With less than a week to go until prize night at the Annual ELTons awards ceremony which ” … rewards the wealth of innovative new English language teaching (ELT) resources “, there are two excellent resource websites nominated.  Justice will not have been served if one of them doesn’t go home with a gong on Wednesday evening.

Nik’s Daily English Activities and Teachertrainingvideos.com are both excellent Web 2.0 examples of how individuals can have an impact and influence far beyond what was possible a few short years ago.

Read more »

‘Where are we now and what are we doing with virtual worlds  in UK Higher and Further Education?’ was the meat of a recent event in London at the end of January organised by Eduserv. Attempting to answer the question of ‘What next for virtual worlds?’, it mainly focused on Second Life and OpenSim.  There were a range of practical and practice-informed research based presentations from a very experienced group of people, engaging with an equally experienced audience. Attendees were warned they were expected to participate and weren’t found wanting.

Some of the tentative conclusions were

• Virtual worlds (VW’s) are useful – which is not the same as saying that they have to be used.
• There are insights to be had in comparing and benchmarking VW usage with the resurgence of video conferencing.
• Technologically the future will be a mix of different, interlinking systems. The key will be open ’standards’ rather than open source.
• Research-wise we may be on thin ice when e.g. describing embodiment as an affordance of virtual worlds. We need to revise approaches to making claims about virtual worlds for reasons of research clarity and real world practicality.
• It’s not just about Second Life
• Virtual Worlds have a future but it’s very difficult to know how things will develop.

Below I’ll go through some of the highlights for me.

Read more »

If opening yet another article about pedagogy and technology prompts a yawn, then human rights protests, sexting and ‘God as a wiki’ might pique your interest.  In From Blogs to Bombs Mark Pegrum considers the future of digital technologies in education and makes a convincing case for educators and educational policy makers to see that  “ ‘technology’ is about a lot more than technology”. He uses an effective approach of multiple perspectives or “lenses” to clarify and relate the multiplicity of issues which stretch beyond the social and, even, socio-political.  It may feel a reach too far sometimes but you can’t push the envelope without a few creases.

Read more »

Last week’s trip to BETT “the world’s largest educational technology event”  marked ten years, more or less since I first went. Almost all of those visits were motivated by professional interest in ICT in English Language Teaching (ELT) or EFL so I wondered when I left this time, if i couldn’t summarise some of the lessons I think BETT has to offer the ELT industry from an ICT perspective.

Check out life as a grown up

ICT in ELT has often been seen as either a necessary gimic, a sop to the marketers or as a nice-to-have which sucks up too many resources. To be fair, not nearly enough activity has been properly business or problem focussed but this is changing. What strikes you walking round the enormous range of vendors in BETT is the sense of an evolved, complex marketplace which fulfills real needs: platforms underpinning school information systems; the hardware; furniture and physical infrastructure; training organisations; software; authentic media adapted for education; special needs and more. It feels like necessary stuff.
Read more »

When some intergalactic equivalent of the United Nations finally takes pity on us and enforces regime change on humanity, they will probably cite our distracting obsession with the latest gadgets as inability to manage our own affairs. The coverage of what was launched at the Consumer Electronics Show  (CES) last week and what wasn’t but still stole the headlines will be held up as irrefutable evidence that we were beyond help.

-

Well maybe but the trend toward smartphones and portable devices has major implications for how people see content relevance, accessibility and functionality and this will create expectations for portable  learning.  So for publishers and ebook / mlearning folk there was quite a bit of good news, albeit indirect. The iPhone and the Tyranny of the App have such an iconic stranglehold on forays into mlearning that many a publishing and other organisation was sitting tight until the Nexus One arrived.  It’s not apparently that there isn’t anything better around than the iPhone.  Rather Google is the only organisation with similar rain-making ability and the market needs rounding out.

-

In some ways it doesn’t matter if Apple launches an iTablet or that Microsoft’s new toy is distinctly underwhelming. (The fact that its launch was entrusted to a pudgy guy with a whiney voice and a line in rumpled sweaters i.e. Steve Balmer, doesn’t help). It may not even matter that some are predicting that netbooks are doomed.

