Mike Wesch’s latest Youtube video, A Portal to Media Literacy, is essential viewing for all educators. He describes so clearly why we have to change and challenge the present system of educating our young people. He is clearly a passionate teacher and someone who understands the world in which his students move.
His dismantling of the idea that “to learn is to acquire information”, the basis of our exam-driven school and college system and our institution-centred university system, is a joy to listen to.
He argues that our students might know how to use Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, Digg and MySpace for their own entertainment but they don’t know how to use them to learn or to create something interesting or new. So, in this sense they are no more “natives” than we are. We can’t assume that our students are media literate - even though they use Wikipedia all the time, many don’t realise it’s a wiki and can be edited.
The challenge for Higher Education, and indeed our 5-18 system, is to create “platforms of participation that allow students to realize and leverage the emerging media environment”. Moving our school, colleges and universities out of their “content delivery” model to one where students are participating, collaborating, sharing, creating and evaluating is how we develop an education system that is relevant to the next generation of learners. As I have said before, we have undersold and largely failed the Google generation - those who are in the system at the moment. But it is not too late to do something about the ones who are coming along after them. Put aside some time and watch the entire 66 minutes of this video - in 67 minutes you’ll be inspired to do something!
Dan Costa from PC Mag.com writes an interesting article entitled Don’t Buy an iPhone 3G. Just change AT&T to O² and do the $ to £ conversion and it fits.
Following close on the heels of MobileMe from Apple, Swedish Startup Cloudo are in the process of developing the next generation of computing access - computers for the mobile generation. Their online computer means that you can access your data (files, photos, music, calendars, workspaces) and collaborate with friends and colleagues from any computer, mobile phone, PSP or other device that is connected to the Internet. Your desktop is no longer just on your home or work computer - it is online.
The OU has become the second UK university (after UCL) to make its content accessible through iTunes U. It joins other world class universities such as Yale, Stanford and MIT in making course materials available for free download. It plans to have 500 video and audio materials from 50 courses on iTunes U by the end of July. In the longer term, some of its research activities will also be published on the site.
This is a video of my presentation to the JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire & Humber on June 10th at Bradford University. The sub-title of the presentation was Beyond “no significant difference”, on the basis that, in education, we use technology to do things the same way as we have always done rather than use it to do things differently. The theme of the presentation was that we, the teachers, rather than our students, are the technology generation. Because the use of digital technology has been completely normalised and fully integrated by our students, they don’t see it as technology. They are the “no technology generation”, and it is us who need to be taught how to use it in ways that engage our students and make their education relevant.
This book gives a detailed and comprehensive coverage of how digital technologies can be used to transform our present, outdated, industrial model of education. Co-published by BC Campus and the Commonwealth of Learning, it is available as a free download. As we are aware, despite the widespread availability of new technologies, their impact on teaching and learning, particularly in higher education, has been minimal. The only measurable impact of the use of technology in HE institutions has been on the administrative side, with admissions, registration and purchasing using new technologies in order to operate within a much more technological-aware, external business world.
This failure to adopt new technologies in order to transform and enrich teaching and learning appears to be a global phenomenon. The book has been collaboratively written and edited by 50 HE practitioners from around the world and covers a wide range of topics on the use of new Information and Communication technologies to support and transform teaching and learning
It is divided into 5 sections:
The impact of instructional technologies
Creating online course
Implementing technology
E-learning in action
Engagement and communication
Aimed at practitioners, administrators, managers, decision-makers, it provides valuable advice, case studies, resources, tools, ideas and reflections on creating socially engaging learning experiences within an online learning environment.
Been getting ready for my workshop at the UCISA User Support Conference tomorrow and thinking about what has changed in the last 12 months that is likely to have a significant impact on how we work and play. I think that one of the most exciting changes will be the appearance of MobileMe from Apple, as announced by Steve Jobs at the WWDC a couple of weeks ago.
Mobileme stores all your email, contacts and calendars on a secure server or cloud. When one of these changes on one of your machines, it automatically changes them on all the other ones you have connected to your cloud. So, for example, when you receive an email, mobileme automatically sends it from your cloud to all your devices. Similarly, if you add a new contact to your laptop address book, it will automatically appear in the address book of your other devices.
While mobileme is designed primarily to operate with the new iPhone 3G and Macs, it will also work with PCs. So if you only use a PC or if you use a mix of Macs and PCs, you can still synch your email, calendars and contacts automatically.
Mobileme also allows you to access and share files using iDisk, Apple’s online file storage that .Mac users will be familiar with. Files can be saved to iDisk, and accessed from any of your devices wherever you are. Files can also be shared by sending a link to the file to whoever you want to share it with. PC users can also use this by mounting their iDisk as a network drive and access it from Windows Explorer
So mobile me is significant in 3 ways. Firstly, it means that all your data is always up-to-date on all your devices wherever you are. No more having to wait to get back to the office to put your phone in the cradle to synch it with your laptop. Secondly. all you data is accessible from all your devices. If you created a presentation at work and left it on that machine, you can now access it from home or wherever you are. Thirdly, it brings PC users on board so its not just a “Mac thing”.
I think that mobileme is going to significantly change how we do things and finally brings real mobility to the way we work.
This Special Report in the Economist highlights the impact of an increasingly connected world on the way we live, work, communicate and generally spend our days. All those gadgets (mobile phones, laptops, PDAs) that we have been carrying around for years, and which tantalised us with promises of quick and easy access to an online world ( but only if you had a techy friend who knew the 40 steps needed to achieve this) are now finally delivering the goods. Thanks to the arrival of faster and reliable cellular networks, getting connected through our mobile phones is now straightforward. Through an ever increasing number of wi-fi hotspots, connectivity from anywhere is finally happening.
The digital nomad is defined not by the gadgets and devices that they carry, but by what they leave behind. The analogy with the Bedouins is an interesting one. The nomadic Bedouins do not carry water because they know that they will be able to get some at the next oasis. The digital nomad doesn’t carry his documents because he knows that he can access them online when he gets to his destination.
This is a useful report describing the likely consequences of this long-awaited connectivity on the way we lead out lives.
This book gives a detailed and comprehensive coverage of how digital technologies can be used to transform our present, outdated, industrial model of education. Co-published by 
