Big thanks to the crew from GeekFest Dubai for the chance to speak last week. The crowd is super-switched-on and made for a great – and intimidating – group to present to that night. With so many people who really ‘get’ stuff you know that you have a great chance to really spark some interesting discussion and get some amazing input on your ideas. That said, the flip side is that this is also the group that will quickly see through your crap if you don’t bring your A-preso.
From engadget: “London school children to get free loaner iPhones in experimental, educational trial”
The Gumley House Convent School — a small, Christian School for girls ages 11 to 18 — in London has laid out its plan to use give Apple’s smartphone to a select group of 30 students as a test educational measure. … The girls will have free access to all of the phone’s features with the exception of actual calls, and the trial will last until the end of the school year.
So assuming that the school has wifi, the students are basically getting an iPod Touch that can browse and use apps. Since I am a BlackBerry user its hard for me to evaluate the role the iPhone could play in education. Of course, a mobile internet device with some doc support can certainly play a role in terms of access and before domain aptitudes using new tools. Also, I’m sure the school is looking to buy some love from the students by giving them all a hip device. That said, it is always a question of balancing the benefit of using a tool and facilitating work and discovery, versus spending time building domain knowledge and expertise with that tool so that is a facilitator rather than a hurdle. Which is faster: great mental math skills, or digging out an actual calculator or booting up the calculator on your computer?
Dr. Helen Barrett maintains an interesting site focusing on the use of electronic portfolios and digital storytelling.
Apart from the highly useful information on there are two sections regarding the specific use of tools to support electronic portfolios that educators can use to implement portfolios using cutting edge tools that provide a great vehicle to learn and use important tools and build a meaningful electronic portfolio at the same time.
Rapid prototyping and experimentation at all levels – including creative play – may never be the same. littlebits is the work of Ayah Bdeir, a graduate from MIT’s Media Lab and the American University of Beirut.
Like I said above, personal learning environments combined with open courseware, new empowerment for educators-as-entrepreneurs, and innovation in technology for delivery and interactivity mean that traditional institutions that cater to the average level of those in the room and which are dependent on the constraints of building, maintaining and managing physical spaces will not have the agility of web native education.
The games that people choose to play are not just an indication of how they personally prefer to face challenges: acting through characters and enjoying seeing those characters achieve and excel which is aligned to performing and linked to receiving praise for your skill – your performance; improving as a player and besting higher levels that require greater effort to master the challenges and domain knowledge and ability required to complete these challenges – your effort.
And behold, the Social Media Classroom is born: The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets ,…
We then got into….once you start with a blog, (Hello WordPress/Blogger) your learning starts to take off. You start to get motivated to want to find a tool that helps make your space more conversational and co-creative/crowsourced in terms of production/interpretation of content/ideas (Hello Wiki). You then want to throw in some pictures (Hello Flickr/OFoto)…
eLearn: In Depth Tutorials – Designing and Developing E-learning Projects: A Three-Tiered Approach link The linked article is an excerpt from the forthcoming book The E-learning Handbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Online Learning (Pfeiffer, 2008), edited by Saul Carliner and Patti Shank…very interesting read for anyone designing – or improving – an elearning project.
It’s certainly not news to anyone that you can take a MBA degree online these days. Increasingly, schools are offering such programs as a flexible alternative for professionals who are either working and cannot afford a study break or who want to study at schools far from their city, country or continent. Its difficult to…