts that Education is the next cartell that will be destroyed by people and technology. The argument that the next stage of technological paradigm shifts after hardware, software, databases, search and now social uses, will be learning. 
  
  
  My question would be which cartells move in as we move through period of disruptive changes.

• BBC made announcement that more programming will be available free for education in UK

http://tdalton.co.uk/2011/01/time-for-a-new-ict-qualification/

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=3141501&item=40102829&type=member&trk=EML_anet_mc_pst_ttle

#EWF Education World Forum

In the background the Education World Forum aimed at education ministers from around the world was going on in Westminster. The speaker line up looked remarkably similar to last year's event  - which included technology in the title. Still on look out for best blog post on this event  - there is actually quite a good summary in the press information on events webpage and some good observations on the twitter stream from John Connell and Ollie Bray not sure these will be curated so grab a look soon  Angela Constance Scottish Skills Minister made a good speech..  Here is Michael Gove's speech welcoming large number of  education ministers to UK

#ELB2011 Microsoft Education Leaders Briefing

On Wednesday evening I attended useful session updating on developments coming our way through Microsoft Partners in Learning.  It was good to be joined at this event by colleagues from Learning and Teaching Scotland.

#Bett2011 Awards 

On Wednesday evening too - We brought back a BETT Award for a games based assessment platform for young people on our Skills for Work courses in Retailing, Health Sector, Energy and Uniformed and Emergency Services. Meant that there was a lot of interest on the SQA Stand on Thursday and Friday.

#Bett2011

I can't blog too much on all the meetings I had around exhibition and I think my initial post is fairly accurate reflection of experience. Some good blogs are picking up more from event from a practitioner's viewpoint.

http://olliebray.typepad.com/olliebraycom/bett2011/

http://alessiobernardelli.wordpress.com/2011/01/14/what-a-day-at-bett-2011/

http://helenmyers.blogspot.com/2011/01/bett-2011.html

and looking forward to seeing work of Leon Cynch who seemed to be everywhere capturing coverage of teachmeet and lots more.

#bett11 First Impressions

I've been really lucky and very privileged to attend BETT the British Educatonal Technology Show for last 12 years either in my current role or in previous jobs. The picture above is of the main hall and the interesting thing is if you have a look at shots over last 12 years  ( probably last three here on flickr) remarkably it  has not changed that much both in terms of who is there and in terms of the solutions being peddled to an educational audience. As usual for me it is the side meetings with partners that matter. Anyway first impressions from day one

• The changing of the guard - new government seems to mean much less top down guidance on ICT in education. This may or may not be a good thing - but quite hard to find folk on policy side who can set out direction of travel in England.
• Last year there were shed loads of functional skills materials - this year hardly in evidence - would be interesting to see figures on how much money has been spent on reforms here.That appear to be continually delayed.
• Whiteboards everywhere as usual but this year turned on their sides to make gigantic tablet PCS
• Seems more crowded with stall holders than ever but footfall seems much lighter
• Useful educational focused side programme and more informal teachmeet type content - always better than advertorial and getting better each year.

For those who don't regard education and learning as chiefly a money making enterprise BETT can be pretty harrowing. For a free pen or even a pendrive  there is only so much sales patter you can stomach. Combine lots of people selling stuff with hordes too of home grown or international educational technologists all on the make  and you get a heady brew and has any of it really changed the experience of learners in schools ?

#lwf11 Learning Without Frontiers

Lord Putnam and Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia debate in final session at Learning Without Frontiers.

I had a productive two days at Learning Without Frontiers and well done Graham and team for organising an event with a difference in a useful calendar slot before the purgatory of BETT.  The speakers were awesome , entertaining and informative and looking forward already to watching them be re-streamed and appearing on i-tunes and YouTube soon ( guess announcement will appear here)
I had some prejudices before I came - this was a relatively expensive event - and a free/discounted  i-pad was on offer if I signed some dotted line ( I'd love too but as attending is as part of my normal day job I can't pick up technology like this) . While I am slightly covetous I still can't figure out how owning one will help my day job. Did appear to be bigger version of i-phone for too wealthy short sighted guys ( guess they haven't worked out that it can't phone yet) sort of techno porn for geeks.
I did enjoy the best wifi I have had at a conference out with trips to States ..and so did everyone else - there is a fairly impressive twitter stream #lwf11 and was great too to find some friends picking up video feed from conference as it went out live.
So how could it be made better - event needs more back channels - a live twitter stream behind and beside presenters. - needs some more unconference stuff - there were some really great people in audience a few five minute slots from a few of them would have been really good. The event was about disruptive education - still not disruptive enough - one or two presentations were corporate advertorial.  Would have been interesting to have some input from open educational resource producers. A hook up somewhere with JISC in UK too would be really constructive - slight danger that it becomes schools silo.
Special tribute to David Muir who managed to do a blog posting on every session he attended.

