So I’ve given my FOTE10 talk a rather argumentative title, but it’s certainly not to imply that I don’t believe in the use of mobile devices in universities which I do with passion – so let me explain…

The explosion in the use of smart-ish devices, over the past couple of years has produced a rash of conferences, workshops and resulting papers all delving into the dark art of enabling our institutions to be part of the in-crowd. And that’s all great.

But when are we going to get past the “thing”, the technology, and onto embedding what we use mobile devices for in education into the mainstream? My argument is that until we quit talking shop and get on with it we’ll move slowly in a fast moving world. This is also probably argumentative and unfair so please argue against me and tell me about all the wonderful things you’re doing at your place!

One thing many people are doing is providing information via smart-things. There are native apps, mobile Web sites, mobile stylesheets and all or none of these. It’s the technological wild west – nobody is quite sure whether there is a best way to do it so the techies debate endlessly. Providing information via mobile devices is a good thing of course and at UCL we’ve been providing the campusM service for students since the spring. I’m just urging people not to get too hung up on particular technologies. While there’s no money around we have to choose what we get into carefully and try to gaze into the smart-ball and avoid here today gone tomorrow technologies.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, and the tendency of those of us in the technology game is to over-predict (”by 2020 everyone will have a tablet device” type of thing – reality usually replaces “everyone” with “some people”). Although device convergence was predicted at the phone / music player / PDA level, who would have predicted in 2006 that a phone from Cupertino would revolutionise the way phones are designed and used? I was fortunate enough to attend a pre-iOS Handheld Learning conference – it was a completely different world even four years ago. Then the devices were less endowed. So what were talks about and what were the devices being used for? Well…er…education in classrooms.

Whether by chance or intelligence some predictions are scary. In the summer of 1989 at the end of a conference in Bangor a group of participants was asked to write up some thoughts and scenarios for the future twenty years hence and produced a Education 2010. A lot of what they thought was pretty much on the mark including top prize for a child’s classroom visit scenario by Jonathon Briggs (from what was Kingston Poly in those days):

…the Professor…spends lots of time telling them things. I bet I would not remember all of it. The boys spent ages typing things he said into their pads.

Which is what I’m typing this post into right now! Last year’s model? Maybe, maybe not – but worth the debate…

Location:Foley St, London

Tweet

FOTE09 - Ondaatje Theatre

Virtually-Linked are delighted to be asked again to be a ULCC partner to bring FOTE10 live into virtual worlds. This is a complex process and if you bear with us and follow the threads I can take you through the journey with us.

Last year we recreated the Ondaatje Theatre at the Royal Geographical Society and provided 50 seats to a mirror of the event inside Second Life.

People who could not attend the live event took up these seats, including those who had booked and were too ill to attend. We got a lot of positive feedback that we are incorporating into our solution this year:

“I thought the FOTE09 was an interesting and thought provoking event and that the use of Second Life as a channel for delivery was highly appropriate.  I look forward to the next show! “ Indiana Nirvana

“I thought the event was enjoyable (I dipped in and out), and having an Second Life option added to it. Time and money constraints meant I couldn’t attend in person, but the Second Life addition meant I could chat to some of the ‘attendees’ about some of the presentations.” John Kirriemuir

“It’s been great to be here, thank you to the Virtually-Linked team who’ve organised everything. Second Life brings a little more of the social to the space, whereas Elluminate etc can be very dry. And if I was going to be at a RL conf, I’d see clothing etc and be able to talk about that. Which I can do here ” Bryony Inglewood: (Cambridge UK)

“Ty, FOTEfolk” Raz Ryba

FOTE09 - virtual delegates

This year, ULCC has raised the bar for us and given us a welcomed challenge to recreate the interior of Senate House  for FOTE10, as well as provide interaction between the participants in both worlds.

To re-create the location we will be taking pictures of the interior and then interpreting these into a 3D rendering inside the virtual world. Studies have shown that virtual experiences that mirror their real counterpart as exactly as possible are the most effective. To ensure the quality of the experience, we create as exact a replica as possible of the real venue.

Last year some people asked for training in Second Life before the event. We will be offering it this year and will share details as and when they become available

To join FOTE10 in the virtual world, all you need to do is follow a link to the virtual location from our web site.

On the day, we will have virtual assistants waiting to greet and seat you. They will also be there throughout the event to assist with interaction between the virtual and live conference at Senate House. We propose to have interaction between participants attending virtually and speakers / participants at the live event. This will require some careful planning and should provide some light entertainment as well as testing the effectiveness of two-way interface.

I look forward to seeing everyone at both the live and virtual events – as I hope to be attending both.


Tweet

This presentation uses work from Microsoft’s research and development teams to look at the technology, lifestyle and workplace of 2020, and then digs behind that vision to join the dots. We’ll look at some of the research work going on around the world to deliver the technology to support this world – some of which will appear shortly, and other parts of which are still in the research laboratories.


