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Clayton Wright's Educational Technology and Education Conferences, January to June 2016

CRW_small
Clayton Wright - source

The 34th Educational Technology & Education Conferences listing [93 pages, 1.3 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here is Clayton's covering note to the list.

The 34th edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2016 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from July 2016 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next.

An explanation for the content and format of the list can be found at http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/08/why-distribute-documents-in-ms-word-or-openoffice-for-an-international-audience/. A Word or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings.

Posted on 14/11/2015 in Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Paul Mason's Postcapitalism - talk and discussion

"Ask yourself. How can eight men undercut that machine [washing cars]? And what is it doing to the society we live in that eight men, often with zero legality of migration status, can undercut that machine. That's the society you live in. And that's why I have no qualms or squeamishness about promoting automation. But we have to do it socially."

Here's Paul Mason talking at length about the ideas in his book, Postcapitalism - a guide to our future, at a CRASSH seminar in Cambridge. 45 minute talk, with great clear audio, introduced by John Naughton, followed by 25 minutes of discussion. [Review of the book, by David Runciman.]

Posted on 03/11/2015 in Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Citizen Maths - powerful ideas in action

ImageForLinkedIn

[Cross posted, with some very minor changes, from LinkedIn.]

Since late 2012 I have been closely involved (as "project director") in the creation of Citizen Maths, a free open online maths course at Level 2. I last wrote about it here just over a year ago. 

Citizen Maths is a free open online maths resource for:
  • self-motivated individuals who want to develop their grasp of maths at Level 2;
  • employers/unions who want to provide staff (or, in the case of trade unions, their members) with a practical and flexible learning and development opportunity in maths;
  • colleges and other learning providers who want to give enrolled learners an additional or alternative route to improving their maths.

To make use of Citizen Maths, learners need access to (and knowledge of how to use) a desktop or laptop computer with a broadband internet connection.

Here's a four-minute screen-cast about Citizen Maths from a learner's point of view:

 

Who is behind Citizen Maths?

Citizen Maths is funded by the Ufi Charitable Trust. It is developed by Calderdale College, with the UCL Institute of Education, OCR, and with advice from the Google Course Builder team.

What does Citizen Maths consist of?

We’ve designed Citizen Maths to involve between five and 10 hours of study for each powerful idea. It it built up from:

  1. short “to camera” videos and explanatory screencasts, by experienced maths tutors Paula Philpott and Noel-Ann Bradshaw; 
  2. activities, tasks and other practical challenges, using
  • applets that provide an onscreen manifestation of a powerful idea
  • the Scratch programming environment
  • standard tools like pencil and paper, and spreadsheets.

There are also frequent “low stakes” quizzes to help users check their understanding.

Why “powerful ideas in action”?

Citizen Maths engages people in familiar activity to reveal the ‘maths inside’, focusing on the way that maths has an immediate relevance to the problems we all of us have to solve every day. These problems could range from comparing deals and prices on groceries and creating a household budget, to understanding a payslip, creating sales forecasts, keeping track of savings and pensions, controlling a production process, or making political judgements. By putting problems in meaningful contexts, learners who do Citizen Maths will begin to grasp the power of mathematical ideas in action.

Which powerful ideas does Citizen Maths cover?

There will be five. During autumn 2014 we ran a proof of concept trial of Citizen Maths based on the powerful idea proportion. From mid October 2015 Citizen Maths will embrace, in addition, representation and uncertainty. From spring 2016 here will be two further powerful ideas: pattern and measurement. Here's a summary of the scope and importance of each.

  1. Proportion is about mixing, sharing, comparing, scaling and trading off. It sits behind many aspects of everyday maths, for example when you are sharing out costs, or altering a mixture, comparing amounts, or scaling something up or down.
  2. Uncertainty includes making decisions, playing, and simulating. It offers a way of thinking about uncertainty in personal and work-related situations, for example when making sense of risks to health, deciding whether to take out an extended warranty, or playing card games.
  3. Representation is about interpreting data and charts, comparing groups. It recognises how much we are influenced by data and the presentation of data, for example in media reports of opinion polls, interpreting stories about health risks, or comparing our own household income to that in the rest of the country.
  4. Pattern is about appreciating structure as in tiling, or knowing how to construct such structure. Pattern focuses on how mathematics can find and describe the regularities in both the natural and the man-made world, for example in the symmetries of animals and plants or in the design of buildings.
  5. Measurement includes reading a scale, converting, estimating, and quantifying. It picks up on the importance of measures and measurement in everyday and working life, for example when dispensing medication, converting currencies or estimating the size of a crowd.