Post 2011

It is the time of the year to make a prediction or two. This year I think more than any other you can feel and see the growth of services like facebook , twitter , linkedin . I've had a few conversations with folks in last six months who I know still have problems with keyboards and e-mails - yes they are still out there - but even some of these hardcore laggards are at least beginning to think about Web2.0. Must be mainstream now there is Social Network the movie!

• I predict that the massive .. really seismic cuts that are happening in education and the disappearance of some national agencies  across UK will drive users to make more inventive use of social software.

I am on my way to a Learning Without Frontiers Conference .. interesting agenda ..but I'll judge value for money over next three days and then my usual round of meetings around  BETT11. Will be interesting BETT with a void left on the disappearance of BECTA and other national agencies. I wonder where drivers for change on adoption of open educational resources , on-line assessment , digital inclusion, quality of ICT at local school and local authority level and a host of issues move forward. 

• I think now up to  ALT , JISC and membership organisations to fill void and see how much change can be driven at grassroots level when there is little money for grand national or regional schemes. Good to see lots of teachmeets happening.  Prediction two membership organisations take greater role in driving change.

Hoping too to get more of a grip on Scottish Government Technologies for Learning Strategy.
I didn't get an invitation this year to what was the Learning and Technology World Forum it has been renamed the Education World Forum  I am guessing that  leaders from around the world will be discussing how to meet their population's educational aspirations with a smaller resource. Shame they dropped the technology bit from the title .. the answer is technology but this still seems too tantalising for policy makers.

• Prediction three more interest in global standards and on Open Educational Resources

Whatever I think 2011 will be a challenging year for learners and for all those who work in life long learning.

Happy New Year

I did a bit of a spring clean around this blog including moving over to a new template. One day I'll spend some more time and set up a wordpress account . In the meantime I probably need to do a bit more hacking around with this blogger template to get the utility I'd like from it but it is starting to get there.

When I returned to blogging in 2006 I thought I'd probably blog about once a week - the reality is that with the arrival of twitter my posting rate is well down on this.

• ►  2010 (31)

• ►  2009 (68)

• ►  2008 (80)

• ►  2007 (31)

• ►  2006 (1)

Hit rates are down too on previous years. The posts that attracted most traffic are mostly all from the end of year 

• A summary of Scottish Government Technolgies for Learning Discussion
• An account of Donald Clark's excellent presentation at the ALT-C Conference
• A posting on Open Educational Resources 

Should add my favorite post of the year ..first post last January tracking our amazing adventures in the Phillippines  http://www.joewilsons.net/2010/01/happy-new-year.html

• 
  

New and Emerging Learning Technologies

In education too often the wave is over our heads before we realise. We really don't have any excuse now - here is a superb presentation from  Steve Wheeler on the shape of some things to come - should be enough to put  any educational leaders on to the front foot or poised to surf the next wave.

eXtending the Web - New and Emerging Learning Technologies

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler.

Maths and more Game Apps on iStore

Lots of meetings in last few weeks and playing catch up. I spent some time with Euan Mackenzie the CEO of  3MRT ltd who was pleased to let me know that they have released a number of game playing aps designed to support SQA Maths Candidates and he thinks as he would that he has achieved a few  firsts-

We have our first Scottish based apps on the iStore and the first press

reviews are universally positive.

You can jump off to the apps here: http://apps.inquizitor.com/

Save on Travel Desk Top Webconference

Just did one of those quick and dirty surveys of what staff are using to communicate with range of stakeholders across UK - worth sharing as it probably gives quite a good picture of desktop web conferencing systems being used accross UK Education. Remember focus here is on desk-top systems not Video Conferencing Suites.

Scotlands Colleges have been using http://www.elluminate.com/  for last two years - though they sometimes also use  http://www.netviewer.com/ 


GLOW ( in the area branded GLOW Meeting ) was using the Marratech System and is now going to make use of Adobe Connect http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html So most mainstream Scottish Schools will have access to this.