Tweet

Jeremy Speller

Jeremy Speller has been involved with the UCL Web presence since 1995. Having headed UCL Web Services for a number of years, Jeremy is now Director of Learning & Media Services which, along with the Web, covers AV, design, learning technology, multimedia and photography.

Prior to becoming a full-time Web “operative”, Jeremy’s background was in planning and statistics at UCL and previously at the University of Birmingham. Way back when he ran the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme at what was then CVCP.

Some of Jeremy’s previous presentations are at http://www.slideshare.net/jeremyspeller/ and we included one her which he gave at Educamp London.

Follow Jeremy on Twitter: @jeremyspeller

Tweet

But what does this mean to the everyday book lover, such as me? As both a student and an avid reader of business and travel books, I am actually finding that I am reading more in the last 12 months than ever before. Taking the fact that I am a student aside (which obviously requires me to read a lot of content), the core reason that I have been reading more in recent months is down to one thing: my Kindle device and, in particular, the emerging Kindle ecosystem.

As a major early adopter of new technologies, I was quick to jump on the Kindle when the international version became available late last year and haven’t looked back since. Taking the price of the books out of the equation (Kindle books are often cheaper than their physical cousins) I probably read twice as much as I did previously. After a couple of minutes of use, the fact that you are reading a book on an electronic device soon fades away and you just focus on the content itself. I have literally spent hours at a time reading on my Kindle. The e-ink technology (that’s the one thing that the kindle has over the iPad) obviously makes this easier.

In addition to being a joy to read content on the kindle device itself, which means that I pick it up more often, the Kindle ecosystem has also acted as a catalyst to me reading more than ever before. With the Kindle app now available on the PC/Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android, even when you don’t have the Kindle device with you it is possible to access your content and pick up where you left off. Tube journeys and waiting in line etc can now be easily filled with catching up on a few pages of a book that I am reading. While you could easily carry a book with you, its heavy/bulky form factor means that it’s unlikely you would bother dipping into it during those couple of minutes of downtime.

Furthermore, the ability to have access to my entire book collection through the Kindle ecosystem (from the Kindle itself or my iPhone and iPad) is a significant benefit. As someone who is studying for a Diploma in B2B marketing in my spare time, I often have more than one book on the go at any one time. If these were physical books, this would be a back breaking inconvenience (I would be pretty fit, though). With the Kindle, however, I just carry one device and have access to everything. This is also ideal when I go on holiday. No more backpacks full of reading material. Perfect!

With these devices also coming significantly coming down in price. The Sony Reader, for example, is now just £99 in Waterstones, the whole cost argument is starting to go away. These are only going to get cheaper, I am sure…

With regard to the iPad, and its multimedia capabilities, I am looking forward to seeing more rich content such as video and social networking (virtual book clubs/study groups etc) incorporated into the book reading experience and challenging what we even consider to be a ‘book’.

Exciting times ahead!

Tim Bush (@tbush)

Joe Dale

Joe Dale is an independent consultant working with CILT, Links into Languages, The British Council and The BBC. He is host of the TES MFL forum, former SSAT Languages Lead Practitioner, regular conference speaker and recognised expert on technology and language learning.

He has appeared in the Education Guardian, helped to update the ICT elements of the QCA SoW for KS2 Primary French, written for the TES ICT blog and CILT 14-19 website and designed games for Heinemann’s new course ‘Expo’. Joe also starred on a Teachers TV programme recently and spoke about the Rose Review proposals on BBC Radio 4. His blog has been nominated for three Edublog Awards in the last three years.

Follow Joe on Twitter: @joedale or check out his blog

New social software services come, many go, some stay. Do those that stay, those that are sticky, fill a pre-existing gap in our social experience?

Most of us know that, like the British, the Chinese talk of losing face. Maybe the language geeks amongst us know that “to lose face” was only recently introduced into English from Chinese. Unlike most other loans from Chinese where English borrowed the actual word, so including a sense of exoticness and remoteness (chopsticks, coolie, lychee), losing face we imported the concept because it expressed succinctly a meaning that, before the British heard it from the Chinese, we had no concise expression for in English.

So much of a need did it fill that English speakers used “losing face” as a building block for concepts – like “face-saving” – that have no exact analogue in Chinese. Although we can’t agree on how to spell it, email (e-mail, eMail?) similarly filled a pre-existing hole in our working lives. How our ancestors BCE (before the computer era) did work, flamed one another, circulated dirty jokes, virus scares, and “corporate communications” is lost in the mists of diminishing productivity.

