Fortnightly Mailing

Teaching and learning tool to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices

I covered App Inventor for Android in Fortnightly Mailing last August soon after Hal Abelson, on secondment from MIT to Google, announced it.

App Inventor:

"is a new tool in Google Labs that makes it easy for anyone—programmers and non-programmers, professionals and students—to create mobile applications for Android-powered devices."

App Inventor is now publicly available as a "beta", and anyone can now request an App Inventor account. App Inventor is primarily designed to support teaching and learning computer science, in the tradition of the Logo programming language, which started life over 40 years ago.

Instinct or Reason: How education policy is made and how we might make it better

CfBT's Instinct or Reason: How education policy is made and how we might make it better by Adrian Perry, Christian Amadeo, Mick Fletcher, and Elizabeth Walker "investigates the factors that lie behind the formation of educational policy". It is "based on discussions with an expert group, a desk based literature review (including academic research and politicians' memoirs), interviews with stakeholders and an extended process of draft revision".

You can download the full report from the CfBT web site [1 MB PDF], and there is also a 23 slide presentation [0.5 MB PPT] from the report's launch on 7 June.

Meanwhile the report's main recommendations, which make me think that in less straightened times there'd be mileage in the establishment of an Educational Research Council along the lines of the Medical Research Council, are as follows.

(a) The recommendation that the prime role of ministers is to bring their values to inform goals and ambitions, rather than tactics and methods, where expert analysis should play the larger role.

(b) An expert commission, analogous to NICE in healthcare, should be established to create and interpret educational research, evidence and analysis. Such a body should advise institutional leaders as well as politicians and civil servants. Ministers would be encouraged to share their thinking when their analysis differs from that of the commission.

(c) An office of Chief Officer – analogous to the Chief Scientific or Medical Officer – should be established. He or she should build strong links with the Select Committee system.

(d) Evaluations should be independent, commissioned outside the Department and published. Research and evaluation should be brought together to share a budget.

(e) Given the short career life of ministers and the limited life of governments on one hand, and the need for long-term implementation of educational reform on the other, there should be a search for consensus between political parties on non-controversial ground.

(f) Attention should be given to the perception that little useful research is being generated for education policy makers. We recommend that a portion of the budget for educational research should be directed to topics which can be seen to relate closely to identified needs of the system.

(g) Researchers should remain independent, but be given help to present their conclusions in a way that will give the best chance of calm consideration rather than rejection. (h) A prize should be established for well evidenced policy.

(i) Better links should be built between practitioners, researchers, civil servants, politicians and quangos – represented in shared career paths.

(j) International comparisons should be encouraged as part of a managed learning system.

What research has to say for practice - nine guides from ALT

ALT (for which I work half time) has made public nine What research has to say for practice guides. The guides, which are freely available, and which are open for others to edit, have been written mainly by members of the ALT Research Committee. It remains to be seen whether the guides languish without contributions being made to them, or whether people in the learning technology community decide to "muck in" and maintain and develop them.

Becta's Emerging Technologies web site, and a cross-site search

Becta currently runs a big Emerging Technologies web site. It has valuable contents but I found it frustratingly organised. (I vaguely remember being consulted a few years ago - with wire-frames - by a company that had won the contract for this service, or the web site on which the service runs.) I found the site quite difficult to navigate, with unhelpfully short abstracts, and peculiar policies on things like the dating of items, and their authorship. I n the continuation post below I combine some links on the site with abstracts about the (interesting and useful) items to which they point.

Abstracts of this kind save the user a lot of time in the long run, and JISC does them a bit better in sites like this one, although it is also evidence that the UK technology in learning world is unhelpfully fragmented, something that is on my mind as a result of UK Government's decision to close Becta.  (The Association for Learning Technology - ALT - for which I work part-time, had  something about this published yesterday.)

I played about with a custom search that gives returns from JISC, Becta, ALT, Naace, Futurelab, TEL  (it would be simple to add others, cheap to get the advertisements removed, and the current version of the code for the search window is at the foot of the continuation post if you would like to reuse it):

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10 techniques to increase retention (in memory rather than on courses)

Donald Clark has posted a terse and informative 10 techniques to increase retention, which deserves to be widely read, though (if this is does not seem churlish) it could do with a couple of links to references for each of the techniques.

"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.]

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.)

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.

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.