I can’t ignore the ignorant

October 20, 2011 James Clay 1 Comment

In my job there are days when I could do a little dance on changing the way someone thinks about and approaches the use of learning technologies and improves the learning experience for their learners. They start to use learning technologies to solve problems they are facing, make things better for their learners or even just to do things differently to engage the learners.

Then there are days when I think… really… I start to realise that the journey my college is on is on a long and winding road…

Let me tell you a story.

In my job I am in charge of the libraries as well as learning technologies and now and again I sit on the desk and help learners and staff using the library to find and use a range of learning resources. I find this a useful way of seeing how our learners use learning resources.

A lecturer came into the library the other day and asked where the journals were, we’ve just had a refurbishment, so I guessed that she didn’t know where we had moved them. So rather than point in the general direction, I took the opportunity to show her where they were and maybe also get her to think about using the e-book collection or other online resources we have.

We found the journal she was looking for and she asked about back copies, I said we have a few on the shelves, but knowing that we subscribed to Infotrac said we also (probably) had an electronic archive. She had not heard of Infotrac, so we went to a computer and I showed her how to access the collection on the web.

She seemed impressed how easy it was to find the journal, the back issues and find archived articles. She then said that she would recommend using the service to her learners.

Just as I thought, yes success, she said,

“I normally tell my students not to use web sites”

I must have looked a little shocked as she then added pointing at Infotrac,

“That website is okay as it is a journal, but I don’t like my students using web sites”.

Then off she went….

Sometimes in my role I think yes we are changing the culture and then a member of staff says something like that dismissing the web out of hand and I think I still have a long way to go!

I really feel sorry for her learners who in the real world will be dealing with web sites all the time with excellent content and here was their lecturer dismissing the web out of hand out of pure ignorance and a lack of understanding of how the web is used for academic research, teaching and learning.

How can anyone be so ignorant of progress and change? How can anyone be so backward in their understanding of how the web is used in their profession?

Back in the 1990s there may be an argument that content on the web, well sites on GeoCities anyhow, were probably not “useful” for teaching and learning and there were issues with the authenticity.

I wouldn’t be surprised by an academic in 1997 making these kinds of assumptions, but fourteen years later haven’t we moved on?

Today even Wikipedia has value (especially in the references) and can’t just be dismissed, there is also a huge amount of valuable content on the web that learners can use to support their learning. There is some “dodgy” content on the web, so learners do of course need to have information skills to find, judge and use web based material. There is also curated content from information professionals. Think of all the open access journals now available as well as online collections of digitised resources, journal articles, and e-books.

From experience the academic in this story is quite rare in my institution, but they do exist, they are ignoring the change that is happening around them, they are not attending the training, reading the communication about the new possibilities that learning technologies and the web can bring to teaching and learning.

Part of me says that it doesn’t matter as someone who has such entrenched views will probably never change regardless of what I say and therefore I should not worry about them, ignore them and work with practitioners who are more open to the possibilities. However part of me thinks about the learners and the fact that they are losing out on the potential that the web can bring to their learning, to make it better, easier and improve accessibility. I can’t ignore them, therefore I can’t ignore the ignorant.

fote11

The Student as the Agent of Change

October 19, 2011 James Clay Leave a comment

At FOTE11 James Clay from Gloucestershire College discusses that in many institutions the structures, processes and procedures we have in place are there for many reasons; these may be for security, safety, financial, prevention, health and safety. Often change is blocked by these same reasons; reasons that exist because of politics, inertia and because we have always done it that way. It is easier not to change.

The result is that learners can often find that their learning experience is one of challenges, difficulties and frustration. Institutions that listen and act on the voice of their learners can find that students can be agents of change.

See the slides from my presentation and more thoughts.

app of the week, iphone

Optiscan – iPhone App of the Week

October 18, 2011 James Clay 2 Comments

Optiscan – iPhone App of the Week

This is a regular feature of the blog looking at various Apps available. Some of the apps will be useful for those involved in learning technologies, others will be useful in improving the way in which you work, whilst a few will be just plain fun! Some will be free, others will cost a little and one or two will be what some will think is quite expensive.

