Fortnightly Mailing

System Upgrade - a vision for technology enhanced learning in UK education

Today I attended the launch of the Technology Enhanced Learning Research Programme's "System Upgrade" report, which summarises the overall findings of the programme and offers recommendations for future strategy. [The 17 minute documentary from the 6 November 2012 final public meeting of the TEL programme is here.]

The report has been written by TEL director Richard Noss and a team drawn from those who led the different strands of the £12m programme over the last 5 years.

It is written in layperson's terms, with two or three coherently structured pages, with examples, for each of the following 12 recommendations:

1. Connect - Exploit the power of personal devices to enhance learning.
2. Share - Catch the wave of social networking to share ideas and learn together.
3. Analyse - Use technology to understand better how we learn, and so help us learn better.
4. Assess - Develop technologies to assess what matters, rather than what is easy to assess.
5. Apply - Allow technology to help learners apply their education to the real world.
6. Personalise - Utilise artificial intelligence to personalise teaching and learning.
7. Engage - Go beyond the keyboard and mouse to learn through movement and gesture.
8. Streamline - Enhance teachers’ productivity with new tools for designing teaching and learning.
9. Include - Empower the digitally and socially excluded to learn with technology.
10. Know - Employ tools to help learners make sense of the information overload.
11. Compute - Understand how computers think, to help learners shape the world around them.
12. Construct - Unleash learners’ creativity through building and tinkering.

Here are three links to snazzily designed materials:

• The TEL report itself [60 page PDF];
• Commentable online version;
• A summary of the report [4 page PDF].

Printed copies of the PDFs can be ordered from the TEL programme.

[Disclosure: for the last few years I was a member of the Advisory Group for the Programme].

Snippets from 4 June to 14 June

Here in one place are some largely unfiltered snippets from my FriendFeed "stream" (about 2 posts per day) for the period 4 June to 14 June 2012.

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Expert Panel member Andrew Pollard provides some very carefully written background to the National Curriculum Review. - http://ioelondonblog.wordpress.com/2012...

Achieving a breakthrough in adult learning with technology

Between January and May 2012 I had the luck to have worked with Adrian Perry, Clive Shepherd, and Dick Moore researching and writing the report Scaling up - Achieving a breakthrough in adult learning with technology [PDF, 53 pages] for the Ufi Charitable Trust. The Trust will be open for Stage 1 applications for funding on 2 July 2012.

Both episodes of Dylan Wiliam's "The Classroom Experiment" now available

Very good to see that both episodes of Dylan Wiliam's 2010 BBC documentary (docudrama?) about improving learning methods in secondary school are now available on YouTube, where I hope they will stay.

Bear in mind that these two one-hour programmes will have derived from many many hours of video, and that there will surely have been pressure to produce "good TV". [Added 21/5/2012] See also the helpful notes on the two programmes from David Jennings that are referenced in the comment below; and if you are interested in the theory underpinning Dylan Wiliam's approach, it is worth reading his and Paul Black's Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Some compulsory viewing/listening for leaders in post-compulsory education? Though don't bulldoze your campuses.

Below is a six minute talk by Sir John Daniel, who headed the Open University between 1990 and 2001, and who therefore knows a lot about large-scale distance learning.

Based on work by Tony Bates, Daniel's carefully summarises three key developments in online learning, focusing on the US.

In short:

• the proportion of students embracing online learning is growing fast;
• for-profit providers dominate the market because they have understood the importance (for doing things at scale and for achieving consistent quality) of the division of labour and of specialisation, and because they've understood how students need the flexibility of online learning if they are to earn whilst they learn;
• public providers wanting to get in on the act need either to do it in partnership with private providers, or they need to move to a team-based approach in which different parts of provision are done by people with different roles;
• the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement is now taking off, with Governments cottoning on to the advantages of OER, and the cost savings to be had from them;
• mobile, connected technology is becoming ubiquitous and cheap and will change the face of provision because "people can now access learning almost anywhere and in many formats".

