Category Archives: stuff

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Small interventions, fundamental shifts

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This morning I was at one of the Symposia at Ascilite 2009, Cascading Change: The role of social software and social media in educational intervention and transformation.

In recent years social media and social software tools and practices have been applied in numerous implementation and pilot studies in higher. Some have been driven by explicit educational goals, while others seem to have been inspired by the attractive, technical flexibility of an emerging decentralized landscape of loosely-coupled, networked tools and services and its alleged potential for changing the dominant patterns of institutional provision of ICT in education. This symposium brings together a diverse and international group of researchers to explore the problems and limitations of using social media as a leverage point for second-order change in higher education. It aims to engage contributors and the audience in theoretical and empirical reflection on possible directions for further conceptual and methodological development in that area.

This was an interesting debate and as is usually the case there wasn’t sufficient time for a lot of discussion. I was hoping with the Twitterfall screen up that we could have an online debate, however Twitter decided to have a big fail. Ah well.

One of the questions that came up was why with all these “interventions” why is change so slow or not happening.

My opinion is that these changes or interventions we make that we report at these conferences are always small and tiny and therefore can’t make a huge differences. We need to make major interventions at a institutional or even at a societal level if we are to effect fundamental change.

I also wonder if the culture of how we work is also a barrier to systematic change. In HE especially with a focus on research and publication, there is less incentive to effect change and more incentive to carry on researching and attending conferences and getting papers published.

People with the power to effect change do not (in the main) attend such conferences and therefore such changes do not happen at an institutional level.

Of course change does happen at an institutional level, but often with administrative systems rather than teaching and learning. For example does your institution use e-mail or MIS ?

As with the MIT OpenCourseWare and other similar initiatives in this area we can see that sometimes there can be fundamental shifts in the ways institutions work.

So how do we move things along…

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Ascilite Day #1

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So here we are with the official start of the Ascilite 2009 Conference. As I write this it’s late Monday morning in Auckland, but late Sunday evening back home in the UK. It feels weird blogging and tweeting about the conference, whilst people I know back in the UK are getting ready to go to sleep.

With a traditional Māori welcome we then launched into the traditional conference openings from the great and the good.

The first keynote of the conference was form Dr Scott Diener of the University of Auckland. He is an advocate of Second Life and described how he saw how Second Life was going to change education. He was very passionate about Second Life and its use in education. He demonstrated his island live to the audience.

Now I have talked about Second Life before and as you may know I don’t really “get it”.

I either seem to be the technology luddite with the red flag walking in front of the Second Life car, or maybe Second Life is not this life changing and social changing technology that many think it is.

Now it may be just me, for example I can see some real potential and benefits of Augmented Reality technologies, but don’t see similar opportunities with Second Life.

Of course this doesn’t mean I am right, but what do you think?

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At last…

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One day this may all change…

chargers

Photo source.

According to a report on the BBC News, there will be on day a standard charger for mobile phones.

A new mobile phone charger that will work with any handset has been approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations body.

What this will mean is that if you do run out of charge you should be able to borrow someone’s charger without worrying if it will fit your phone.

Of course one of the advantages of this is that if educational institutions want to provide charging points they don’t need to worry about trying to provide the multitude of chargers currently available.

So when is this going to happen… not for some time. It will be 2010 when the standard will appear on new phones, and after that it could take a few years as people replace their phones.

In the meantime educational institutions may want to consider secure charging points such as this.

multiphonecharger

Why?

Well with the way in which the phones of today can be used for learning from over the web to video and audio, the batteries just don’t last long enough.

I am now looking forward to the day when I can carry one charger for everything, not just my phones!

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It’s Day Two…

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It’s day two of Handheld Learning 2009 and we start with the keynotes (preceded by industry announcements). Graham Brown Martin starting the conference with a hard hitting commentary on the state of the learning economy.

Later we have Malcolm McLaren and others…

I am speaking in the Social Media for Learning session on Twitter at 5.30…

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Handheld Learning 2009

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Today I am going to Handheld Learning 2009, probably the biggest conference on mobile learning.

