2012 Horizon report
An advance copy of the the NMC Horizon Report 2012 K-12 Edition, due to be launched on June 14, identifies mobile devices and apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Game-based learning and personal learning environments are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; and augmented reality and natural user interfaces emerged in the third horizon of four to five years.
OER Quality
A new project is attempting to define quality standards for open educational resources in higher education; this is part of the OER Quality Project, a joint research between the universities of Barcelona, Santiago de Chile and the University of London.
The researchers for this project are lecturers and academic librarians and aim to define a set of quality standards and develop a good practices guide both for content design and for indexing open educational resources in institutional repositories.
They are looking for university lecturers, readers or professors (distance learning lecturers welcome too) willing to answer 2 surveys (20 minutes each) and to evaluate a set of OERs, according to certain guidelines and criteria, which will take 30 minutes to answer. To participate, please register here.
Hangouts on Air
Personally I am not a great fan of Google+, although as Google increasingly integrates its different services it is hard to avoid. But, as Stephen Downes points out in the ever valuable Oldaily, citing an original blog post by David Andrade, “by far and away the best thing about Google+ is the Hangout feature, essentially a way to have a videoconference with ten of your friends. This latest upgrade allows you to broadcast your Hangouts to as large an audience as you want. “With Hangouts on Air, you will be able to broadcast yourself publicly to the entire world, see how many viewers you have, and even record and reshare your broadcast. The public recording will be uploaded to your YouTube channel and to your original Google+ post.”
With free skype video calls limited to two people and the increasing cost of proprietary synchronous elearning platforms like Blackboard Collaborate, Hangouts could become the system of choice for open online courses.
Gadgets and widgets
The Dutch SURFnet have announced the ‘Edu-Socializing Seminar’, to be held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on June 12th and 13th. They say “Gadget and widget technology is gaining momentum in the Research and Educational community. Projects like the Role Project, Apache Rave, Sakai OAE and OpenConext implement and deploy these technologies, showcasing the possibilities and benefits of such loosely coupled and distributed environments. The projects address a wide variety of needs from within the community like, among others, personalized learning environments, mashing web and social content, distributed learning and online collaborations.
The event seeks to explore trends and foster these developments internationally, by bringing together experts from different fields into one event and joining them in a community. With interactive sessions the workshop wants to enable sharing of ideas and knowledge. At the same time the event wants to trigger new developments. With dedicated breakout sessions, common challenges can be addressed and solutions can be targeted.”
More details on the seminar wiki page.
The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:
Well inspired by Dirk’s twitter, I thought I might actually come to this event.
I clicked on the url, found the website but had no idea how to navigate it and no idea how I could make a contribution. I clicked randomly on words I didn’t understand but it kept asking me to log in. I tried that because I thought I had to create an account to say anything. When I tried to do that I just kept getting a message saying I didn’t have an account so could not contribute anyway.
One of the things I wanted to comment on was that it is described as an event designed by researchers for researchers yet the focus is on practice. I can’t get my head around this. Is it going to be another event where researchers talk to researchers about what teachers and trainers should be doing? Or is it for practitioners as well? Anyway, I thought I might do something on that – like what the issues are.
The reason I have never been interested in attending e-learning events is because they all seemed out of reach of ‘the rest of us’. Since working for Pontydysgu, I decided I ought to take the plunge.
So, the first thing I tried to join was some on-line conference thing a few weeks ago but the technology broke in the first few minutes so depressed and with confidence shaken, I gave up.
Thoughtfest was only the second thing I tried to get involved in and I’m now even more depressed. Maybe I am just dull – tho’ I don’t suppose any more so than other ordinary teachers and trainers I know who might be interested in discussing e-learning – but so far this event is totally inaccessible to me.
It might be OK for the ‘community of practice’ that is already involved but as sure as hell it is not welcoming for those who are just dipping their toe in the water. Both the web site and the ideas are impenetrable to a newcomer.
Have a nice conference!