-

The breakthrough is the increasing number of mobile multimedia devices which can handle ebooks – audiobooks are ebooks too, remember. Subject to actual availability (many of the smart phones are quite expensive and / or have slow rollouts due to the approach of signing exclusive agreements country by country ) and a fair wind from other enablers such as mobile broadband tariffs, there will be a market need for portable learning content sooner or later.  And the more devices, the merrier as it reduces the liklihood of propietary formats.

-

So 2010 may not be the year when mlearning takes off but it should be the year when we develop a much clearer idea of the art of the possible.

Imagine you spend a lot of time working on a variety of projects, sometimes with different teams.You come across a dynamic new type of meeting and collaboration space.  Just from a brief promotional video it’s obvious that this is a new way of thinking with immediate benefits for the way that you do things.  Better still, you can have an extended free trial. Problem is, the new meeting space doesn’t  integrate with any of your current projects and no-one you know can meet up with you there.  Some of the furniture is missing but someone thought it wouldn’t matter too much provided you could use a big Sudoku game  in the middle.  Next door, a bunch of people involved in education are experimenting with more than a hundred crammed into a space for  twenty. They’re all excited about having managed to get in at all and seem convinced it’s the future even if no-one can say why.  Ring a bell?

This is the story of Google Wave – an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. … can be both a conversation  and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more (Google blurb). How can something so patently useful be so wildly overhyped before troughing in despondancy for many?

Read more »

Some  very large changes happening in Spain for those interested in the classroom of the future and ebooks for elearning. Yes, there is lots of investment going into classrooms with Interactive Whiteboards figuring large. There real news, though,  is the government  seems to be promoting a national version of One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and is corralling the publishers into facilitating ebooks across the curriculum in the very near future.

Read more »

Three posts in a row on a similar topic is not a habit of this blog but e-books are the talk of the town at the moment, not only Frankfurt, so I thought one more couldn’t do any harm.

Iin putting together the last posts which aimed to cut through the device hype and examine what we mean by e-books for e-learning,  I came across a reference to a new publishing house called Flat World Knowledge which has been set up to answer many of the most pressing conundrums in getting the e-learning e-book right.

Flat World Knowledge

Once you scratch your head (or other favoured part of the anatomy in search of inspiration) for more than two minutes the following becomes apparent. E-learning e-books need to

• be available in multiple different formats (B&W, colour, interactive, mobile and audio)
• play on the devices the students already have (laptops, mobiles)
• be customiseable and updatable
• have the option of being part of a trackable suite of materials – Well-designed e-textbooks become learning environments that leverage the advances of publishing in a digital format enable from Michael Ritter’s post here
• offer some part of the product for free, not because Chris Anderson says so but that is the way that existing information web business models work (entertainment and news) and why should education be different?

None of this is really a problem from a technical perspective – the bottleneck is the model: how are these variations going to be made available, not to mention paid for?  Because of their fundamental nature, it is very difficult to resolve these issues on the product level which is why Flat World Knowledge is so interesting. Their real innovation is to change more than the business model. They have re-engineered the model of the business.  Disclaimer, as with any other company or service I focus on in this blog, I have no connection with Flat World Knowledge and this post is put together from publicly available information. Read more »

The first post on the e-book issue was motivated by the need to side-step the hype about e-book readers in order to ask “What is an e-learning e-book?” Comments said I had a fair summary of the issues around e-books in general but had sidestepped the e-book reader issue too completely. For some audiences, especially college students , this is a non-issue as they already have the wherewithal to read any e-books which may come there way.

This prompted me to go through  some very broad audiences types in fairly  simplistic way, and consider what sort of e-books they might want / have to read and what they might imply about either the hardware or the software necessary. Some conclusions also dropped out at the end for what this might mean for the ELT publishers.

Read more »

Today’s fanfare for the imminent launch of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader outside the US may have an impact on education. Will e-book readers finally begin to build some momentum in the mainstream market and generate, in-turn, some pressure for uptake in  education?

E-books provoke surprisingly little excitement among technophile educators.  Perhaps because the topic is associated with gadgets and gear rather than content, especially content which those same educators like authoring themselves.  In the Web toolosphere blogs and wikis monopolise the creative attention of those interested in written student expression and co-creation of text.  And digital text isn’t nearly as exciting as creating digital audio while mobile is just waayy sexier than either.

Read more »