Sunday, January 29, 2012

#LWF12 a quick review

Learning Without Frontiers #lwf12

Learning Without Frontiers #lwf12

I spent two days this week at learning without frontiers . At some points of conference we made it out to the frontiers but there was also a fair number of old ideas being recycled. I loved the igloos but did think conference was not as good as previous years. Day Two was best day for me.

  1. Stephen Heppell was as his best as a reliable anchor. He really should get a lot more attention paid to his grounded ideas for moving education forward. It was great to hear him on day two . It helped for me at least to bring lots of ideas had picked up back into a real world context.
  2. Fine words from Noam Chomsky "A person can do magnificently on a test, and understand very little." #lwf12
  3. I thought Noam needed to be challenged  - but that is really the problem with deities  - he offered some very  clever questions but not really solutions - the lot of the über  academic .This was a very clever way to open conference but I don't think he really has answers that learners today need never mind future of learning.
  4. #lwf12 Ellen MacArthur passionate about the future, renewable resources & inspiring young people. http://t.co/fTgzEpOD
    #lwf12 Ellen MacArthur passionate about the future, renewable resources & inspiring young people. t.co/fTgzEpOD
  5. Rest of  morning of day one for me at any rate was too much thigh slapping empty rhetoric.  Though I'd still like Ray Kurzweil's slide deck.
    Jaron Lanier and Debbie Forster were hard going for me at least.
     Ellen MacArthur would have been brilliant but I've seen presentation before and I used this slot for some external meetings .
    After lunch Charlie Leadbetter gave us standard fayre biggest disappointment was perhaps Ed Vaizey - with Digital Britain agenda surely great moment to talk about life long learning and challenges that can be tackled that will lead to greater economic prosperity - thought he set his sites too low.
  6. Ended Day One in one of the marvellous igloos discussing educational Armageddon with lots of old friends and some new ones - if anything highlighted ongoing lack of consensus about what education is for - especially in England as everything seems fractured.  It seems like politically engineered Armageddon in England . I'd love an igloo for my back garden would be great for parties !This is worth a read from @dajbelshaw 
  7. What is ‘digital literacy’? EdD thesis by @dajbelshaw  http://neverendingthesis.com/doug-belshaw-thesis-as-submitted.pdf esis.com/doug-bmscilolthesis-as-submitted.pdf via Nigel on #mscilol
  8. Day two started is much more grounded way - David Puttnam does have a vision and Mitchel Resnick has done some great work at MIT Media Lab . I know lots of schools in Scotland are using Scratch to teach computer programming 
  9. RT @wayneholmes: If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will be condemned to spend its whole life believing it is stupid. David Putnam #LWF12
  10. Mitch Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten, MIT Media Lab on stage at #lwf12 http://t.co/baM5emCD
    Mitch Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten, MIT Media Lab on stage at #lwf12 t.co/baM5emCD
  11. Really enjoyed Mozilla Foundation input and moving something on with them 
  12. Really hoping we can plug Scottish education into Mozilla global community #lwf12 lots we can bring
  13. Some other links and ideas I am going back to look at - 
  14. Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects: Where learners can share amazing things they have done with ...  http://bit.ly/ybopuo 
  15. RT @oliverquinlan: Digital Technology and the Brain: A Guide for the Online Family  http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/digital-technology-and-the-brain-a-guide-for-the-online-family/18705197 prlwf12/paperback/digital-technology-and-the-brain-a-guide-for-the-online-family/18705197 #lwf12
  16. Oops and here it is any Scottish learners tuned in to this ?  http://youngrewiredstate.org/ tate.org/
  17. RT @GrahamBM: Diary dates for #LWF13 Jan 29-30 2013, the brand new "West Hall" Olympia - expect us... #lwf12 Get it in your diary now!
  18. There are loads more of reviews appearing 
  19. From last night: my first reflections. RT *New* 'Learning Without Frontiers 2012 (#LWF12)'  http://bit.ly/wVtX6V 
  20. Schmooze did not really do it for me 
  21. @joecar Schmooze  http://bit.ly/sFrsKd  sounds really interesting! Let us know how it works for you at #LWF12

Monday, January 23, 2012

Class Dojo

I think this is interesting  development and probably running ahead of policy makers in this area of classroom management and reporting.

Young learners  who have seen Kung Fu Panda will probably understand concept of a Dojo and those that haven't will quickly see normal penalty and reward system of classroom management in this tool

Appeared on my radar a few times now in last six months and flagging it up for this reason alone.