There is also an active community across Education using the hosted Open University Flash Meeting service http://flashmeeting.open.ac.uk/index.html  . This is a free service which allows you to set up meetings as well as attend meetings - the Open University offers this service for free to the world wide education community.
It is used to record and broadcast quite a lot of events as well as for hosting meetings.

Finally there is a growth in wholly on-line conferences to get a flavour of these would be well worth signing up for JISC's  Innovating e-Learning 2010 Online Conference http://www.jisc.ac.uk/elpconference10

The Best of EdTech Web 2010 #ediff

Resources like these are arriving every day and they can change education
as we know it.. thought this was a great set of new tools..

Best of the EdTech Web 2010 - With Links

View more presentations from Richard Byrne.

Useful Perhaps Observation from Across the Water #ediff

Thought this graphic gives nice picture of how a larger economy is struggling with #ediff
challenges.

Useful graphic from http://www.onlinecollegesanduniversities.net/technology-in-the-classroom/
was taken down last night.  The graphic presented  the challenges in integrating technology into American Classrooms. Where internet access in schools is much lower than Scotland.

Via: Online Colleges and Universities

Scottish Government Technologies for Learning Strategy #ediff

A few folks have aleady had a go at summarising discussions around Friday's event.
Neil Winton ,  Fearghal Kelly ,  Andrea Reid  and I'm sure more will follow.

The focus was on what schools and learners  (think nursery, primary and secondary schools ) should have access to and how a government with limited resources can support the necessary initiatives and investment to support this access.

The best bits.. that there is still broad support for the vision of a Scottish Schools Intranet and the notion that institutions, learners and teachers need to be trusted much more and have greater access to the internet. Expressed as a dimmer switch that could be turned up or down to protect learners as they progress through education. ( this has been aired lots of times and  in lots of ways  before)

This was a gathering of like minds from the Scottish educational  blogosphere. We can like all educators fight over the number of angels that can dance on the end of a pin ..but we didn't have to do too much justification on whether more technology is good for learning and learners.Yes we agree that play is central to learning and that there is a place for games based learning in schools ( and beyond serious games happening more and more in workbased learning)

What we didn't have time to do but I hope will be done was strip the  discussion down to the things that need to be in place

• Without reliable broad band access across all schools vision cannot happen.  There should be guidelines on what learners should have access to in nursery, primary and secondary across Scotland.
• Without guidelines on "the dimmer switch" most local authorities will opt for the standardised web filtering policies that keep most learners and teachers in the dark
• A minimum national intranet should allow interaction between teachers, learners and relevant agencies at a national level 
• It wasn't said in this way but one of my own - If Starbucks can do wifi why can't Scotland's schools - learners should be able to use their own devices to access their school platform.

 The outputs of what was a full day stimulating debate - not short on big words - and big ideas from Pat Kane @theplayethic  are captured in David Gilmour's photographs of the  flipcharts.

We didn't touch much on the support available through the internet itself - there are offerings from Microsoft, Intel , Cisco, Oracle, Google and more aimed at building up the digital literacy of teaching staff and learners and we only began to consider the growing open educational resource movement. Nor did we spend much time talking about what assets the learner takes in this domain from primary into secondary or the eportfolio they could usefully take into College or workbased learning.

Most of this audience have at some stage or continue to take a professional risk in blogging , adopting twitter or more modestly asking for some webservice or other to be unblocked. I think the education hackers or edupunks are live and well in Scottish education but need more encouragement. They are still a challengingly small minority of voices - echoing , re-blogging and tweeting each other. There needs to be a cultural shift and more support from the agencies that look after standards of access and the teaching standards in Scotland.

I hope this debate moves on at pace. We are not being ambitious enough for our learners in this space. The savvy ones can already do a lot of their own learning in their own time on their own devices in a place and time that suits them. The debate is not about schools staying technologically relevant it is really about the continiuing relevance of our education system.

Open Education #ediff

Some folks in Scotland will know the amazing work done by Brigham Young University in widening access and playing a major role in changing American Society. It is great to see this institution leading from the front in the Open Education debate here is David Wiley's presentation from last week's Educause Conference . Hope it helps some folk understand what I was getting at when I suggested that more and more learning resources would be free and accessible in the futureEducause 2010 - Openness, Data, and a Sustainable Future for Education

View more presentations from David Wiley.

