Month: January 2007

Education for a digital generation

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

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Image: ‘Franci plays maze‘ by Nico Cavallotto

Demos, the UK thinktank ‘for everyday democracy‘, released Their Space: Education for a digital generation, written by Hannah Green and Celia Hannon on January the 11th, and available as a free CC licensed download. For the edtechs amongst you it offers a good overview to the national policy level approach the UK is increasingly adopting. For the non-digital, it provides an introduction of some the key ideas currently informing calls for educational reform.   

The increasing recognition and consensus that digital literacy is something that needs to be mainstreamed is obviously a welcome one. The authors take a practical, moral-panic defusing approach to the reality of new technologies and practices, focusing on participation and economic arguments.

The brief glossary  features more commercial services (ie Facebook) than it does tools (eg blogs) and some of the entries are debatable.

Chapter two, Myths and misconceptions, is handy, and rehearses a few discussions that will be familiar to people working in education and trying to promote a positive view of young peoples use of technology.

Chapter 5, The world has changed so why haven’t we? is a bit of a mish-mash. It aims to "lay out a set of opportunities and challenges for the government and for school leaders and their staff", most of which are familiar and aren’t particularly well resolved here – informed leadership, better staff development, a more relevant and integrated approach to ICT as a subject, access for disadvantaged learners, parental involvement, a re-evaluation of the assessment system, greater learner involvement (dynamic (or deep) personalisation, as I’ve characterised it).

Personal Learning Environments get a mention in the guise of the ‘Creative Portfolio’. A little weirdly, the authors final two "opportunities and challenges" are classroom wikis and Del.icio.us. I’ve got nothing against either tool or site, and I know that loads of educational professionals have found effective uses for wikis, other collaborative tools, and social bookmarking sites. It seems incongruous to be promoting particular services at policy level in the context of a document which has clearly articulates the fast moving state of play. 

EdTech activism

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

The recent Florida Educational Technology Conference blogger meetup seems to have stirred up some hi-octane interest in edublog lobbying to  “make education and read/write technology a social/economic priority”, and for working towards the political mainstreaming of educational transformation which embeds new social technologies and practices (software, networks, media production and sharing).

Christopher Sessums outlines the US edubloggers embryonic manifesto in ‘Why the future needs us: educational reform, collaboration and social action”, and co-conspirator Will Richardson pitches in with A Call to…?

Focusing on the next US election is an interesting strategy, and one that might well provide some useful models and lessons for other countries. I’m interested in what a US-wide organization is going to look and work like, how it might influence and collaborate with other emerging social and educational tech associations, and very much looking forward to hearing more info on the planned June Stateside edubloggercon.

A whole bunch has happened since last June, when we held the UK’s first edublogger conference. There will be a formal announcement shortly about the new grass-roots, independent UK organization, Future Learning Online (FLO) which has emerged from a series of on and offline events, meetups, and conversations taking place over the past few years between educational bloggers, technologists, developers, IT support staff, librarians, consultants, researchers, teachers, post-grad students, trainers and many other people who don’t fit easily into these, or any single, role. We’ll be holding our next annual conference in June as well – so it’s shaping up to be an interesting summer. 

Stop complaining, be modern

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

Thanks to Glyn Wintle, Open Rights Group regular, for this link to the Action on Rights of Children (ARCH) blog post ‘Can’t you just be modern?‘

The post replies to an article by David Walker in Wednesday’s Guardian which suggests that mistrust of data sharing practices is erroneously based on an assumption that the UK government is the evil empire.

Check out the ARCH sidebar while you’re there for some nice linkfo.

Mobile ubiquity

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

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Image: ‘thats why they call it work‘ taken by cactusbones

I was talking to some undergrad students recently about all the uses we had for our mobile phones. Actually making phone calls was way down on most lists – right up the top were alarm clock, calendar (synced with online or desktop calendar), texting, taking and sharing pictures, and filming and watching clips. Checking email, going online, and using sat-nav to get home after drunken parties were all there too. Listening to music showed up.

So I was interested to read this 27 year-olds day-with-the-phone in Japan. Posted over at electro-plankton in reply to the recent US iPhone-fever, the post puts the additional features (mainly Mobile digital TV and increased consumerism ops) down to Japanese phone developers working with the countries only two network providers:

"Claude’s typical day starts with him checking his email on his phone. He gets all his daily tasks and calendaring events this way. He then syncs it with his computer. He pays for the subway by placing the phone on a kiosk granting him access past the gates. The commute is spent watching TV on his phone by rotating the screen. A small antenna extends up and catches the wireless digital TV signals (something we will never have here in America). About 45 minutes later, he’s in Tokyo and heads to a vending machine to buy fresh fruit and water. He places the phone up against a pad. The vending machine reads his bank information which is tied into his phone. He then places his thumb on the phone’s tiny thumbprint reader to verify his identity. As he makes his way to the office, he waves the phone near the door handle to unlock it. During a 10 minute break, he’s flips thru a magazine and sees something he wants to buy. The item has a tiny stamp size barcode pictogram next to it. He scans the pictogram with his phone. A receipt and shipping confirmation hits his email minutes later. As the day ends, he syncs with his work computer and goes grocery shopping paying for items with his phone. Before heading home, he heads to a bar his friend has invited him too. He uses the phone to give him step-by-step directions. The day is finally over and his phone’s battery is nearing the end of its life. He plugs it in and goes about the rest of the evening relaxing before bed."

Emerge

Posted on by Josephine Fraser

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As George Roberts posted earlier today, the Emerge project JISC bid to support the Users and Innovation strand of the capital programme was successful.

I went along to the formal interview with George (Oxford Brookes), Chris Fowler (Essex), Michael Gardner (Essex) and Steven Warburton (Kings College London) on Thursday, where we had a really productive discussion and got very excited about the project again. 

My role will be focusing on supporting JISC’s community of practice by providing appropriate infrastructure and tools, and ensuring that support and training is designed around the needs of group members. 

I’m very much looking forward to working with Team Elgg, since we will be using an Elgg network to support the community members as appropriate (a lot of the flesh of the project, including tools and services, are going to depend on user need and preference) and as a base for the project management. Elgg was the obvious choice for me for a bunch of reasons, but in particular:

  • It’s open source and supports a number of open standards. The January to June roadmap points up a lot of interesting new developments, including OpenID.
  • Elgg has been designed to support distributed practices and user choices. This means that people in the group can choose to work where and how they want to, in small or large groups, or as individuals. We’ll be able to support the connections they want to make using the platform, and provide a great entry point into networks of practice.
  • Relational granularity/Smart networking: posts, resources, and even elements of profiles can be public, shared amongst groups of any size, or private.

Entirely appropriately, while I was over at elgg.net checking out George’s post, I stumbled over another just-up post from Sam Rose, which pointed in the direction of a very interesting piece by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze, Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale.