Archive for April, 2011

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

Bring back the Flip

April 13th, 2011 by Graham Attwell

It is not often I write about hardware. There are quite enough web sites for that already. But, I am greatly saddened to read of the demise of the Flip camera. I have three of these excellent cameras and regularly use them in workshops and events. They are lightweight and robust. But most importantly they are extremely easy to use. I can teach someone who has never used a video camera before how to use a Flip and download the content in about 3 minutes. And that frees them up to think about the content and pedagogy, rather than worrying about their technical proficiency.

So why has Cisco decided to stop manufacturing the Flip. It is profitable, albeit with a falling volume of sales. The answer it seems is that with the rising use of mobile phones for filming and uploading video content, Cisco do not see a long term future for the Flip.

Last week I wrote in the editorial how I saw no future for dedicated educati0nal technology. But perhaps I was wrong. Even if mobiles do have advanced video capacity, for teaching and learning they are no competitors to the Flip. Biut it seems the educational market is too small and insignificant for manufacturers such as Cisco.

Posted in News, technologies, technology | 1 Comment »

Education bubble?

April 11th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
I suspect that if I ever met him I wouldn’t like Paypal founder and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. We would probably disagree about most things.
But I do agree with his assertion that we are now in a education bubble. Education has come to be portrayed as the answer to all of society’s ills. Young people are told they must get an education to get on in life. Older people are told they are responsible for their own lifelong learning to ensure they remain ‘employable’. We threaten to cut social benefits to those that refuse to undertake retraining courses. And of course it is a lie. Many people are unemployed becuase there are simply not enough jobs. In Europe thousands of graduates, who in countries like the UK have run up substantial debts to get their degree, cannot find work. Thiel is right – education is not working. At least not the kind of education system we have now. It requires a complete rethink. What is the purpose of education?
clipped from techcrunch.com

But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on  something that is by definition exclusionary. “If Harvard were really the best education, if it makes that much of a difference, why not franchise it so more people can attend? Why not create 100 Harvard affiliates?” he says. “It’s something about the scarcity and the status. In education your value depends on other people failing. Whenever Darwinism is invoked it’s usually a justification for doing something mean. It’s a way to ignore that people are falling through the cracks, because you pretend that if they could just go to Harvard, they’d be fine. Maybe that’s not true.”
  blog it

Posted in uncategorized | 2 Comments »

The spread of Smartphones

April 8th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Latest predictions on smartphone growth and operating systems as reported in the Guardiian
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

About half of the world’s smartphones will be using Google’s Android operating system by the end of 2012, according to the research firm Gartner.

Worldwide smartphone sales are expected to reach 468m units in 2011 – a 57.7% increase on 2010. The explosive growth in affordable smartphones will see annual sales top 1.1bn by 2015, Gartner said. Sales of PCs, by comparison, will reach 387m this year, a 10.5% increase on 2010, the research firm predicted last month .

By 2015, Android will enjoy a 48.8% share of the market, ahead of Windows Phone 7 on 19.5%, iOS on 17.2% and BlackBerry on 11.1%. Nokia’s once-dominant Symbian will shrink to 0.1% of the market in this period, as its Finnish maker switches to Windows Phone 7 on higher-end handsets.
  blog it

Posted in uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Turn an iPad into an Interactive Whiteboard

April 8th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
this is almost enough to tempt me into getting an iPad. But also when talking to Jenny Hughes she pointed out a big flaw in Interactive Whiteboard design in that for younger kids many of them cannot actually reach the screen. they could of course, reach an iPad.
clipped from www.speedofcreativity.org
My experiments this evening with the Air Display ($10) application for iPad confirm what I’ve suspected for some time: Inexpensive mobile applications (relative to the cost of an IWB) can transform these devices INTO functional IWBs with many more benefits as well as capabilities. In this post, I’ll highlight some of the applications which can do this for Apple’s iPad, based on a phenomenal set of tutorial videos (over 52 minutes worth) shared recently by Tim Tyson. If you still have IWBs in your school technology plan, put your planning on hold. I’m hoping the ideas I share in this post will convince you to put those precious dollars toward iPads for students and teachers INSTEAD of an expensive device (an IWB) that will stay mounted at the front of a classroom gathering dust.
  blog it

Posted in uncategorized | No Comments »

Open Attribute

April 8th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
I have been looking for something like this for ages. If you use Creative Commons materials – and most bloggers do – this is a ‘must have; plug in.
clipped from openattribute.com

The problem: Creative Commons licensed content is awesome, but attributing it properly can be difficult and confusing. The first rule for re-using openly licensed content is that you have to properly attribute the creator. There are specific requirements for what needs to go into that attribution, but those requirements can be confusing and hard to find.

