Category Archives: Mobile

Stream Globally, Save Locally: Key Benefits of Webcasting Your Event for Live and On-Demand Viewing

Posted by nicolew on 17/10/2012 No comments

New Research Shows Hybrid Events Won’t Cannibalize Your On-Site Attendance

Earlier this month Sonic Foundry sponsored the The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference. Hundreds of individuals interested in educational technology flocked to London, England to hear from experts in the field and learn what the future holds for classrooms.

One reason the conference was a success: The discussion extended far beyond the physical confines of the conference. The sessions were webcast live to a remote audience via Mediasite by Sonic Foundry.

If would-be attendees weren’t able to get a ticket to attend the in-person event or were unable to make it due to geography, time or budget restraints, they could still participate remotely. All they had to do to feel like they were actually there in person was register using a passcode to get access to sessions via their internet browser. Through the magic of Mediasite they didn’t miss out on anything, and they were able to ask questions and participate in discussions via the Ask button.

Creating hybrid or blended events – meaning a meeting or event has at least one group of face-to-face participants connecting with other participants in one or more additional locations – is becoming more and more common.

New research released by the Meeting Professionals International Foundation and sponsored by Sonic Foundry shares some interesting insights on the topic. MPI surveyed nearly 1,800 meeting planners, attendees, technology vendors and consultants and conducted in-depth interviews with nearly 40 people, and research shows that 70 percent of respondents feel that hybrid meetings will be important to the future of meetings.

Meeting professionals are using hybrid meetings to share content, ideas and experiences with attendees across multiple geographies and time zones. Plus, on-demand content is also important because attendees may not be able to participate at the exact moment the meeting is happening.

The research cited that the potential for cannibalization of the face-to-face meeting is a concern of 50 percent of those surveyed. However, this concern appears to be largely unsubstantiated. The data suggests that face-to-face attendance increased or remained flat – 88 percent of planners who have done hybrid meetings say there’s been no negative impact on onsite attendance.

By going hybrid and streaming your content live and on-demand you’ll be extending your reach, creating instant online video libraries of knowledge that can be reviewed anytime and you’ll allow many more people to attend your event. Just ask the University of London Computer Centre (organizer of FOTE). Going hybrid is a win-win.

Mediasite by Sonic Foundry is used for video management and academic, enterprise and event webcasting. Its Mediasite Events group is a leading provider of event webcasting for hybrid events and high-profile meetings. Voted one of the “Best Technology Tools” by Professional Convention Management Association’s Convene Magazine readers, the group supplies technical webcasting services and expertise to organizations who seek to complement their conference or event with viewing over the web. The Mediasite Events group provides live and on-demand webcasting for Fortune 500 corporations, university associations, sporting events and charitable organizations globally.

For more information, please visit http://www.sonicfoundry.com/ or call 877.783.7987 toll free. You can also download the research report at http://mpiweb.org/hybrid (free to MPI members and available for purchase for non-members) and read a recent blog post from Sonic Foundry called “10 Tips to Create A Successful Hybrid Event.”

- Nicole Wise, Sonic Foundry

One Company’s Use of Webcasting Brings Employees Together

Video learning at the Royal Veterinary College

Posted by James Cross on 08/10/2012 No comments

As one of the leading institutions in its field, the Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in London has a reputation for providing one of the finest veterinary educations in the world. And through the use of online video, the RVC is amplifying the power and reach of the learning that takes place inside and beyond its gates.

MediaCore gives the RVC the power to quickly and simply share mobile, media-rich learning content with its students – who can then access it on demand, whenever and wherever they need it – from high-definition recordings of complex surgical procedures, to videos showing how to cast a cow and turn a sheep.

In this video, Nick Short, Head of E-Media at the RVC, explains how online video has become an essential part of their toolkit – and how MediaCore has enabled them to leverage video like never before for the benefit of their students’ learning.

Visit http://MediaCore.com to learn more, and to sign up for a free educator account.

FOTE12 Goes Hybrid with Mediasite by Sonic Foundry

Posted by nicolew on 04/10/2012 No comments

One Company’s Use of Webcasting Brings Employees Together
Photo credit: Sonic Foundry, Inc.

The Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference in London, England always sells out fast to IT directors and managers, learning technologists, practitioners and anyone else interested in educational technology.

But if you weren’t able to secure a ticket to this week’s conference, you can still participate and feel like you’re actually there, because FOTE is being webcast for the first time to a remote audience via Mediasite by Sonic Foundry. That way, even more people from all over the world will be able to watch online from the comfort of their offices or homes.

All of the sessions will be live streamed via Mediasite 6, which will allow attendees, both on-site and online, to watch sessions from their mobile devices in real time. The recordings will also be archived for on-demand viewing, creating an instant online video library of knowledge about IT trends in classrooms that can be reviewed at any time.

To join remotely all you need to do is register on the Mediasite events website using the ‘FOTE2012‘ passcode. If you are planning to watch the FOTE12 live stream from a desktop computer please make sure you install the latest version of Microsoft Silverlight.

Making FOTE a hybrid event this year by simultaneously offering face-to-face and online experiences, allows the University of London Computer Centre, the conference organizer, to reach and engage a much larger audience.

Worldwide, 1,100 colleges and universities use Mediasite and its video content management system to quickly and cost-effectively automate the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand streaming videos and rich media presentations. Sonic Foundry has been named Frost & Sullivan’s Global Market Share Leader in Lecture Capture Solutions for six consecutive years.

Check out www.sonicfoundry.com/mediasite to learn more.

– Nicole Wise, Sonic Foundry

The Horizon Report

Posted by Frank Steiner on 16/03/2011 No comments

With the first FOTE round table session on Shared Services written up and February fast becoming nothing else but a distant memory we are starting to put our minds to this year’s FOTE conference. Looking back at the previous three events and scouring the interweb is always a good way to start a) to see which of ‘our predictions have come true’ and b) what technological topics the education community is discussing.

What is The Horizon Report?

Part of our research uncovered The Horizon Report, 2011 Edition, an annual paper produced in collaboration between The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative “examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative inquiry.”

The report covers critical challenges, key trends and technologies to watch. The former “considering important constraints and challenges” associated with technology adoption whilst key trends being based on “an extensive review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research to identify and rank trends that are currently affecting the sphere of education and the world at large.” Finally “the six technologies featured in the 2011 Horizon Report are placed along three adoption horizons that indicate likely time frames for their entrance into mainstream use.”

Challenges & Trends

Challenges	Key trends
Digital media literacy continues its rise in importance as a key skill in every discipline and profession	The world of work is increasingly collaborative, giving rise to reflection about the way student projects are structured.
Appropriate metrics of evaluation lag behind the emergence of new scholarly forms of authoring, publishing, and researching	The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based, and our notions of IT support are decentralized.
Economic pressures and new models of education are presenting unprecedented competition to traditional models of the university	People expect to be able to work, learn, and study whenever and wherever they want.
Keeping pace with the rapid proliferation of information, software tools, and devices is challenging for students and teachers alike	The abundance of resources and relationships made easily accessible via the Internet is increasingly challenging us to revisit our roles as educators in sense-making, coaching, and credentialing.

Technologies to watch

The report features six key technologies to watch and maps them along three adoption horizons: near-term (12 months), mid-term (2-3 years) and far-term (4-5 years), indicating the likely time frame for uptake in the mainstream use for teaching and learning. Four of those were covered at last year’s FOTE conference and we embedded the videos accordingly.

Near-term

e-Books continue to generate strong interest in the consumer sector and are increasingly available on campuses as well. James Clay argued in his talk ‘The iPad is the future of reading!’ that books are wonderful things, but still, the iPad is the future of reading…

Mobiles enable ubiquitous access to information, social networks, tools for learning and productivity and much more. Mobiles are capable computing devices in their own right — and they are increasingly a user’s first choice for internet access. Hugh Griffiths, the founder and owner of oMbiel, has developed campusM™ which has become a leading mobile application for UK Universities providing an integrated suite of services for students, staff, alumni and prospective students that are available on the iPhone, iPod Touch and hundreds of other smart phones.