This week’s App is Optiscan.

Scan any QR code quickly and easily using your devices camera and Optiscan.

Create your own QR codes to share contacts, web addresses, text messages, phone numbers or locations with others.

Contrary to some reviews, it IS possible to create geo-location codes – use the ‘Note’ option to type (or copy/paste) the information in. This will be made easier in version 1.9.2 – due very soon!

Save to Photo album by holding down on the QR code image and selecting ‘Save Image’

Automatically scan a wide variety of QR code data formats

Save specific QR codes for quick sharing – perfect for sharing your business card!

Keep a history of QR codes created and scanned for easy recall.

Want to scan or generate codes in French? Japanese? No problem! Optiscan supports UTF-8, ISO-8859, and Shift-JIS.

Select the contact details you want to send, so the right people get the right information.

Found a QR code on the web? You don’t need two devices. Save the image to the photo gallery from Safari (tap and hold the image) – and Optiscan will decode them for you!

Optiscan runs without a network connection, and keeps your data private. Why put up with anything less?

£1.49

QR Codes do seem to be going mainstream at the moment and there are lots of people who are now embedding and using them in education.

In my own college one of the Sports Lecturers on a newsletter about College Sport put in a QR code that linked to a Flickr page with more photographs on.

The iPhone doesn’t come with a QR code reader and the older iPhones, the 3G and the 3GS, had a poor quality camera that often failed to render QR codes properly. When I had a 3GS I tried a few free QR code reader apps, but in the end after reading a review bought Optiscan.

Of course the camera in the iPhone 4 and the 4S is superior to previous cameras and as a result the newer iPhones are much better at reading QR codes.

It did the job really well, so have stuck with it since then.

It reads virtually all the QR codes I have thrown at it. I also like how it retains a history of all the QR codes I have read.

There are free QR code readers that work well on the iPhone 4 such as the QR Reader for iPhone that probably means paying for a reader isn’t necessary. However if you have the older 3GS or 3G have problems with one of the free readers then I would recommend Optiscan.

Get Optiscan in the iTunes Store.

news, stuff

Newspaper Boy

October 17, 2011 James Clay Leave a comment

In the past (over forty years ago) you needed to be a post graduate student to access old newspapers in the newspaper and library archives. They would need to go through the newspapers one by one until they found the articles they needed.

Twenty years ago, undergraduates could access newspapers on microfilm in their university libraries. They still needed to go through paper by paper, however microfilm allowed access to a wider range of newspapers and was in many ways faster than leafing through an actual newspaper.

Ten years ago, learners in colleges and schools could access newspaper articles on a CD-ROM using a computer in their classroom or library. The text was searchable and could be easily copied into a different medium.

Today, archives of newspapers from the last two hundred years can be accessed via a web browser on a mobile device or from a computer in the home, workplace or at college.

In the past the process of researching past newspapers was time intensive, expensive (travelling to archives) and exclusive; there was no way newspaper archives and university libraries would allow college students or school pupils access to their collections.

In the past learners would be dependent on text book interpretations of newspaper articles or even the author’s interpretations of events based on other sources. Today primary school children can access a range of newspaper archives covering the last two hundred years and that alone can and should have an impact on the delivery of learning.

fote11

Agents of Change – FOTiE 2011

October 10, 2011 James Clay 1 Comment

This week was the fourth Future of Technology in Education or FOTiE and the third one I have spoken at. I missed the first FOTiE as it wasn’t on my radar until it was too late, however I did follow the tweets and thought I must attend the following year.

As it was, I was asked to speak at the second FOTiE and presented on what I thought the future of learning would be.

I have used that presentation as the basis for other keynotes I have done at other events.