Viral Education 2.0

Getting to the stage where I find a profound presentation like

this every month or so - chimes well with debate we had in

Scotland yesterday about the future of technology and education.

I'd love to see some more of these presentations coming out

from Scottish institutions - I still get the sense we're being stoic

and canny around the place of technology in learning when

we should be jumping right in.

AXA brings print ads to life

Just think what this technology could bring to interactive learning

and what a great way to sell and Apple Ap

IronWorkz

Oldie but goodie - reminds me a bit of digital natives discussion.

European Association Of Test Publishers Conference

Halfway through this conference and pleased to hear that we in Scotland are actually doing pretty well in the domain of innovative on-line assessment and in who we have chosen to work with as technical partners. Many of our testing and development partners are here.

I am writing this for those who don't know the commercial side of the computer based assessment industry. This is big multi-national business spanning the organisations that provide pychometric and selection tests to industry , those who provide specialist regulatory tests for different industries ( SQA is included here) to those who work in mainstream education providing the testing systems that support national awarding in the school, college or vocational learning space. ( we feature here too)

It is all here for a price - from the vast aircraft simulation assessments for pilots and ground crew, to the professional tests for global professional associations, to those who offer selection tests for lots of different kinds of employment or for national driving tests and for .. the list goes on...

Tests can be built , beta tested for valididty and realibility and delivered through the medium of the customer's choice to a testing centre for high stakes tests or even out to mobile devices as authentication and on-line proctoring systems develop.

The main changes in the market globally

• Main move is towards more immersive assessments using virtual worlds or augmented reality - but they are very expensive to develop but allows increasingly authentic assessment this stretches out to serious gaming.
• Greater regulation CPD and mandated testing in growing number of occupational areas around world.
• Moves to mobile and Wi-Fi based testing you can now have mobile test centres using i-pads and other devices. 
• Video Proctoring - allowing candidates to take assessments where ever they wish to tackle these.
• Costs of hardware going down for equipping test centres from about £6oo to £300.
• Massive opportunities in places like India and China where the delivery device of choice will be mobile phones.

The good news is that we have thought about most of this. The challenges as ever are not the technology or the ability to change the system but the willingness of those in the training and education systems to embrace change. When assessment on demand is a reality will your institution be ready ?

Scottish Learning Festival

Gathering my thoughts on another successful Scottish Learning Festival. For me the opportunity to network around the event is its main attraction. Here are some of my personal  favourite bits from rushing in and out of the conference over the two days.

Still awaiting some really cool SLF t-shirts playing on the Stiff Little Fingers Logo of the 1980's.

• Sugata Mitra  - Should challenge everyones thinking catch his keynote on conference website.
• Teachmeet - made 15 minutes of this before I had to scramble off to Scottish Training Federation Awards and Dinner. Check out wiki and flashmeet
• Ollie Bray and Derek Robertson's infectious enthusiasm - catch the dance..
• David Cameron's ( @realdcameron on Twitter) perceptive sessions on what Curriculum for Excellence is really all about
• Finally good to see NQ Games Sessions , Katie Farrell's work on using the new awards  , and the SQA Computing team getting around the event and blogging about it
• Ewan McIntosh  trying to stay in the debate while flying over to the west coast of America to deliver a keynote
• Stephen Heppell and his friendly supportive ways

I'm sure a simple Google #SLF10 or #SLF2010 will throw up much more - I had a sense there was more blogging and tweeting going on at this event than any of the past ones and great to see keynotes up on LTScotland Website.  Particularly liked  John Johnston's perceptive post on teachmeet -Looking forward to next year already.

Scottish Training Federation Awards

On Wednesday night I was humbled as ever by the work that training providers across Scotland do. The organisation I work for uses SVQ Awards and national occupational standards as an important part of our staff development processes as do many organisations across the UK. 

However, the work of Scotland's training providers in supporting training in the workplace is  largely unreported. We need to shine a light more often on the hard graft that is involved in achieving a modern apprenticeship and the challenges that are involved in supporting candidates in the workplace.

E-Cert Programme

Interesting project that creates an e-certificate and controls management and verification systems - can operate across different institutions and awarding authorities . Some really useful example uses from across UK  Allows educational organisation to issue these , learners to access these and  employers and institutions to use these - can be used to verify exam results, project work , e-portfolios . Candidate can submit their certification and the work that they have completed - can see lots of applications for this.
Potentially useful links to Bologna process and E-Certification E-pass work.