To find out more, go to https://citizenmaths.com/. There is also this Slideshare presentation:

Posted on 28/09/2015 in Moocs, News and comment, Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Robotics - someone who ran DARPA's Robotics Challenge looks ahead

This article [10 page PDF - web-based version here] is by Gill Pratt, until recently responsible for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Pratt starts by explaining why a "cambrian explosion" in the pace of development is on the way, highlighting eight technical drivers that are at work:

  1. Exponential growth in computing performance
  2. Improvements in electromechanical design tools and numerically controlled manufacturing tools
  3. Improvements in electrical energy storage
  4. Improvements in electronics power efficiency
  5. Exponential expansion of the availability and performance of local wireless digital communications
  6. Exponential growth in the scale and performance of the Internet
  7. Exponential growth of worldwide data storage
  8. Exponential growth in global computation power

He goes on to summarise four "big ideas" that between then represent "Cloud Robotics":

  • Memory-based Autonomy
  • High-Speed Sharing of Experiences
  • Learning from Imagination
  • Learning from People

The article concludes with a speculation - with echoes of ideas advanced by Paul Mason in Post Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future - about the implications (of the explosion) for the economy and the workforce.

Pretty it ain't.

Posted on 02/09/2015 in Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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On the long-term future of artificial intelligence

Minor edits made 19/8/2015

Stuart Russell is co-author (with Peter Norvig) of the very highly regarded text book "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach".

This 30 minute talk provides a striking, accessible and ethically focused explanation of what AI is, where it is headed, and why its practitioners need to find ways of making AI "provably beneficial", if it is not to have, long term unforeseen and harmful consequences. (Cory Doctorow has more on the talk here.)

Posted on 16/08/2015 in News and comment, Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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A ten year old interview

Reda Sadki reminded me about an interview I did by email for Epic (now Leo) in July 2005 in which I'd banged on about wanting to ban the term blended learning.

The interview was long gone from the Epic/Leo site. But the Internet Archive's trusty Wayback Machine had it, and all but two of the links still worked, at least after a fashion.

I re-read it, initially with trepidation, then with quite a bit of relief. Here it is. (I've fixed the dud links and added one to a review I subsequently did of The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders.)

Q What's your INTEREST in learning/online learning?

I spent 25 years working in Further Education, teaching and developing TUC courses for trade union representatives. Through the TUC I got involved in pre-internet online distance learning courses, using a Swedish conferencing system called PortaCOM. I applied what I’d learned in the creation of LeTTOL, a web-based online course for teachers wanting to learn how to teach on-line – http://www.lettol.ac.uk/, which, several thousand learners later, won a National Training Award in 2003. My interests now center, through ALT, on establishing learning technology as a discipline, and learning technologist as a profession, and in the other half of the week mainly on helping organisations implement sustainable e-learning.

Q What interactive technology do you use and have at HOME?

Several radios and a telly. All four people in my household have networked computers, one of which is a Mac, and one of which is used for making music. My sons use iPODs. No Digital TV. No games machines. No self-filling fridge. I have and use a lot of books, which you could class as an interactive technology.

Q What stands out as your MOST EFFECTIVE learning experience?

A week training to be a trade union studies tutor. Extremely challenging. Plenty of feedback. Combining learning about a curriculum with learning how to tutor it. Reading “Inside the Black Box – Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment” by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam. An in-a-nutshell summary of why giving learners timely and motivating formative feedback is the most important determinant of how fast and well they learn. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/education/publications/blackbox.html [Now available here: http://www.webcitation.org/6VELZxcop - SS 28/6/2015.]

Q What stands out as your LEAST EFFECTIVE learning experience?

A year training to be a further education teacher. Diffuse. Lacking in practicality. Thin on (useful) theory.

Q Any really NEW AND INNOVATIVE IDEAS out there?

When I see the word “innovative” my heart sinks, even more so when I see the words “really new and innovative”. This is because I believe in honing and improving ideas and methods which work, rather than moving to the next fad, and in e-learning there are a lot of fads. Of course the danger with this approach is that you can be blind to necessary or beneficial innovations. So, if pushed I would say that applications like http://www.jot.com/ which enable users to build Wikis without any special syntax are worth keeping an eye on, as are tools like http://search.yahoo.com/cc which finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license.

Q What do you want that DOESN'T YET EXIST in learning/online learning?

Machine translation! But this interesting piece about “The Google Translator” - http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html - perhaps shows that something sitting in the background which enables people to converse with each other online when using different languages is not that far off.

