Jan

14

Learning is Social , Teaching Isn’t

Filed Under Blog, Education, internet, Publishing | 1 Comment

This week I went along to the BETT show at London’s Olympia.  Unlike CES in Las Vegas, I was on my aching feet for seven hours, and only the sensible suggestion of one brilliant assessment software developer ( “Fancy a pint of Brakspears at the Hand and Flowers on the other side of the road?”) sustained my analytical efforts throughout the day.  And this great trade show for British educational technology fully repays analysis.  The show is 26 years old, has 750 exhibitors, covers the best part of 14000 square metres, and will by the time it ends on Saturday have entertained some 30,000 teachers as it did me.  It is still growing, with Google, YouTube and LG joining for the first time this year.  Panasonic, Intel, Microsoft, Dell and NCC were amongst those launching new products at the fair.  In the related conference, the UK government, part sponsor of BETT, welcomed 72 ministers of education speaking for the interests of over a billion students.  The UK Prime Minister announced the Home Access scheme at this meeting, in order to fund laptops in needy families to support access to a digital revolution following successful trials in Oldham and Suffolk  …. Hosannas, let choirs sing, glory to politicians and educational administrators in the highest  ….

My apologies for breaking off into Carol Form (seasonal hangover), but attending the opening press conference at conferences like this brings out the worst in me.  EMAP, the organizer, does a great job (but the show does need a real all-year web presence).  BESA, the UK trade body, likewise.  But, really, when is this 26 year old revolution going to change anything?

So, at the press conference moment for open questions, I asked Professor Steven Heppel, apostle of new learning, when the red hot heat generated at BETT was going to thaw the cold and indifferent heart of average British teaching, and was delighted when he agreed that for 70% of British teachers what IT in schools accomplished was putting a modernist gloss on teaching approaches that had not fundamentally changed since the nineteenth century.  For the rest, for the centres of excellence, for the teachers as leaders, something different was happening.  He spoke of the post-appropriation model – a place where learners are finally in control, where engagement was largely (in the widest sense) play-based.  He thought that Home Access was important because half the nation’s children are brought up by their grandparents while parents are out at work, because you were more likely to learn on Facebook than from an eTextbook, that the network (as in extended family) was the learning place, and (my words) the classroom had to compete in the network for learning space.

If you walk round BETT with your head afire with the idea that kids don’t learn from teachers  but from play, from other pupils, and from the range of formal and informal material available on the web, it quickly becomes easy to categorize what is on show.  Most products and services are for sale to teachers and schools.  They buy them because they persuade parents, governors, regulators, inspectors  and their ilk that standards are rising, modernity is being treated with respect and that newly graduated teachers can be safely employed at schools which have VLEs, LMS, blended learning packages , online and self-marking continuous assessment, a digital whiteboard on every flat surface  and a networked school timetable that emailed and texted every parent with an update for each inch of falling snow.

But if the Professor is right, and he has my bet (pun intended), then the real revolution is yet to come.  It follows from learners being tracked in the network and their learning journeys and exploratory pathways being recorded and imitated by their peers.  Like apprentices in a Victorian factory, we will learn from each other how to survive and how to use learning for self-advancement and competitive benefit.  And our best teachers will guide and influence these processes. Once we learn how to learn it will be a lifelong practise.  And the rest of our teachers, those who teach by rote in the eTextbook?  They will go the same way as the Librarians…

Jan

10

Viva, Las Vegas!

Filed Under Blog, eBook, Education, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

I have never really enjoyed Las Vegas very much.  Too much glitter and artifice.  I always think of broken gamblers dying in lonely bedsits.  But I must say that I have really enjoyed my day in the desert today.  Perfect antidote to the foot of snow around my Hut.  And going to CES without ruined sleep, jetlag, tired feet, or the endurance test of having yet another demo from yet another salesman without being able to break in to ask the only question that I really wanted answered.

Instead I have had demos of everything I wanted to see.  The aisles have looked fairly crowded but no-one jostled me. I have asked my questions , and even had sensible answers to some of them.  I started by working out exactly what I wanted to see: always a good move at a huge trade show but one that I seem to rarely accomplish.  I settled on a day of looking at Readers: Copia, the Liquidvista prototype, MSI eReader, PlasticLogic QUE (one of the most impressive – and a Cambridge UK development!), the Skiff,  Spring Design’s Alex, the Booken Orizon, the Entourage Edge and the Microsoft Courier dual screen digital codex (why are we suddenly into that word “codex”? – it produces Leonardo da Vinci in my mind).

Then I thought, if I had time after all those stands, I would like to look at the Samsung display and evaluate the E6 and the E10.  And I missed Steve Ballmer of Microsoft using the HP Slate at the opening press conference (I didn’t have a ticket!) so I would rather like to catch up on that, as well as previewing the Dell Streak and Cydle M7.  Well , I did get to see the Ballmer demo, and I also visited those other stands.

And I had a ton of help.  Hats off to Matthew Bernius and his colleagues at the Open Publishing Lab at RIT for gathering all this stuff up in one place for me.  And three cheers for the great people at Engadget , Gizmodo and Teleread for doing the videos and demos and evaluations of all these things, and for answering my fool questions for all the world as if I knew what I was talking about (and to their communities, who spotted a sucker immediately).  And to Bobbie Johnson and the Guardian for getting me in to the Ballmer session and then restlessly videoing the crowded aisles and fevered sales pitches: quite beyond the call of duty.

So I am off to bed now.  A little tired but quite energized by what I have seen.  But there is just one thing I cannot work out.  If I was CES , wouldn’t I put all of these links and demos and ideas on my own site, and run it year round, and offer to continually update punters like me, and create a community which includes all who went to Vegas, and those like me who stayed at home.  The current CES site is a good news site but hardly an eCommerce, 365 days a year community experience.  In the past year I have spoken to two of the greatest business event operators in the world about this, and while they talk the talk of network connectivity they do little more.  One day the physical event will be the satellite activity, and the web will be the core: I hope they transfer their brands successfully before that happens.

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