Donald Clark Plan B at ALTC2010

Donald Clark opens ALTC 2010 Conference in Nottingham.

Founder of Epic an early on-line educational publisher which he sold on for a modest fortune now has an excellent blog at http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ always controversial.


Don’t Lecture Me ! - Why we need to move away from the lecture theatre - a rabble rousing opening address.

I’ve heard some of this many times over the years and have experienced lots of awful teachers, lectures and conference presentations over the years. Donald does an entertaining spin through the challenges of getting individuals and institutions to move away from the lecture theatre. I agree with many of the challenges he identifies – but think we still have to find a way to move pedagogy on – and not least the  the pedagogues who like giving lectures when they can .. even in schools.  So not an easy challenge.

Hardly anyone who teaches in a University believes in any scientific methodology of teaching and learning or even tries to apply any of it. Collection of anecdotes rather than a data driven empirical approach and if any theories are used then they are half-baked. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs gets a doing it only survives because it is easy to put on a power point. Teachers always focus on what they are going to teach they hardly stop and think about how they are going to teach it.

Great use of teaching clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-S54bbX6eA

The Crazy English Movement fills stadiums with 25,000 in China
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/crazy-english-how-chinas-language-teachers-became-big-celebrities-1777545.html

Recommends  "The Media Equation " – book http://www.amazon.com/Media-Equation-Television-Information-Publication/dp/1575860538 some good ideas on applying new technologies to learning.

Teachers ask pseudo rhetorical questions and don’t really challenge learners. Lecturing grew from preaching in the middle ages and it has never really moved on. Was associated with reading and then instruction – but still a meaningless monologue.

Isaac Newton – was brilliant but no-one turned up to his lectures as no-one could understand them and his delivery was very poor – he often delivered them to empty rooms . Why put brilliant research scientists who can’t teach in front of undergraduates? Problem is not just people it is about methodology Richard Feynman teaching physics through lectures is almost an impossible task has to be through active learning.

Even the new recordings of lectures in YouTube are mostly rubbish – but it is still better to see a first class lecture on video than a mediocre one in the flesh. Russell Group Universities attendance drops to just around 50% among first years over a year.

Institutions should be looking at learning success rates and looking at how they can use technology to time shift Youtube.edu http://www.youtube.com/edu look at Lewins Lectures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Lewin_Lectures_on_Physics , i-tunes u , MIT , Open Learn OU Don’t pad out cognitive overload - hardly anyone knows how to use text, images, sound etc in learning - there is lots more we could be doing to improve learning.

The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve – keep coming back to this

Carol Twigg – Pew Research – move to active learning approach and redesign your courses around learning http://www.thencat.org/  actually a lot of potential in this work for curriculum for excellence in schools.

People need to be able to study at a distance in a much more enlightened way and universities need to share resources in much more creative ways – most medical faculties still have art /publications departments drawing and digitizing representations of the human body in a massively inefficient ways. When capital expenditure cuts come at least it will stop lots of monument building that has been going on campuses around the country.– most university buildings run at under 50% capacity which is scandal.

The Open University model is the way ahead.

And now 63 minutes later I've forgotten half of it

Assessment Futures , New Ventures and ALT-C

I'm on my way down to the Association of Learning Technology Conference on Monday.  It is probably the best place for ideas and theory sharing across the UK Learning Technology community . I've been engaged with ALT since mid 1990's . But this post is not an advert for ALT it is to set up discussions with colleagues at the conference and beyond . The post will be picked up by the excellent Crowd Vine tool that is being used.

So if you are at ALT-C here is flavour of things we are up to and areas of my immediate interest at the conference.

As you would expect from National Awarding and Accreditation Body there is quite a lot of work going on around looking at different models of assessment.   By the current nature of our system this is largely work we are doing in  Further and Higher Education , Community and Workbased learning spaces - but a quick flavour of some of the themes that are emerging

• Exemplifying models of holistic assessment utilising range of different mediums.
• Exploring use of E-portfolios and their application across institutional boundaries - portfolio moving with learner.
• Describing and exemplifying Assessment strategies beyond the written word video or other evidence capture mechanisms including Virtual Worlds
• Demonstrating use of Wki and Blogs for assessment of collaborative and group work
• Piloting and creating models for test item sharing in (maths , sciences and computing ) how far can we share/ re-use  items between institutions /continents/ education systems  ?
• Further exploring potential of Games Based Assessment

These areas of work and some broader work around building and defining Digital Literacy across  the spectrum of life long learning.and how qualifications support this. 