Check it out at  http://www.classdojo.com/tour






Monday, January 16, 2012

#TeachMeetImpact



If I've done this correctly each time this page loads you will see 10 more photographs from one of the Teachmeets  that are happening right now somewhere in the world - Images from flickr tagged 'Teachmeet' and a  wee tool courtesy of Flickr Badge

The inspiring thing about Teachmeet is that it has travelled well

It works best where there are about 40-50 participants

The rules work well for teachers - who are not used to

a. Being in the audience
b. Talking for only a minute in some cases
c. Speaking in front of their peers and/or strangers
d And originally who wish to share and build their confidence in using technology in the classroom - and might not be that confident.




Created with flickr badge.

Sunday, January 15, 2012

Playing with Drawing Packages

I am a terrible doodler and result of being away from home and trying to seek inspiration in meetings is that I sit and doodle .
I wonder if any of my pals recognise these doodles ;-)

The Bett Show 2nd Helpings #bett12, #BETT_Show, #bett2012




Michael Gove set a much better tone and direction for this year's conference, he may have disappointed some with talk of making programming exciting while perhaps overlooking the  fact that many folks still see a need for ict to permeate the curriculum more,  just using the stuff does require support and neither teachers or learners naturally apply technology in a learning context. We still need a focus on digital literacies.


I looked around for some familiar Education Department folks to compare notes with - I think an Education Department Stand at BETT would be useful. Though I have to say Naace and ALT are doing a fine job in keeping debate going and providing guidance for schools in maintaining quality of ICT Provision for learners.
It is worth looking and contributing to the  following debate at SchoolTech.Org.Uk 

When you see commercial muscle that is on display each year at BETT it is easy to see how and why local authorities can be seduced in to making large investments. There is an  interesting on going BBC investigation on UK Schools paying up to fives times more for technology than other parts of the world.

There was I thought some misplaced smugness from Scotland - we have done much around games and learning , programming in classroom and lots more and Curriculum for Excellence genuinely opens up a very broad range of opportunities from 4- 19 and across the full subject range,  but we still have much further to go.

Hoping Gove's  damascene conversion is what it appears and that it spurs on some more joined up messages and actions from Education Scotland and SQA . We've been talking about wikifying education for last six years hope some ears pricked up at Michael Gove taking this forward in England.




Saturday, January 14, 2012

The Bett Show First Pass #bett12 #BETT_Show, #bett2012 , #mmafa , #tmbett2012 , #C84C , #EWF , #ELB2012 , #ATC21S



Lots of people can and do spend a lot of time slagging off the BETT Show but it is the one week in year where you  get the sense in the UK that learning technology has a full part to play in the future of learning.  

It can be really hectic but it is always a privilege to attend and critical I think that anyone who gets to attend shares things with the broader learning community. There are a few learning 'consultants' who top up on their jargon this week and will drip feed it to their clients for the rest of the year.  I think "flipped classroom" will be the term  for Bullshit Bingo this year.  ( not knocking theory but those who will mouth it emptily in the coming year ) 

The event was a lot busier than last year both on exhibitor and it felt on attendee front.  Some folks said rightly that last year had a poor turn out because of the weather but it still felt busier than last two previous years.  Good too to  meet up with both Education Scotland and Scottish Government at the  event - it is really critical we make the most of events like BETT both for information gathering and on promoting the best of Scottish Education.

I'll do a few posts  to summarise my BETT experience. There were lots of great links and interesting topics flying around on twitter I hope some of these streams will be archived.

#EWF,  #ELB2012  , #ATC21S I think lots of folk are unaware that BESA now helps organise an Education World Forum on the Monday and Tuesday before BETT started.  There are quite a few useful snippets in the feed from this  http://www.ewf2012.org/  , Microsoft's Education Leaders Briefing  and one to have a look at the assessment and teaching of 21st century skills programme http://atc21s.org/ which we at SQA have been engaged with from inception.

#bett12 #BETT_Show,  #bett2012   - I wish that the official BETT Tag did not have an underscore in it . I don't know who came up with that idea but hopefully one that changes next year. 

 #mmafa  The Miranda Mod  Unconference and some excellent sessions http://www.mirandanet.ac.uk/bett/ 

#C84C  Collaborate for Change a useful new additional fringe event on Thursday evening some lively discussion from vendors and ICT support people http://www.c84c.org.uk/   Looks too that it has a format that can sustain large conference numbers.

#tmbett2012 The one and only - but I'm still not able to hang about until Friday and I am still not sure that teachmeets work when you get 200 folk in one room. But it looked good as ever http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/w/page/48562279/Teachmeet%20%40BETT%202012  and its still critical to have this kind of informal , informative , networking event for teachers at BETT. I'd still like to be able to offer some  no strings sponsorship for  this but I am not quite sure what is happening on this one. Delighted too that John Johnstone has been nominated for a NAACE award for impact of teachmeets http://www.johnjohnston.info/blog/?e=2245 I am sure lots of folk from across UK and beyond will want to help John get his portfolio together. 