Last year I really enjoyed delivering a session called the iPad is the future of reading.

This year I looked at the concept of students as agents of change. What I wanted to do first was look at students and learners and how they are viewed by institutions, at best an inconvenience, at worse a security threat and quite dangerous! I then wanted people to think about why we should engage with learners and how to do this.

These are the slides from my presentation at the Future of Technology in Education 2011.

In many institutions the structures, processes and procedures we have in place are there for many reasons; these may be for security, safety, financial, prevention, health and safety. Often change is blocked by these same reasons; reasons that exist because of politics, inertia and because we have always done it that way. It is easier not to change.

As you would guess as all learners are individuals and have different needs, you need to use a range of approaches and strategies in order to engage students.

You also shouldn’t assume that learners necessarily know what they want. Usually they want something which is familiar, but better.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Henry Ford

It is never just about asking learners what they want, but about ensuring that learners know what is possible and what the benefits that these possibilities can bring to them.

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Steve Jobs, 1998

In order to provide real change and ensure that the learners are engaged in that change is to offer students real choices about what could change and the impact of that change.

So how are you engaging with learners to support change within your institution?

news, presentation

SlideShare moves to HTML5

October 3, 2011 James Clay Leave a comment

In an not an unexpected move, SlideShare, the presentation hosting service has moved from Flash to HTML5.

When SlideShare launched it used Flash to create an online slideshow of your presentation slides. It is a service I have been using now for over three years and have found it a useful place to put presentations, but then to also embed them into the blog or the VLE.

However as it was Flash based there were issues when people viewed them on a mobile device such as the iPhone or the iPad. They did fix this for viewing a SlideShare presentation on the SlideShare website and released an API. Last year I reviewed the Slide by Slide app for the iPad and was not impressed. However this wasn’t an official iPad app one that merely used the SlideShare API.

Even though you could view the presentation on the website on the iPad when the SlideShare presentation was embedded into a website, all you got was a blank space.

So it’s interesting to hear that SlideShare are losing the Flash and moving to HTML5.

Your slides will display flawlessly on an iPhone, iPad, Android and any other mobile platform. You can send a link to friends and colleagues, and they can view it on the go regardless of what device they are using.

Your slides will now load 30% faster. On the web, faster is better.

Your slides will be a part of the web. No plugins or downloads are required to view them.

They are certainly convinced that mobile is the way a lot of people will view presentations on the web.

m-learning, mobile

A Mobile Learning Journey

October 1, 2011 James Clay 2 Comments

I recently gave a presentation at an event about my mobile learning journey, here are the slides.

Of course one of the challenges with a Slideshare presentation is the lack of context and what I actually said. I think it demonstrates how a presentation in isolation is less useful than the presentation in its entirety. Something that practitioners needs to consider if they are uploading presentations to the VLE or using a service such as Slideshare. Of course you could upload an mp3 recording of the presentation, but that implies you did make a recording… alas I didn’t.

app of the week, ipad

Virtual History, Roma & Firenze – iPad Apps of the Week

September 27, 2011 James Clay Leave a comment

Virtual History, Roma & Firenze – iPad Apps of the Week

This week’s Apps are Virtual History, Roma & Virtual History, Firenze

Firenze – Virtual History, a three-dimensional journey using your iPad through the city that invented the Renaissance. Enter this epicenter of art, invention and history and even explore in detail masterpieces like those of Dante, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

Mondadori presents a fantastic voyage to Ancient Rome, the capital of the largest empire in the ancient world, which has been reconstructed in virtual form and which you can explore in a “full-immersion” panoramic experience.

£6.99 each

I was discussing with my team the other day on whether we should be placing iPads into the libraries at the college to provide additional resources and content for learners. There have been quite a few projects and trials that have shown the value of library users having access to the iPad for research and reading. The iPads would not replace existing paper resources or online content, but would supplement and enhance. I hope to expand on these ideas in a later blog post.