The solution: A simple tool everyone can use to do the right thing with the click of a button. That’s why we’re building Open Attribute, a suite of tools that makes it ridiculously simple for anyone to copy and paste the correct attribution for any CC licensed work. These tools will query the metadata around a CC-licensed object and produce a properly formatted attribution that users can copy and paste wherever they need to.
  blog it

Posted in uncategorized | No Comments »

The future of universities

April 8th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Another challenging post by Richard Hall about the future of universities and whether they offer any longer any spaces for dissent and resistance or have become merely “a functionary of neoliberalism within the social factory.”
clipped from www.learnex.dmu.ac.uk
Is it now only beyond the University, in the multitude, in the autonomous collective, in the social science centre, in the really free school, that we are free to resist and dissent and re-imagine? Do we have to become dissident? Do we have to re-imagine higher education as higher learning beyond the institution, dissolved into community? In the face of the crisis, where do we find hope?
  blog it

Posted in uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Breaking the silence

April 7th, 2011 by Graham Attwell
Interesting article by Sarah Amster asking why more academics are not speaking and acting against the destructive policies being enacted in higher education in the UK. She ends on an optimistic note – I hope she is right but am not so sure
clipped from www.socialsciencespace.com
Academics have already relinquished many vital opportunities to remake universities into institutions for learning and human development. But as the first new budget cuts materialise and universities begin enforcing changes to accommodate and legitimise the government’s policies, there will be other openings for organising new, not-yet-imagined forms of collective resistance to the agenda. We are learning from our students that such work is neither easy nor impossible. We are also learning that such serious attacks on public education, critical disciplines and research, non-hegemonic epistemologies and democratic life, can only be met with equally as serious acts of resistance – which may of course take a plurality of different forms.
  blog it

Posted in uncategorized | No Comments »

Talking about Data – Careers Information, Advice and Guidance

April 6th, 2011 by Graham Attwell


This is the first in a new weekly series ‘Talking about Data’. As the name implies, each week I shall be publishing data related to education and learning and talking about it. And I hope you will join in the discussions.

This weeks ‘Talking about Data’ focuses on the provision of Careers Information, Advance and Guidance in England. The data source is Wave Six of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. The main objectives of the study are:

  • to gather evidence about the transitions young people make from secondary and tertiary education or training to economic roles in early adulthood
  • to enhance the ability to monitor and evaluate the effects of existing policy and provide a strong information base for future policy development
  • to contextualise the implementation of new policies in terms of young people’s current lives.

Posted in Career Guidance, Data, G8WAY, Mature, Video, Wales Wide Web | No Comments »

Do we need educational software?

April 6th, 2011 by Graham Attwell

In a reply to my post last week on Donald Clark’s article about ePortfolios Ben Werdmuller said “From reflection, to privacy, to institutional feedback and portability, these are all things that the wider web is working on, and it makes no sense at all for the elearning sector to be tackling them on their own – except for the worst kind of closed business motivations.” And I think he is right.

For some time now I have been questioning the idea of educational technology – of technology development specifically focused on education. That is not to say there is no place for research on the use of technology for learning – nor of implementation of insubstantiations of technology specifically in a learning context. But the educational technology community can only be the poorer for developing ideas and applications based on use cases posited in a silo – outside of the rest of the world.

Indeed, I would suggest that the reason this came about was because of a focus on control and management of learning – and thus on replicating and reinforcing institutional practices, rather than supporting the learning process itself. Whilst institutional practice may be quite particular and confined to the educational sector, learning processes take place throughout society. If we start designing for learning, their is nothing in the use cases of those designs which separates them from the home or from work or the wider community.

And if we take our main focus as design for learning, then we have a far greater chance of developing technologies which can transform learning, rather than reinforcing the class and technology divides which inhibit access to education.

Posted in e-portfolios, News, technologies, technology | 1 Comment »

Online safety – inverting the power relationships

April 6th, 2011 by Graham Attwell

This video reports on research by the Cooperative Research Centre for Young People, Technology and Wellbeing in Australia which has shown young people are much better prepared to deal with online risks than adults presume and that young people themselves are the most valuable resource for adults concerned about the online safety of their children. The research also reveals significant benefits to young people through social networking, which helps them to build relationships with the world around them and increases their sense of community and belonging.

I particularly like the research approach. “In the Living Lab we inverted the usual power relationships that underpin cybersafety education. Instead of charging adults with the responsibility of educating young people about cybersafety, we put young people in charge” says Dr Amanda Third.

Posted in Multimedia, networking culture, On-line safety, Social networking, Video | 1 Comment »

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

  • Search Pontydysgu.org

    News Bites

    Open online seminar

    Jisc are hosting an open, online seminar on ‘Making Assessment Count (MAC)’ on Friday 3rd Feb – 1-2pm. The presenters are Professor Peter Chatterton (Daedalus e-World Ltd) and Professor Gunter Saunders (University of Westminster).

    The mailing for the seminar says” “The objective of Making Assessment Count is primarily to help students engage more closely with the assessment process, either at the stage where they are addressing an assignment or at the stage when they receive feedback on a completed assignment. In addition an underlying theme of MAC is to use technology to help connect student reflections on their assessment with their tutors. To facilitate the reflection aspect of MAC a web based tool called e-Reflect is often used. This tool enables the authoring of self-review questionnaires by tutors for students. On completion of an e-Reflect questionnaire a report is generated for the student containing responses that are linked to the options the student selected on the questionnaire.”

    You can find out more ans sign up for the seminar at  http://jiscmac.eventbrite.co.uk/

    EC-TEL 2012

    The EC-TEL 2012: Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning 21st Century Learning for 21st Century Skills takes place on 18-21 September 2012 at Saarbrücken in Germany.

    The focus for the conference includes:

    - How can schools prepare young people for the technology-rich workplace of the future?
    - How can we use technology to promote informal and independent learning outside traditional educational settings?
    - How can we use next generation social and mobile technologies to promote informal and responsive learning?

    The deadline for proposals is April 2.

    Visitors and Residents

    David White (University of Oxford) and Dr. Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) have been attracting quite a stir with their JISC-funded work on Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment?, being undertaken as part of the Developing Digital Literacies programme webinar series.

    Slides, audio and a recording of the Blackboard Collaborate session where they presented some of the findings of their work can be found at http://bit.ly/jiscdiglitvr.

    Learning and New Technologies

    Graham Attwell is delivering a keynote presentation on Learning and New Technologies to the ‘Encouraging participation in continuing training in Romania, with focus on disadvantaged employees’ project in Bucharest on Wednesday 7 December.

    ECER 2010

    The keynotes, videos, radio shows and interviews from the ECER 2010 Conference in Helsinki:

    On the ECER 2010 website.

    Taccle handbook for teachers order form

    Here you find the Taccle handbook for teachers order form.

    Twitter

    Follow Graham Attwell on Twitter Follow Cristina Costa on Twitter Follow Dirk Stieglitz on Twitter

    Other Pontydysgu Spaces

    • Pontydysgu on the Web

      blip.tv
      Watch the Pontydysgu Videos
      pbwiki
      Our Wikispace for teaching and learning
      Sounds of the Bazaar Radio LIVE
      Join our Sounds of the Bazaar Facebook goup. Just click on the logo above.

      Our next programmes will be live from the German Moodlemoot in Emsden. Full details coming soon

  • Sounds of the Bazaar AudioBoo

  • Recent Posts

  • Archives

  • Meta

  • Upcoming Events

      There are no events.

    • Categories