More posts to follow 




Sunday, January 08, 2012

#BETT12 Here it comes



Well my diary is almost full of the important catch ups with vendors that I can only really make in this slot in the year.  I'll  be at BETT from Wed morning to Friday afternoon this year.

Normally I am aware of what the main big ticket issue is as a backdrop to BETT - in the past you could guess before you went that dependent on year you would be running into

- purveyors of electronic whiteboards
- ICT Training initiatives for teachers, learners , adults , civil servants ....
- whole school and local authority management information systems
- technical service providers for local authorities
- special deals for bulk buys of hardware
- Virtual Learning Environment providers
- Schools for the future , gazers , describers , sellers , costructors - in handy pre-formed partnership teams

The only constants over last 10 years are quiet stands full of fuzzy felt and interesting things for primary learners and  appalling really for Britain's premier education exhibition, wi-fi will be inaccessible or really dreadful.

It is hard to tell what main thing will be this year - I am guessing policy folk will sit around and talk about PISA - this has been main topic for last three years. It is verging on the obsessive really.

I'd like discussions to be around how education in the  UK can support BYOD if not for learners then certainly for teachers and how and why we can't be as ambitious for learners as a county like Uruguay can be in terms of moving to one lap top per child and building the infrastructure around this.
It may only be a short hop away as 4G and new networking technologies may mean that high bandwidth is available to support new initiatives in this space without cost of all the hard-wiring.

Would be great too to hear from school system of some examples where local authorities of regions have moved into cloud in an open scaleable way and overcome any security issues they may have had for learners and for information security too.

I usually come back with some great new ideas from international links we have http://www.joewilsons.net/search/label/BETT  and a huge sense of relief we don't operate in the same policy landscape as the English education system. ( should add for blogging police this is a fact on policy landscape  rather than any form of  political statement )

See you there folks 

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Reflections on a Busy Year – Part Three



I am certain as ever there are hordes of tools out there that do all the things I do in a much more time efficient way with a higher communication impact. But here are some reflections on trends I have seen this year.

Google Docs – I’ve been using this a lot for collaboration across and beyond our organisation. Challenge when tools arrived was to get other folk comfortable with this technology and happy to contribute in a crowd sourced way.  I’d predict much more use of tools like this across the public sector and folk become socialised to this way of working.

Twitter – In one way probably an enemy to joined up thinking – most folk who tweet think we hang on every post. I’ve been in a few meetings where folk think because they have broadcast something that everyone has read it and that everyone understood what it was about.   With those caveats Twitter remains a very effective way of following lots of change across range of sectors and sharing useful links

MOOCs – Massive Open On-line Courses There just has not been enough time in my diary to actively engage with one. Game changer this year has been Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Course with  more than 100,000 learners  taking part  and some more courses on offer this year this is really something to watch and take part in if you get the chance. Worth too just doing a Google Search for Stanford Mooc you start seeing huge range of learning resources the learners have created 

Aggregation Tools Paper.li
These just get better and better and are great ways for getting most out of all the sources you follow and for re-broadcasting them selectively. I predict these will be big news next year as folk struggle to stay on top of all the information sources they now have access too.

Pealrtrees  - picked up on this about half way through year – for some topics I think this is better than delicious as a social bookmarking tool . Worth too checking out some of the collections  that are already there.

Simmering in background all this year and I’d expect more growth next year -
Infographics , Digital Storytelling , Growth of on-line schools , more interest in  national one computer per child and digital literacy projects

I have one confession though I’ve used Google Hangouts a couple of times but I still don’t really get Google+  I’ve got an i-pad 2 too and mostly use it as a flat screen TV

Finally a word of praise for Engage for Education.  I ‘ve been more and more impressed this year by the Scottish Government’s ability to use social software effectively .  The only slightly worrying caveat is that many of our stakeholders – teachers - are still looking for that paper copy of any information – I hope we can change this in the coming year.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Reflections on a Busy Year – Part Two


There is never enough time or money to support ground up initiatives. There is a lot of ground level work out there that could and can transform the lot of learners.  I think there are more of these than ever this year – and well done all ...

