Fortnightly Mailing

Clayton R Wright's vast listing of conferences with a learning technology component

Clayton R Wright has sent me - from Sierra Leone - the next instalment of his terrific listing of learning technology conferences [1 MB DOC].  Clayton writes:

Although it focuses on July to December 2010, note that events, such as "PLATO@50", have been added to June 2010 as well as the International Association of Universities 2010 Conference: Ethics and Values in Higher Education in the Era of Globilization. Since my previous publication of the conference list, forty-seven events have been added to the June 2010 listing. I am hoping that readers will step a little out of their comfort zone and consider attending events that at first glance may not be their "cup of tea".

"Data is not the plural of anecdote". Eric Mazur talks about how to improve large group learning.

Via Martin Hawksey, here is a long video from November 2009 in which Eric Mazur, who teaches physics at Harvard, describes the main innovations he has made in how he runs his courses - and the painstaking empirical research that he has used to guide these changes. The educational research area of Mazur's web site, with its focus on peer instruction, gender and physics, classroom demonstrations, and technology and education, is worth careful study. [Note: site has been intermittently down in recent weeks - 17/9/2010.]

Facing urgent threats - interview by Andreas Kluth with Larry Brilliant

Below - following a short but intrusive advertisement - is a 15 minute interview by the Economist's Andreas Kluth with Dr Larry Brilliant, who played a leading role in the successful WHO/UN campaign to eliminate smallpox, which killed 0.5b people in the 20th Century. Brilliant was head of Google's philanthropic arm google.org, and is now president of the Skoll Global Threats Fund.

Encouraging Digital Access to Culture - a March 2010 report by Jonathan Drori

Updated 19/4/2010

Encouraging Digital Access to Culture - [2.5 MB PDF] - went on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport web site just before the election was called, and though it has a Ministerial Foreword, its publication will not be announced till after the General Election, if at all. (As a precaution I've uploaded a copy here.)

Ascending Glitterheim, March 2010

Picture by Lise Omholt

Over Easter I skied hut-to-hut across Jotunheimen in Norway from Gausdal to Tyin, with the luck to be able to climb Norway's second highest mountain, Glitterheim (2472 m) on 29 March. My camera broke on the first day, and the pictures I took on my phone are dire, as the European Lynx prints  below show. So above I've used a picture by Lise Omholt, who was part of the group I was with for part of the trip. The route is plotted here using Mapometer.

Mobile phone vs Internet uptake: Tanzania, South Africa, Estonia, and the UK

Via Hans Rosling, here is a Trendalyzer animation to compare mobile phone and Internet uptake over time in Tanzania, South Africa, Estonia, and the UK. The steeper the line (as in Tanzania and South Africa, the more are mobiles are trumping the Internet). NB: log scale on mobile phone axis, linear scale on Internet axis. (You can use the controls on the Trendalyzer animation to select different countries and different data-series.)

Varied and interesting articles in ALT News Online

Here are links to ten articles in the current (January 2010) issue of ALT News Online, edited by Morag Munro. (Disclosure: I work half-time for ALT.)

1. Google Wave in Education, by Alan Cann, Jo Badge, Dick Moore and Cameron Neylon - http://tinyurl.com/yzck6q2.
2. How to create a live online learning event by Phil Green - http://tinyurl.com/yzjz2cf.
3. JISC launches strategy for 2010-2012 by Malcolm Read - http://tinyurl.com/ygp6lrl.
4. Develop Me! Support Me! Engage (and retain) Me! by Becka Currant - http://tinyurl.com/yjjca9f.
5. Learning Technologies at the University of Oxford by Melissa Highton - http://tinyurl.com/yjm84la.
6. Interview with the University of Manchester's Faculty e-Learning Managers by Graham McElearney - http://tinyurl.com/yz8z5zh.
7. The impact of OpenLearn: making The Open University more "Open" by Patrick McAndrew and Andy Lane - http://tinyurl.com/yfjbla8.
8. Learning Pool, Sink or swim by Donald Clark - http://tinyurl.com/ygvpm8e.
9. How e-learning is being used in prisons to teach offenders practical work based skills (and help the environment!) by David Patterson, Gillian Broadhead and Peter Murphy - http://tinyurl.com/ycp7vsh.
10. 3000 e-textbooks now live and free to FE colleges by Anna Vernon - http://tinyurl.com/yhbro9s.