Mid-term

Augmented Reality brings a significant potential to supplement information delivered via computers, mobile devices, video, and even the printed book. Much simpler to create and use now than in the past, augmented reality feels at once fresh and new, yet an easy extension of existing expectations and practices. James Alliban, an Augmented Reality specialist and interactive artist from London (UK) showcased some of his experiments in AR which have developed a great deal of interest in the last year, leading to the founding of his company Augmatic.

Game-based Learning has grown in recent years as research continues to demonstrate its effectiveness for learning for students of all ages. For a variety of reasons, The Horizon Report sees the realisation of this potential is still two to three years away. in his talk at FOTE10 ‘Unlocking Learning: Computer Games in Education‘ he looked at the use of computer games in education, with a particular emphasis on schools. In this 20 minute whirlwind session a number of topics were covered including learning from games, learning about games, commercial games in education and games design. Short case studies illustrated a number of examples from the Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Consolarium.

Far-term

Gesture-based computing moves the control of computers from a mouse and keyboard to the motions of the body via new input devices. Depicted in science fiction movies for years, gesture-based computing is now more grounded in reality thanks to the recent arrival of interface technologies such as Kinect, SixthSense, and Tamper, which make interactions with computational devices far more intuitive and embodied. It would be interesting to see if any UK (or international) institution is currently using gesture-based computing to deliver teaching and learning, a perfect showcase for this year’s FOTE12 conference.

Learning analytics loosely joins a variety of data-gathering tools and analytic techniques to study student engagement, performance, and progress in practice, with the goal of using what is learned to revise curricula, teaching, and assessment in real time. Building on the kinds of information generated by Google Analytics and other similar tools, learning analytics aims to mobilize the power of data-mining tools in the service of learning, and embracing the complexity, diversity, and abundance of information that dynamic learning environments can generate.

Which of these trends are currently impacting your institution?
How are you addressing the challenges associated with the integration of e-books and mobiles into your delivery of teaching and learning?
Are you already using augmented reality or game-based learning? If so how has it changed teaching and learning?

Reference: 2011 Horizon Report Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K., (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report. Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.

The Mobile Internet: Thoughts on the iTunes U conference

Posted by Frank Steiner on 12/11/2010 1 comment

Only a few days after FOTE10 ended and with most post-conference actions ticked off, it was time to leave for good old Germany to attend the iTunes U conference in Munich. Tim and I were invited along with a handful of selected suppliers that address a variety of challenges associated with running an institutional iTunes U presence.

It was great – and slightly surreal experience – to be at the other side of the (conference) fence so to speak – shortly after running our 3rd Future of Technology in Education conference. Apple did a great job in putting on the first dedicated iTunes U conference and the few presentations we managed to enjoy – after all we travelled to the Bavarian capital as exhibitors – were something to behold. Jason Ediger (@jsunediger) Director, iTunes U and Mobile Learning at Apple took us on whirlwind journey of adoption rates (120million iPhone/iPod users), iTunes U stats (800 content providers from 26 countries & available in almost 100) and future gazing (by 2013 content access via mobile will overtake traditional desktop access).

I have no intention to weigh up the institutional benefits or challenges of ‘using’ iTunes U, Jeremy Speller did a great job in his guest post over at Brian Kelly’s blog. I’m more interested in the overall market trends for mobile and what the implications are.

As I’m a sucker for a nicely put together chart, whether this is something personal or comes with my profession I don’t know – most likely a mixture of both; I did some digging around and found Morgan Stanley’s ‘The Mobile Internet Report’ and thought I share 2 highlights of the 659-slide presentation.

Chart 1: Adoption rate of mobile technology

According to the report mobile is the fastest growing ecosystem in history with the chart above illustrating adoption rates per quarter after launch.

Chart 2: The iPhone/iPod ecosystem

Taking a closer look at the iPod/iPhone growth and the ecosystem of Apps & Downloads shows the rapid adoption and success of that particular mobile device as well as the growth of the ecosystem surrounding it. The fact that Morgan Stanley only features stats on Apple devices, might seem odd, but I assume having spot on figures of devices sold and app downloaded is one advantage of Apple’s closed ecosystem. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said in an interview in August 2010 that about 200,000 new Android devices are being sold each day, which equals an 866% increase year-on-year for the same period (Q2) last year. Considering Android having 34% market share compared to Apple’s 21.7% in the US – as of Q2 2010 – gives an indication of the overall size of mobile market.

FOTE10: email clients and mobile access

Taking this a step closer to home I thought I have a look at how our FOTE10 delegates accessed our conference emails and website.

It turns out a third of delegates accessed our regular updates & RSS campaigns from their mobile devices with the majority of those coming from the iPhone.

Mobile visits to the FOTE conference website only made up 9% of total visits and compared to the site average show lower rates of engagement (lesser page views per visit, less time spent on site and higher bounce rate). If this is due to the website not being optimised for mobile access or different usage/access behaviour on mobile devices compared to desktop/laptop access I can only speculate. It would be interesting to know what the statistics for your organisation are. Are you monitoring mobile access?

FOTE10 website: Mobile statistics

Considering the rather tech-savvy FOTE fan-base it is likely that those percentages will increase come FOTE11, I shall make a note in RMT to keep an eye on them.

Coming back to the starting point of this post – the iTunes U conference in Munich – I can’t help but think that mobile access to content is less and less about being a unique selling point for an institution/organisation and more about offering the (paying) customer/student a level of interaction they have come to expect out in the ‘real world’.

In search for a good closing statement for this post, Twitter came to the rescue, with a tweet from Graham Brown-Martin: “Is the future mobile? Visualising smart phone growth: http://bit.ly/9K8llP #jiscel10 http://bit.ly/8YjG6I #lwf11″

As he points out in his blog post over at Learning Without Frontiers for his upcoming presentation at the JISC Online Conference:

I haven’t suddenly become anti-mobile learning it’s just that having promoted it since the mid-80′s I really think that it’s arrived, happened and is no longer a question anymore. I’d advise those still struggling with the concept to consider a new career.

Finally, thanks to Morgan Stanley for making ‘The Mobile Internet Report‘ available online and allowing us to refer to it in this post.

Education: What technology wants

Posted by Frank Steiner on 22/09/2010 1 comment

Suppliers and institutions may want technology to enable a control, expensive rarity model with proprietary and protected features. People may want technology to enable freedom and choice with a cheap abundance model with open features (except of course where rarity and expensive are a feature of identity rather than function – think “designer” fashion). Initial phases of new technology are often balanced towards the supplier/institution and then competition shifts balance towards what people want from technology. The balance between supplier/institution and people will continue to play out into the future according to contexts but ultimately what technology wants ends up being what people want.

Information technology wants to be personal, abundant, cheap, easy, convenient, open, small, mobile and connected – “resistance is futile”.

The balance of technology in education is weighted to the institution – we depend upon institutionally provisioned hardware and software from data centres and servers to “end user” computers – this is an expensive, resource intensive, centralised and locked down model struggling to meet the demands of what people want from technology.

Continuing on the current trajectory every room will be eventually be an IT suite or every student will have a college computer – how could I provision, support, maintain and secure up to 20,000 computers – we need a new approach. Educational technology must seek a lighter, simpler less resource intensive approach to technology – it must learn to let go of technology, step away from the diminishing returns on the technology treadmill. Instead, education should provide a platform for technology use – a feasible and sustainable model for the next era – the “fifth wave of computing” – personal, abundant, cheap, easy, convenient, open, small, mobile and connected.

The traditional response is for education to provide resources but better choices can usually be readily selected by people from the web. Education needs to de-institutionalise and reduce its own technology – allow the balance to shift to personal technology by exploring DIY and self service approaches.

All our learners have on-line presence and identities – why provide institutional versions – allow learners to use their own resources and on-line identity. Allow learners to select their own email and their own applications – some will use Google apps, some will use Microsoft Live apps while others might prefer Zoho, Facebook office or local apps such as Openoffice or even Microsoft office. If learners don’t have on-line resources then this is an area for education, for education should be about learning for life.