If you get a moment you should check out some of these links to teachers taking control of their own CPD.  I am always amazed that some more of the teacher training institutions are nor more visible in the CPD space in this way.

http://purposed.org.uk  useful discussion on purpose of education across UK
http://edutalk.cc/   nice set of educational podcasts
Pedagoo http://www.pedagoo.org/   teachers for teachers on a host of topics from Scottish Teachers 
Scotedublogs  http://www.scotedublogs.org.uk/   Still for me best aggregation of Scottish Educational Blogs
Teachmeets  just grows and grows and driven by teachers   http://teachmeet.pbworks.com/w/page/19975349/FrontPage

Most of the really good Scottish educational bloggers are now on twitter and you probably get richest diet from them here. But a few old timers worth following who will quickly lead you into the community of Scottish Educational Bloggers and Twitterers
Sorry I  can’t list everyone but check out Scottish Education Twits for feeds from main Scottish Educational Twitterers.

Worth following too those who stride around the world stirring things up

But best of all I found some new folks with new ideas emerging

Reflections on a Busy Year - Part One




Tidying out my  inbox and calendar, and while I get the chance, reflecting on a year measured out by appointments almost on each hour.  I think what still frustrates me is that I can’t put down all the things we get up to here, mainly because of the sensitivities around competition which is still an alien concept to many in Scottish education – not in the competition of ideas which should drive learning and is familiar ground, but that in education the profit motive can get in the way of excellence.

The thought that there are global corporates who will read this and frustrate us where they can, horrifies me but it is the reality of education and learning as a global service.  We need to be open to the best ideas and the most cost effective ways of delivering services to learners, competition is a good thing,  but we need to be wary of those whose mission is simply to set toll gates around learning with the aim of “monetising education” while still continuing to build public private partnerships with those who have higher ideals and are willing to work for and with us to support learners in Scotland.

Last year was dominated by the forces of change one way or another in all areas of my work.

Huge changes in institutions in Scotland

  • Education Scotland arriving, on the one hand meant lots of leaving parties, but meant too that change and handovers dominated the agenda of many meetings over the year.
  • Glow metamorphosing into what?.. we’ll find out early in New Year
  • JORUM changing direction and management structures,
  • November and December lots of meetings around future shape of further education in Scotland and Glasgow,  as a Board Member at Anniesland College. The impact of restructuring  on the further education sector will become apparent to many in the coming year.
  • One major scheduled change; Curriculum for Excellence and the roll new national qualifications,  this is doing well against a background of change and sticking to its delivery timeline


Internally I spent almost a year cajoling and encouraging some policy changes to make it an easier option to take vendor SCQF credit and leveled awards into national awards where institutions and qualification development teams need this.  This was behind the scenes work to support the DIVA project where we welcomed Linux at the start of year and VMWare at end of year.  Still patchy communication and information flow between centres and vendors and not enough made of opportunities that come from many of them.   Did my bit too to help SQA finally get a social software policy in place and hope it makes a difference in coming year.


On DIVA we hope to do more around communications early in New Year.  It was great to see a strong Scottish presence over in Washington for Partners in Learning Conference but I still fear many of these opportunities pass too many by in the main as folks are not aware of all the development opportunities available to them.

Finally an active year for Cross Party Skills Committee transitioning with new administration, on-going work getting things in place for Scotland’s Commonwealth Games 2014 through the Legacy Committee and lots of fine tuning of offers through the Partnership Action for Continuing Employment and at end of year lots of work with Scotland’s Colleges, Skills Development Scotland and Education Scotland looking once again at a shared services agenda.

I was fortunate too to get along to ALT-C11  and OER11 this year 

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

JORUM Have a Look

I'm delighted still to be involved with JORUM . We need to foster more openness and the sharing of learning resources and we need to promote progression for learners - I can't think of a much better way of promoting learning than making learning materials available for teachers and learners through  an open learning object repository

There are lots of lessons around the journey that JORUM is making which are  relevant to many organisations in the private and public sectors who are interested in opening up and sharing learning content.

Spotted this nice summary of first meeting of new Jorum Steering Group  and you can follow the adventures of the JORUM Team here.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Microsoft Partners in Learning Camp Scotland #pilgf #msftpil



Just did some homework around promoting this useful and free event for teachers .
There are great opportunities for teacher development from a broad range of private sector partners .
Sometimes it seems harder than it should be to get the message out around this and a  host of other related  opportunities.

Some of this is natural public sector suspicion and circumspection but goodness knows we do need innovative thinking from both the public and private sectors to support skills development of learners and teachers across Scotland. 

Thursday, December 01, 2011

GLOW and SQA


Have to say up front I have no involvement in the organisation of these events .

 But just delighted that after a lot of years there are  SQA events taking place using the national platform and supported by Education Scotland . 

SQA
  • Important information for Secondary Schools: SQA Curriculum Area Events Live on Glow here. Most events and workshops will be shown live and recorded for watching again later.