Snippets May 2 to May 18 2012

Here in one place are some largely unfiltered snippets from my FriendFeed "stream" (about 2 posts per day) for the period 2 to 18 May 2012. (Updated: 20151201)

Clayton Wright's June - December 2012 Educational Technology and Education Conferences listing

Clayton Wright - source

The 27th edition of Clayton Wright's superb conference listing [1.1 MB DOC] contains, according to Clayton "events such as 'Learning and Teaching', 'Innovation in e-Learning', 'Online Teaching', 'Distance Learning Administration', 'The World Open Educational Resources Congress', 'Mobile Health', and 'Realizing Dreams'".

He continues:

"Those seeking to improve the development and delivery of e-learning courses may find a few of the suggestions in this publication helpful: http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/11/developing-and-reviewing-online-courses-items-for-consideration/. And those working in countries with weak economies may want to refer to a discussion about distance education (http://repository.alt.ac.uk/2115/) or open educational resources http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1185/2161." 

Links for a session about technology and learning

Vielha Tunnel - South entrance - Picture by Adrian A. Lorente Grima,a geologist who worked on the tunnel's subsequent reconstruction

On Friday - my last day with ALT - I ran a two-hour session at the University of Sheffield with a group of nine students on a postgraduate module about technology in learning. The "slides" I used in the session - which on their own make little sense - are here [2MB PDF]. Below are some supporting links.

2030: Robot Competence Comparable to Larger Mammals http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/talks/revo.slides/2030.html

Maes-Garreau Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maes-Garreau_Law

Boston Dynamics BigDog web site http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html

Oppenheimer/Einstein picture by Alfred Eisenstaedt http://www.photographersgallery.com/photo.asp?id=3545

Sitting in a bar with a really smart friend
Course web site - https://www.ai-class.com/home/
Small chunk #1: Unit 16, Computer Vision I,Sections 1 to 4, starting at https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/179 - work through the first four sections (~7 minutes)
Small chunk #2: Unit 5, Machine Learning, Sections 1 to 3, starting at https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/47 - work through the first three sections (~8 minutes)
Piece by Rob Rambusch of the same title http://fm.schmoller.net/2011/12/sitting-in-a-bar-with-a-really-smart-friend.html

Udacity - what the AI course has become - http://www.udacity.com/

The Wired interview/discussion with Sebastian Thrun http://fora.tv/2012/05/01/WIRED_Business_Conference_The_Intelligence_Revolution

The Internet in Britain - the Oxford Internet Institute's survey - http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/oxis/

Eric Schmidt's 2007 interview in Wired - http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/news/2007/04/mag_schmidt_trans?currentPage=all

ALT-C 2007 keynotes - especially by Dylan Wiliam and Peter Norvig - in several different formats including text transcript and MP3 http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2007/

More stemming from the Lifelong and Lifewide Learning diagram - http://fm.schmoller.net/2008/11/roy-pea-at-bect.html

Walter Lewin's introductory physics lectures at MIT - http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-classical-mechanics-fall-1999/video-lectures/

Sheila Webber's "Information science in 2003: a critique" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.86.7450&rep=rep1&type=pdf

Hal Abelson's 2012 ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contribution acceptance talk http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2012/downloads/ha_sigcseTalk.pdf (the transcript is here http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2012/downloads/ha_transcript.txt - needs some reformatting by the user)

Lanier piece with links http://fm.schmoller.net/2010/10/jaron_lanier_asks_how_can_you_be_ambidextrous_in_the_matter_of_technology_and_education.html

The appeal of the brain in the popular press http://pps.sagepub.com/content/5/6/762.full

Douglas Adams via Donald Clark. This stuff is "alright really".

Donald Clark ends his recent talk at TEDxGlasgow with a nice quote from Douglas Adams's 1999 How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet:

1. Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal.
2. Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it.
3. Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

[Source]

The talk is a nicely condensed and developed version of Donald's "Don't Lecture Me" from the 2010 ALT conference, here presented alongside its associated Twitter-stream:

Disclosure. I (still, but not for much longer) work part time for ALT.

Regulating the Net - @JJN1's report from a talk by Simon Hampton, Google’s Director of Public Policy for Northern Europe

John Naughton provides the kind of really useful informal reportage that we need more of. I'll not try to summarise it, knowing that you will read it right away. One point that Hampton made that John questions was “The larger the haystack, the easier it is to find the needle.” I think that Peter Norvig's 2007 theorising from the data talk sheds light on this apparently counter-intuitive statement. If you've enough data then statistically based algorithms can home in the needles within the data, using other parts of the data to guide them.