Shift investment from computers and servers to the network. Shake off the ghost of internal client-server thinking – think global – think open – think web only. Create pervasive wireless guest access and increase both internal and Internet bandwidth. Encourage learners and staff to use their own IT on your guest network – let the network be our computer – let the network be the technology platform for learning

Education teaching and Education IT could both share a common new approach – facilitation. In the same way that teaching is considering facilitation, coaching, guidance styles so too could education IT.

iTunes U/Podcasting

Posted by Frank Steiner on 13/09/2010 1 comment

iPod touch

I have been asked to chair the panel session on iTunes U/podcastingat FOTE 10. As a practitioner I have been making podcasts available online and/or via iTunes since 2006. More recently at Sussex I have been working with colleagues across the institution to “industrialise” the production and distribution of podcasts (digital lecture capture) for our students via our Moodle based VLE.

We now have a scalable a fully automated solution for podcast creation in more than 10 of our largest lecture rooms. Our podcasts are certainly popular with students but perhaps, not unsurprisingly; there has been a mixed reception from my academic colleagues across a range of disciplines. However, I was more than just a little bit pleased when a Sussex FRS became a podcasting fan.

I believe the following factors are potential barriers making more lectures available online:

The fear of the technology and the unknown. Technology really is disruptive!

Who owns what in the digital age? This is perhaps the single most important concern presented to me by my academic colleagues. What are the copyright implications and how long should universities retain digital recordings? For guidance JISC has produced some guidelines and documentation, which sets out a useful roadmap (Recording Lectures: Legal Considerations (28/07/2010).

Going global. Not everyone will be comfortable with their, hitherto very small audience, expanding to the entire (potentially and/or perhaps hopefully!!) online learning community. What happens if I say something wrong?

Management. Is learning and imparting knowledge becoming too commoditized? Are lectures simply a vehicle for promotion, institutional self-interest and becoming an arm of marketing and corporate communications. Who selects what material is suitable for iTunes U and what criteria and/or quality assurance will be needed?

It’s been nearly a year since the Times higher education (THE) carried a report entitled “get it out in the open”. The article highlighted how many universities are now producing and distributing for “free” open educational resources as part of their marketing strategy. The use of podcasts aligned to institutions signing up to Apple’s iTunes U features prominently in the article where universities as diverse as MIT, Oxford, Coventry, Edinburgh, Birmingham City University, Harvard, OU etc are making their mark.

Where do we go now? Should everything we teach in the lecture/seminar room be recorded? If so what is the justification for this approach and will it make any difference pedagogically or indeed financially by way of a return on investment (both in time and cost of equipment). Although we only have a short time to debate podcasting and iTunes U I’m sure the conversations will be both interesting and lively.

iTunes U/Podcasting: Meet the panel

Posted by Frank Steiner on 09/09/2010 1 comment

Bill Ashraff

With the Open University claiming a world record for the number of iTunes U downloads as the first to reach 20 million earlier this year, we asked a panel of practitioners to discuss possibilities and barriers to use of podcasting in education.

The panel chair is Bill Ashraf, Director of Technology Enhanced Learning at the University of Sussex and a FOTE veteran, having been to all previous conference as a delegate and speaker. He is currently heading up the strategy at Sussex for e-learning, student facing educational support technology and is the “owner” of the VLE. He has ‘Apple distinguished educator’ status and was a finalist for The Times Higher 2006 awards for the ‘most imaginative use of technology in distance learning’. You can follow Bill on Twitter: @billash01

James Clay

He’ll be joined by James Clay who has been passionate about the use of learning technologies to enhance and enrich the learning experience since 1991. He has used, developed, managed and inspired others in a range of technologies, from DTP, CD-ROM, mobile devices, the internet, the VLE, the MLE, mobile learning through to Web 2.0. We are thrilled to welcome James back after his riveting talk on the ‘Future of Learning’ at FOTE09′ he‘s not only joining the panel but will also deliver a keynote entitled ‘The iPad is the future of reading!’, the most commented guest post on this year’s blog thus far.

Sally Hanford

Sally Hanford is currently part of the Learning Innovation Team at the University of Nottingham. Prior to this she has worked in the IT systems section of Information Services at the university since 1999.

Her role includes responsibility for the university’s video streaming service (including support for the live webcasting of events since 2002), and the introduction of systems to enable staff to publish their own media content.