Always interested in anything out there that can inform our work in these areas - and welcome input from ALT Colleagues and broader blogosphere.

N'IMPORTE COMMENT - THE TOXIC AVENGER FEAT ORELSAN - "OFFICIAL VIDEO"

Facebook Boogie from France - fantasist view of virtual worlds but interesting for all references made to social networking

21st Century Education in New Brunswick, Canada

I met some of the folks leading this change in New Brunswick at a conference a few years ago

They have done a lot to modernise all of the public services across the state, not just schooling.

Useful clip for Scottish staff rooms in schools , colleges and universities.

Race to Infinity

Race to Infinity
Originally uploaded by The iconoclastic yet iconic ionic icon

The media is jumping around on results, curriculum changes, funding challenges, job shortages, institutional restructuring , funding threats and all the topics that have probably been educational media fare for the last two centuries.
We overlook that it is probably the most exciting time to be engaged in learning and education perhaps since the renaissance. We now know how education transforms lives, civil society and boosts individual and national economic capability and we have access to an almost unimaginable set of resources - on-line courses, videos, virtual worlds, games, data visualisations, primary sources, walk through maps of the world , augmented reality , even interactive maps of the universe.

The resources are there to support innovative engaging individualised routes through learning and if you can't figure out how to do this there are global networks of learners and teachers emerging offering peer support. There is not an occupational area that is not being transformed by technology. I was delighted to hear last week of a colleagues daughter moving out in to the economy confidently stating "my blog is my CV "

I predict this year will be a great year for open educational resources and for many more open minds on the changes that are happening across life long learning. It would be great to see more stories on the transformations that are happening in the UK and around the world.

Open Educational Resources

I think this image originates from some JISC CETIS Work - I used it as part of a presentation this week .

The question I would ask is how ready is your organisation to

A. Make the most from this global movement of open innovation

B However modestly how do you and your organisation contribute - (educators and learners need to become creators as well as consumers of Open Educational Resources) Are you ready ?

Shh ! Blog Posting

shh
Originally uploaded by Kradlum

I've been off blogging regularly. A combination of the technicalities of moving host, diary commitments and a reflection too of some of the more confidential discussions I have in my new role. Since Easter I've had some really great meetings with existing and new partners and we've been pushing through some business cases through our internal processes. This combined with conference season in June and a round of award ceremonies has kept me quite silent.
All poor excuses I know. In the past I have tried to make blogging a natural adjunct to life and work - twitter has taken over a bit of this and I've got to say SQA has got a bit better at using blogs and social media too ( but still room for improvement)
Anyway back from holidays and back to some projects that can be shared - expect to hear more from me over the next six months.

This is my first post on Amplify! I've really no idea how this works but here is a test posting http://amplify.com/u/8eod

Lest we forget the barriers to skills development in the Workplace

A UKCES ( UK Commission for Employment and Skils)  discussion paper from earlier this year said that in a perfect market, individuals would do their utmost to participate in skills development activities. This would provide them with a stronger chance of more secure, well paid, and more rewarding employment, and would also provide them with the wider benefits associated with ‘good work’. However, the paper acknowledged that this was not the case, and set out the barriers to skills development.


Barriers to Skills Development

Intrinsic
• Social barriers: learning perceived to go against social, gender, or family norms
• Lack of knowledge of what is available
• Lack of awareness of the benefits of engaging in skills development
• Lack of confidence
• Lack of expectancy that engaging will result in desired outcomes
• Fear of failure due to educational inheritance from previous experiences
• Perception of being too old to learn
• Perception that there is no need for further skill development
• Gaps in basic skills
• Lack of motivation due to personal priorities

Extrinsic
• Lack of time
• Cost/lack of financial support
• Lack of provision of appropriate quality, relevance, and content
• Employer unwilling or unable to resources training or time off
• Lack of space or resources for work-related training
• Lack of work culture that encourages skills development
• Lack of job ownership/autonomy to effectively deploy skills
• Lack of formal systems for progression/rewarding skills development
• Inappropriate allocation of skills development opportunities by management
• Lack of support/advocacy from unions, peers, management

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

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.

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.

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

TeachMeet Second Life 2010

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

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

Happy New Year

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.



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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ..

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.

Photosketch software

Somethings are just too clever to explain

ePortfolios

Here is nice explanation of an e-portfoilo and how Google could be the answer