Q Any views on the phrase and concept 'BLENDED LEARNING'?

The term provided a bolt hole for traditionalists wanting to defend face-to-face teaching against the encroachment of online learning.

Q Any views on GAMES in learning/online learning?

I trust my sons’ judgement that the value of games in learning is exaggerated. But I think I am probably missing something.

Q Any views on INTERACTIVE TV in learning/online learning?

In a previous role I helped develop “Keep IT In The Family”. This was a simple quiz – a game, even – to test a user’s IT knowledge, at three levels of difficulty, and to recommend suitable IT courses depending on the user’s knowledge. It was served from The Sheffield College and was freely available over the Internet, or to Telewest DiTV subscribers. At one point, judged by the number of users, Keep IT In The Family was one of Telewest’s most popular interactive services. That said, I feel that learning is a category of activity which normally requires learners to be able to concentrate, free from interruption, with a means of making complex inputs (currently using a keyboard). TVs typically neither have the necessary input devices, nor is a living room a conducive environment for learning.

Q Any views on MOBILE DEVICES in learning/online learning?

I’ve not yet read “JISC Landscape Study on the use of Mobile and Wireless Technologies for Learning and Teaching in the Post-16 Sector”. Certainly the pressure is now on content developers to make sure that content will run adequately on a wider range of access devices than just a PC or a Mac. And users of mobile devices are paying for data by volume rather than at a flat rate. So they may not thank you for media-rich content, even if it is educationally effective.

Q Any views on OPEN SOURCE in learning/online learning?

Open Source. I use Firefox and Thunderbird as my main browser and email client. Moodle, for example, is certainly presenting an interesting challenge to LMS vendors. But in 5 years time I think there will continue to be a “mixed economy” of software products in the provision of e-learning.

Open Content. Initiatives like MIT’s Open CourseWare - http://ocw.mit.edu/ - and the stunning W3 Schools web site - http://www.w3schools.com/ - show the power and significance of freely available e-learning content.

Q What's your favourite PHRASE/QUOTE/EPIGRAM in learning/online learning?

Because Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” was so influential, and because so many of his quotes make you think, I was disappointed to find that I’d been wrongly attributing “A word is worth a thousand pictures” to him, including the accent. It is still my favourite phrase in learning/online learning, mind.

Q Could you recommend a PIECE OF RESEARCH in learning/online learning?

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. This report, by Frank Coffield, David Moseley, Elaine Hall, and Kathryn Ecclestone, is freely available for download from the Learning and Skills Development Agency. It critically reviews the literature on learning styles, and it calls into question the way in which learning styles inventories are in widespread use, often with next to no evidence as to their validity. http://www.lsda.org.uk/pubs/dbaseout/download.asp?code=1543 [Now available here: http://www.webcitation.org/66qgBO959 - SS 28/6/2015.]

Q Could you recommend a BOOK in learning/online learning?

The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders (ISBN: 0140230122). [Review here http://fm.schmoller.net/2007/03/16_bits_per_sec.html - SS 28/5/2015.] More about the nature of consciousness than about learning, but provides convincing evidence that the conscious mind is only able to deal with a tiny proportion of the data it receives - perhaps as little as 30 bits per second. The mind then creates a “media-rich” consciousness from this thin data-stream. We’ve evolved to interpret the sensually complex real world in an effective way; but that does not mean that our brains are good at effectively interpreting media-rich learning materials, which should hence be used (if used) with great care.

Q Could you recommend a WEBSITE in learning/online learning?

W3 Schools - http://www.w3schools.com/.

Q If you were to pick one CONFERENCE to attend in learning/online learning, what would it be?

ALT-C. Why? I work for the organisation which runs it. ALT-C has enough depth and breadth for an astute delegate to be able to plot a varied, interesting, and rewarding course through it. The booking deadline is 12/8/2005.

Q Any words/phrases/ideas you'd like to BAN from learning/online learning?

Word. Blended.
Phrase. Compelling content.
Idea. Digital natives and immigrants (which is not to say that Mark Prensky’s Digital Game-based Learning (ISBN: 0071363440) has nothing useful to say – both it and he have!).

Q Anything in learning/online learning that you strongly believed in, on which you have now CHANGED YOUR MIND?

I used strongly to believe that learning without some face-to-face contact between learners is unavoidably and badly second best. Thus online distance courses just had to start and preferably finish with a face-to-face session, and if possible have face-to-face activity in the middle. I now know that if the course design is right, and if the learners are suitably experienced – both big ifs - this is not the case.