She managed the recent launches of the University of Nottingham on iTunes U and the university’s YouTube Edu channel, along with a pilot video.nottingham service for user generated content (which utilises ULCC’s managed media service).

Sally is actively involved in the Steeple and Opencast communities, and has a wider interest in the future of online video, in particular the opportunities and challenges presented by open source software, technology convergence, shared services and cloud computing.

Liam J. Hayter runs RaveMedia at Ravensbourne delivering briefs for commercial clients, including The O2. RaveMedia connects clients to the very best of the colleges talent, providing freelancing opportunities for students, staff and graduates. His official job title is Technologies and Production Manager which ticks most of the boxes.

He is part of the team setting up iTunes U for the college, and also provides technical training and development for the ERDF supported Business Incubation Centre, mostly centred around video and cloud applications. Liam graduated from Central Saint Martins with a BA (Hons) Fine Art in 2003 and has spent the last 7 years working in digital media.

Sarah Sherman

An experienced adviser and qualified teacher, Sarah Sherman has been working in the field e-learning, providing strategic advice about its implementation and development, for nearly ten years.

In her role as e-Learning Adviser (HE) at JISC RSC London, she developed and delivered training events for technical and academic staff, and supported the use of e-learning and learning technologies to support learning and teaching. Since 2007, Sarah has been managing the Bloomsbury Learning Environment – a collaborative e-learning service shared by five University of London Colleges (Birkbeck, Institute of Education, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Royal Veterinary College and SOAS).

The service comprises an impressive portfolio of shared facilities including a VLE (Blackboard), virtual classroom software (Elluminate) and lecture-capture software (Echo360). In 2008, Sarah managed a JISC-funded project exploring the use of collaborative online tools (e.g. GoogleDocs) to support learning, teaching, research and administration to enhance the use of ICT. Currently, Sarah is managing the Bloomsbury Media Cloud project, which is focused on the creation, development, storage and delivery of media content.

The Mobile University: last year's model?

Posted by Frank Steiner on 02/09/2010 6 comments

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

Speaker Bio – James Clay

Posted by Frank Steiner on 23/07/2010 1 comment

James Clay

We are thrilled to welcome James Clay back after his riveting talk on the ‘Future of Learning’ at FOTE09, which we added below, he will share with us why he thinks ‘The iPad is the future of reading!’.

James is and has been passionate about the use of learning technologies to enhance and enrich the learning experience since 1991. He has used, developed, managed and inspired others in a range of technologies, from DTP, CD-ROM, mobile devices, the internet, the VLE, the MLE, mobile learning through to Web 2.0.

James Clay has been ILT & Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College since November 2006. He is responsible for the VLE, the use of learning technologies, e-learning, mobile learning, the libraries, digital and online resources and the strategic direction of the college in relation to the use of learning technologies.

James has extensive experience of mobile learning and has a vision that goes beyond mobile technologies and focuses on the mobility of the learner, blurring the demarcation between formal and informal learning. His current vision for tertiary education encompasses the use of Web 2.0 technologies embedded into an institutional VLE which can be accessed through mobile technologies. Allowing learners a focal point for their studying, whilst allowing the depth and breadth of Web 2.0 to bring a personalised learning experience to students at a time and space to suit them. For the future, James hopes that institutions and others will allow for a flexible, personalised, accessible learning experience for all.

James Clay previously was Director of the Western Colleges Consortium from 2001 to 2006. As Director he is responsible for the management, strategic direction and development of e-learning using a shared MLE across the four partner FE Colleges of the WCC.

Before the WCC he worked for at-Bristol, a Millennium project within the Harbourside of central Bristol – a job which involved delivering hands-on science education and designing educational websites on subjects as diverse as handheld learning experiences, via Antiguan racer snakes, through space science to the mummification process of ancient Egyptians.

Prior to the above, James spent ten years in Further Education as a lecturer in Business & Economics, employing learning technologies. His resources and websites were used extensively by students and were praised by verifiers and inspectors.

Follow James on Twitter – @jamesclay

FOTE – Future of Technology in Education

5 October 2012 | Senate House, London

A ULCC Event