Cloud Culture

Charles Leadbeater has a knack of summarising and sometimes creating the Zeitgeist, whilst remaining on-side with the establishment. (We have him to thank for "personalisation"....) His Cloud Culture [87 page 1 MB PDF, designed to be read on screen], published by the British Council's Counterpoint think tank, with a Foreword by David Milliband, is no exception.

In his recent Learning from the Extremes (co-written by Annika Wong, who worked as a researcher on Cloud Culture), Leadbeater summarises an argument with a handy four-cell grid. In Cloud Culture he boils his argument down to an equation, which is risky, a prompt for "yes buts", and has a touch of snake-oil about it:

More cultural heritage stored in digital form
+
More accessible to more people
+
People better equipped with more tools to add creatively to the collection
=
Exponential growth in mass cultural expression
=
Cloud Culture

Cloud Culture hits several nails on the head, for example, with his reference to cloud-based socially useful and significant services like Kiva (featured in Fortnightly Mailing some time ago), in drawing on Stephen Webber's The Success of Open Source, and in a strong and convincing critique of the "old media" industry, and its attempts to defend itself with copyright.

Personally I am torn - in a head/heart way. I spend my working life "in the cloud", and I've been banging on about the generally beneficial (and/or inescapable) impact of cloud-based services on education from before it became fashionable. And I strongly agree with Leadbeater on the need to keep things open. But at heart I feel cautious about the long term impact on culture and human relationships that the cloud embodies. (For much more on this see Jaron Lanier's You are not a gadget - A manifesto [Review by Boyd Tonkin]) .

Stein Ringen's critique of New Labour

Disturbing and impressive animation of a 10 minute talk by Stein Ringen, an Oxford-based Norwegian professor of Sociology and Social Policy - "The economic consequences of Mr Brown". I think Ringen is a bit sweeping in his dismissal of New Labour's impact (waiting lists, for example, have come down; the impact of capital spending will not be rapidly felt), but the general point that Labour came to power with all to play for, but achieved far too little, is firmly and clearly explained.

The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus - a joint JISC, SURF, EDUCAUSE, and CAUDIT report

Via Phil Candy, here is the recently released The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus [20 pages, 100 kB PDF]. Described as a "collaborative visioning of the future of higher education to explore issues common to our countries and memberships", it has been produced jointly by:

• the Council of Australian University Directors of Information Technology, CAUDIT;
• EDUCAUSE (the association for information technology in higher education, based in North America);
• the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC;
• the SURFfoundation in the Netherlands.

The report is organised under three broad headings Drivers of Change, Enablers of the Future, and Emerging Themes, and it includes a six-page Underlying Technologies appendix covering: cloud computing; open educational resources; identity management; analytics; mobile devices; collaboration tools. Abstract:

Higher education’s purpose is to equip students for success in life — in the workplace, in communities, and in their personal lives. While this purpose may have remained constant for centuries, the world around colleges and universities is undergoing significant change. Higher education is under pressure to meet greater expectations, whether for student numbers, educational preparation, workforce needs, or economic development. Meanwhile, the resources available are likely to decline. New models, an intense focus on the student experience, and a drive for innovation and entrepreneurism [sic] will ensure that higher education continues to meet society’s needs. Information technology supports virtually every aspect of higher education, including finances, learning, research, security, and sustainability, and IT professionals need to understand the range of problems their institutions face so they apply IT where it brings greatest value. Creating this future will require collaboration across organizational and national boundaries, bringing together the collective intelligence of people from backgrounds including education, corporations, and government.