We early adopters, abandoning last year’s iPhone for an Android even as we swipe through the day’s feeds on our iPads, bemoan the benighted mundanes – those users who “don’t get it”: the hapless, clueless academics who didn’t take to the VLE as quickly as they annoyed the PVC with caustic all staff emails, the benighted commentators who sneer at the vapidity of the Twitterati, the people who buy iPads because they want an easy to use computer rather than score earlier adopter points. These poor mundanes might not be able to use Outlook if their lives depended on it, but they sure “get” email.

Me, I got Twitter right after it came out of private beta, and I stuck with it, even though I had almost no one to talk to, because, as well as having precious little evidence of a business model (and let’s face it, watching VCs burn cash never gets old), it had the look of a general purpose communication tool – something that asked little (or, rather, 140 characters) of me, and yet offered so much pregnant possibility. Possibility was all it offered until the day Twitter became the 21st century’s upgrade to passing notes in the back of the class.

I attended a conference one day, and, wow! I was on the “backchannel”. Your mum and dad’s bad manners all of a sudden got a hip name and became the reason you lugged your laptop to conference in the first place. You’ve forgotten those oldskool pre-Twitter conferences now, haven’t you, where you actually listened to the presenter? Twitter, pointless, vapid, I’m not interested in what you had for breakfast Twitter filled a hole we never knew we had. And like email, one day the mundanes will get that too.

Last year, my Twitter stream filled up with people announcing themselves mayors of local Prêt-à-Mangers. Should I un-follow these deranged megalomaniacs with expensive tastes in sarnies? There was an odd, repetitive quality to their tweets that’s the signature of a machine. So I discovered Foursquare: the most transparent attempt I’d seen so far to induce you to give up your location so advertisers could monetise you. Meh. I didn’t get it – perhaps because the “mayor” business didn’t sit so well with my instinctive anarchist tendencies. Maybe I’d want people – friends – to know where I am, but I don’t need points and titles (or free cups of coffee with a catch).

Do you care about the location-based web? Do you get it? This is the beginning of realtime metadata about you. Technology has put into the hands of the private sector information about you that was formerly only available to the police – with a warrant. Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Schmidt talk, insouciantly, about the end of privacy. Using their services is a bargain from which we can extract many benefits. For their respective corporations, though, we are all money-spinners now. When we ask “what can this technology do for me?”, we should also ask, “and what do I have to lose?”

Tweet

Philip Butler

Philip Butler works as the Senior e-Learning Adviser at ULCC and has been in post-16 education sector as a teacher and manager for nearly 30 years.   He developed a strong interest in Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) and in 2000 was appointed as one of the founding members of the JISC Regional Support Centre for London.  In his subsequent capacity as a regional advisor he helped establish a strong reputation for high quality strategic advice and guidance on e-Learning and organisational transformation.

He has supported innovative development in the education sector whilst working as a consultant on several national projects for JISC, NIACE, BECTA, NLN, DTi, and others.  He has presented papers on effective use of e-Learning, Virtual Learning Environments, the Personalisation of Learning and many other subjects to conferences in the UK, USA and India.  Philip presented at our first FOTE conference back in 2008 and you can see his talk below.

Follow Philip on Twitter: @moodleprof

Tweet

FOTE09 website

FOTE 2009 was one of the best events I attended last year, not least because as a result I wrote 2 blog posts (one about the event and one about about iTunesU) and Justin (my colleague who also attended wrote a blog about digital identity) AND the keynote speaker for our main JISC RSC Wales cross sector event in June, ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digdol‘, was Dougald Hine, who we heard speak at FOTE 2009 and who inspired us both because of his challenging ideas about the future of education.

oMbiel on iPad

FOTE 2010 is less than 2 months away now and I am already looking forward (being lucky enough to have got another ticket) to this years event. Although much of the programme is of interest, 2 things that stick out for me are the iPad session and the as yet untitled session led by oMbiel. oMbiel is an organisation that I came across recently, when asked by a  post 16 learning provider in Wales about the availability of mobile apps for helping orientate new students to a new campus and via a Google search I came across campusM … so I am looking forward to hearing more first hand. And then there’s the iPad … I admit that (having a tech mad husband too) I have had my own iPad since day one and that I have used it a bit for work, mostly for leisure but also as an Open University learner. The least successful/most gripes have come for me as a learner … I can view course resources and even download them to GoodReader to view offline but I can’t post to the Moodle forum or my course blog easily and making notes on the numerous pdfs we have to read is not a straighforward experience. That said, for all its faults I love the iPad and am hoping that ‘The iPad is the future of reading’ will convince me of its place in a learners’ hands.

FOTE09 Lunch

Justin also said, ” I am looking forward to the drinks reception” but he made me promise not to actually put it in this blog …oops! Here’s to another great FOTE

(P.S. If you would like to follow either of us on Twitter I’m @HelenHRSC and Justin is @JustinRSC)

Tweet