Category Archives: stuff

FENC Symposium

I have spent the day in Birmingham at the FENC Symposium. Colleges who had submitted Beacon applications for the FENC award were invited to show and tell what was in their application.

Our original submission was on how we had embedded the use of Interactive Whiteboards across the college to enhance and enrich the learning experience for our learners.

At the Symposium thanks to Promethean we had a mobile board in place and we were able to show and explain not only how we had embedded the practice of using the boards, but we also could demonstrate the board itself.

Quite a few colleges were presenting and had stands. A few caught my eye. Telford College reminded me that not everyone can read text and using images for navigation can be a useful way of presenting course information, especially course information for courses that teach people how to read, or ESOL or EFL courses.

Dumfries and Galloway College showed how they were using WordPress for ILPs. A simple way to allow students to post information about their learning.

Overall an interesting day and again realising that it is never about the technology, it is all about the people, learners, staff development and key figures moving things forward.

Phone Applications

Nice little BBC news item on the growing market for applications for smartphones.

Sales in the world’s mobile phone industry are expected to fall this year but downloads of phone applications is one area which is thriving.

Applications create new things to do on a phone and almost a billion of them have been downloaded to Apple’s iPhone.

Rory Cellan-Jones examines the emerging new trend.

Nokia N73 mobile phone

A vision of FE in 2020

This is a vision of FE in 2020.

Stuart Edards of DIUS has said

Sion Simon, Minister for FE, has stated his ambition to see further education recognised nationally and internationally for its commitment to technology. We have now put together some simple statements on where things could be heading towards 2020 and how that compares with evidence of where the sector is overall at the moment. These build on discussions that we and our partners have had with experts within and outside the sector, with employers and with learners. They cover five main areas:

  • content and digital resources
  • blogosphere, social media, web 2
  • provider and workforce capability
  • learner experience
  • employers

So what is your vision for FE in 2020?

Mobile users at risk of ID theft

BBC reports on a survey about the possible identity theft issues from mobile phones.

A survey of London commuters suggests that 4.2m Britons store data on their mobiles that could be used in identity theft in the event they are stolen.

Only six in 10 use a password to limit entry into the phones, according to the survey by security firm Credant.

The survey found that 99% of people use their phones for business in some way, despite 26% of them being told not to.

Of course from an educational perspective, if an institution is giving mobile devices to students, they do need to be informed about what data the students put on that device and what to do if the device is stolen?

Transforming the World

A quarter of the world use the internet and half the world now has a mobile phone.

The Guardian has an interesting article on an UN report.

The speed and scale of the world’s love affair with mobile phones was revealed yesterday in a UN report that showed more than half the global population now pay to use one.

The survey, by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the UN, also found that nearly a quarter of the world’s 6.7 billion people use the internet.

I assume that if you are reading this that you more than likely have access to the internet (unless some kind soul prints out my blog articles for you to read) and if you do have access to the internet then more than equally likely you have a mobile phone.

The world is changing and the world is changing fast.

Transforming the World

We can’t as a sector afford to stand still, nor is it merely a matter of moving from one state to another. Society and our learners are changing and we need to ensure that not only we keep up with the technological changes, but that we also support our learners to keep up too.

The problem with ILT and e-Learning is that it will never be a place we can get to, it is much more a moving target and we need to keep moving to keep up.

For example new services come and go.

I use to demonstrate Gabcast which was a fantastic free podcasting tool, now it is no longer free. Should you stop using it, well no, it might cost money, but it might be money well spent. College systems may need to change in order to make it simpler for them to pay for services such as Gabcast, but the issue is less money (colleges spend money on lots of things) and more about processes and procedures.

This doesn’t mean that you should never use Web 2.0 and other free services.At the end of the day, things change, things close down.

My view is that institutions and individuals need to be more flexible, responsive and robust in how they use services and resources so that when things do change, break, close, or whatever, it has a minimal impact on the end user, the learner.

Engadget does not like Windows Mobile 6.5

Engadget, the gadget blog really doesn’t like Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system.

Still, some of us at Engadget (well, one of us, at least), feel like the folks in Redmond missed the mark by a longshot. Instead of demonstrating its technical prowess and vast resources, Microsoft limped out a half-hearted rehash of an OS we’ve seen all too much of, and managed to blind most onlookers with a storm of big time partnerships and bloated PR.

They go on to give ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark!

Read the article in full.

I will say that I am not a great fan of Windows Mobile, for many years I used an iPaq as a PDA, but recently (an Acer c530 for GPS and Satnav aside) I have been using either my Nokia phone or an iPod touch as my personal organiser.