There is lots on at the conference and for it is quite a busy conference. Today I am at the HHECKL Fringe event with our excellent Gadget Cool Wall. Later I hope to be on the Pecha Kucha with twenty slides and twenty seconds for each slide.

Monday evening is the Awards Evening and that should be fun.

On Tuesday there is a lots on and I have the final slot in the Social Media for Learning session. I am presenting on the Value of Twitter.

Wednesday I am presenting in the MoLeNET session on our Glossy and Shiny projects.

The nice thing about Handheld Learning is that it is about all types of learning and all types of sectors. There is a research strand, there is an exhibition, keynote speakers and lots of different strands and sessions.

Some excellent people are going and some of these are also presenting.

Looking forward to it.

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Mobile Broadband too slow

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3gdongle

From BBC News.

A survey by comparison site Broadband Expert suggests that UK mobile broadband providers are delivering services “far lower than advertised”.

Almost three and a half thousand broadband connections were tested over a five month period.

The firm found that users recorded an average download speed of 1.1Mbs, substantially lower than advertised.

The advertised speeds are sometimes in my opinion a bit over the top, for example Vodafone advertise 7.2Mbps which is really fast, however though I believe I have had that speed probably once, in London, I generally get a much lower speed.

However I agree with the expert critcism of the report, this is mobile broadband we’re talking about, though I would like to get a consistent 7.2Mbps I know that the technology doesn’t work that way. If I am moving, if other people are using their 3G devices, buildings, the weather and other stuff.

I have been pleased with my Vodafone 3G and T-Mobile 3G speeds, what are your 3G experience like? Do some people have high expectations for a technology which personally I am surprised works at all.

Photo source.

stuff

WiFi, no MiFi

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So you want to be connected to the internet on the move? Or you need connectivity at a conference without wifi?

Yes you could get a 3G USB dongle or stick, but that only allows a single computer to connect.

What happens if you also want to connect your mobile device, a second laptop, what happens if there is more than one person and only one dongle?

In the past the solution I used was Joikuspot which was an application which ran on my Nokia N95 phone. It acted as a wireless access point, it connected to the internet via 3G and then shared that connection over the phone’s wifi connection with other devices. It was a very clever technology which made life easier for me. There were a few downsides, the main was battery life, it drained battery from the N95 really fast, so was only useful for an hour or two or when the phone was plugged into the mains. Of course this meant that I couldn’t use the N95 as a phone, as the battery would be drained. Another problem I had was with devices such as the Nokia N810 and Sony PSP which would not connect to the Joikuspot wireless network. The reason was a limitation in the Symbian software which meant that the phone acted in ad-hoc mode for wireless rather than infrastructure. The N810 and PSP had issues with connecting to an ad-hoc network. It did however work fine with the iPod touch which was how I mainly used it.

I was very interested to hear from Andy Ihnatko on MacBreak Weekly about the MiFi. A battery powered 3G wireless router. Using a 3G SIM it would connect to the internet and then allow  up to five wireless clients to connect and share that 3G connection. With a four hour battery life, could be charged via USB and about the size of a credit card, it seemed ideal. Of course I didn’t expect to see it in the UK, probably only available in the US on Verizon or Sprint…

mifi2

I did an internet search (as you do) and found it on sale at Expansys (without a contract). Ordered and delivered.

Using a SIM from a Vodafone 3G USB dongle it was  very simple to set up and configure and I would recommend that you use the details from Ross Barkman’s excellent website on connection settings for GPRS/3G to save having to work out where the information is on your providers’ website.

You can configure it wirelessly, and the first things I did was rename the wireless network and add WPA2 security.

Once configured it is simply a matter of turning it on, waiting for it to connect and then connect your laptop (or other device) to the wireless network.

It works very well and felt faster than using the USB dongle!

One problem I have had is the MacBook Pro losing the wireless connection and being unable to re-connect with the result the only solution was to reboot the MiFi. I am now trying just WPA as I think it is a MacBook Pro wireless issue rather than a MiFi issue. Or it could be an issue with the fact I was on a train!

I do like the MiFi and it does what it says on the tin.

You can now get the MiFi from 3 on a contract or as PAYG. This is much “cheaper” than buying the unlocked MiFi, but of course you get less flexibility as a result.