As a result I have started to look at the type of content we could put on the iPad, the DK Human Body (that I covered in a previous post in this series) was an obvious one for biology or anatomy.

For arts, history and travel & tourism I found these two apps (from the same publisher) that I feel would be useful for learners on those courses. Both the apps have an “immersive” experience that allows the users to explore both these famous cities using the touch interface of the iPad.

These apps would introduce the learner to these great cities and would be a starting point before moving onto for example for travel & tourism students we might also have on the iPad, the Rough Guide to Rome. We would also place e-books onto the iPads for additional detailed and indepth content, as well as content and links from practitioners.

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Define Success

September 26, 2011 James Clay Leave a comment

Going around the Twitter a week or so back was a video from TEDx London from Goldie about despite dropping out of the school system he has made a success of his life. Given the choice again, he would drop out of school again!

It reminds me of some (most) of the presentations from Handheld Learning 2009 in which Malcolm McLaren, Zenna Atkins and Yvonne Roberts.

Back then I wrote about how they all felt they were failed by the formal education system, but had made a success of their lives.

…next was Zenna Atkins… She felt she had been failed by the formal education system and despite this had a made a success of her life. She recounted tales about her children and their experiences in the education system. I am sure she knows more about the UK education system then someone like me, but you have to ask this question, if the education system is so wrong in the UK, despite the best efforts of organisations like Ofsted which are there to check the quality of the education system, then maybe we need to rethink the whole education system and the quality checking that takes place. I did feel that alienating your audience who are generally all from the formal education system and indicating that they are the problem was an interesting way to present the issues.

With Malcolm McLaren up next… He was also failed by the formal education system but found success, notice a pattern here?

Yvonne Roberts was the third keynote and having alienated the audience with a throwaway remark about dyslexia once more recounted how the formal education system had failed her and here she was speaking as a keynote presenter.

All of these speakers talked about how the formal education system was rubbish and needed a revolution. The pattern behind all their talks was that the school system had failed them and despite that they had made a success of their lives.

What annoys me about giving these people a platform is that it sends completely the wrong message to young people.

“Drop out of school and you will be successful!”

We never hear from those thousands of people who dropped out and didn’t have success in the same way they did. Those thousands who for whom school failed them and they feel they have failed.

Let’s remember that there are many more people that didn’t drop out of school and have led happy successful lives.

I think a key question is how do we define success?

Do we measure success by how many column inches you have in the Daily Mail?

Is success measured by economic success, how much money we have earned? Wealth?

Is success measured by popularity? By the number of Twitter followers you have? How much you are liked on Facebook? How many hit singles you’ve had?

Is success measured by how high you get in an organisation? Are you a Chief Executive? Are you a senior manager?

Is success measured by some weird happiness index that takes into account multiple factors? Do you need to be successful to be happy?

There are issues and problems with the formal education system, however those issues are institutional, cultural, societal and governmental. Changes need to be made at all levels, in government, in government departments, officiating quangos such as Ofsted, examining boards, local authorities, funding bodies as well as schools and colleges.

When an individual is successful despite failing at school, in some ways yes we should celebrate this, but we must also question why they failed within the formal system. Likewise we mustn’t forget those for whom not only did the school system fail, but have not had happy successful lives.

However we mustn’t forget those for whom the school system did work and who have also led successful lives. Let’s also celebrate when it works, but not be complacent when it doesn’t.

altc2011, lwf11

Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia

September 14, 2011 James Clay 1 Comment

I really enjoyed this talk by Jimmy Wales at LWF11.

Jimmy Wales is the US Internet entrepreneur and wiki pioneer best known as the founder of Wikipedia. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge” Jimmy asks us in this talk and discusses how Wikipedia has grown, the impact it has made and the people who contribute to its creation. Jimmy discusses future directions and plans for Wikipedia and Wikia, Inc. Presented January 11th 2011.

I mentioned this recently in the final ALT-C Keynote.

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