Q Anything else you'd like to add?

The impact of “always on” wireless connectivity on learning/online learning will be bigger than many people realise. Partly because of how access devices will change (getting smaller, more multipurpose, and in some respects less usable), and partly because of how different kinds of data will be available to be integrated into the content (for example positional, location-specific, or “friends-close-by” data).

Hope you found the questions stimulating. Thanks for your answers.

Posted on 27/06/2015 in News and comment, Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Video and Online Learning: Critical Reflections and Findings From the Field

A terrific article by Anna Hansch, Lisa Hillers, Katherine McConachie, Christopher Newman, Thomas Schildhauer, and Philipp Schmidt.

Well, I think it is terrific, because if chimes with so much of my experience working on the design and development of Citizen Maths and FutureLearn's Assessment for Learning in STEM Teaching, and as a committed MOOC learner.

Here's the abstract:

Video is an essential component of most Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online learning. This exploratory study examines video as an instructional medium and investigates the following research questions:

  • How is video designed, produced, and used in online learning contexts, specifically with regard to pedagogy and cost?
  • What are the benefits and limitations of standardizing the video production process?

This report presents an overview of current video practice: the widespread use of video and its costs, the relevance of production value for learning, the pedagogical considerations of teaching online, and the challenges of standardizing production. Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. Based on these findings, we have developed a set of recommendations designed to raise awareness and stimulate critical reflection on video’s role in online learning. Additionally, we discuss some need for further research on the effectiveness of video as a pedagogical tool and highlight under-explored uses of the medium, such as live video.

You can access the full paper from http://goo.gl/MvXXCs. There is also this shorter version by Katherine McConachie and Philipp Schmidt on Medium.

Posted on 24/06/2015 in Moocs, Resources | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive matters more and more

Here are some links to a couple of past posts about the Internet Archive, which is playing a crucial role in archiving the Web and digital artefacts such as films, games and software:

  • 13/3/2009 - Brewster Kahle - the man behind the Wayback Machine;
  • 8/10/2012 - Brewster Kahle and the love of books - physical and digital.

Two recent pieces give added emphasis to the importance of Kahle's work, from different angles:

  • 26/1/2015 - The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived? by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker;
  • 28/1/2015 - As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory, by Andy Baio.

Posted on 29/01/2015 in News and comment, Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Clayton Wright's Educational Technology 32nd Conference Listing, January to June 2015

CRW_small
Clayton Wright - source

The 32nd Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [90 pages, 1.15 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here are the first two paragraphs of Clayton's covering note to the list.

The 32nd edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2015 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from July 2015 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next.  

An explanation for the content and format of the list can be found at http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/08/why-distribute-documents-in-ms-word-or-openoffice-for-an-international-audience/. A Word or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings. Consider using the “Find” tool under Microsoft Word’s “Edit” tab or similar tab in OpenOffice to locate the name of a particular conference, association, city, or country. If you enter the country “Singapore” in the “Find” tool, all conferences that occur in Singapore will be highlighted. Or, enter the word “research” or “assessment”. (Note that key words such as “research”, “assessment” or “MOOCs” may not be present in the conference title, yet these topics could be discussed during a particular conference.) Then, “cut and paste” a list of suitable events for your colleagues.

Posted on 15/11/2014 in Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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John Hattie interviewed for Radio 4 by Sarah Montague

JohnHattie
Snipped from www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dmxwl

I don't know how long the BBC web-site will carry this 28 minute interview with John Hattie, author of Visible Learning, and respected authority on school-effectiveness.

But in case you cannot access the interview, here is a professionally created transcript [12 page 40kB PDF - not sure what is any IPR issues pertain to this.....].

Taken in the round, Hattie provides a calm and witty counter to many of the ideas used by what Pasi Sahlberg memorably describes as the Global Educational Reform Movement. [See also this 2012 interview with Pasi Sahlberg by John Hattie.]

 

Posted on 28/08/2014 in News and comment, Resources | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Recent Posts

  • A leaving speech
  • How algorithms manipulate the market
  • Clayton Wright's Educational Technology and Education Conferences, January to June 2016
  • Alphabet
  • Paul Mason's Postcapitalism - talk and discussion
  • FE Area Based Reviews should start by making an assessment of need
  • Citizen Maths - powerful ideas in action
  • Robotics - someone who ran DARPA's Robotics Challenge looks ahead
  • On the long-term future of artificial intelligence
  • A ten year old interview

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