Future of Technology in Education conference
Last week, Backstage was at , Imperial College, London. It was a one-day conference looking at trends, technologies and core drivers that will impact on the academic sector over the next 18 months to 3 years. It was an interesting day and a real mixed bag of insights coming from various angles, such a social media, virtual worlds, cloud computing, internet video and skills for the 21st century learner.
Read on for a few snippets of the talks...
Ian Forrester, Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Backstage - Why portability matters
Ian talked about data portability and the importance of web users being able to control their profiles and data. Controlling our identity online is very difficult and a subject not to be approached lightly! He mentioned , which asserts that a user has rights online.
He also talked about how identity is a difficult and complicated area, particuarly with social media sites and mentioned that is one way to control your identity online.
So who owns what? We should all be using sites that allow distribution to our content via licence - it's a flexible way to control the rights and freedoms to use your work - if you're using a site that doesn't use CC - you should be wary of adding your content to it. You should also read your ULAs - user licence agreements - to check who owns your profile, content and views before you add them and if you can delete your data when you want to move on.
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Philip Butler, University of London computer centre - Personalisation
In his opinion the future of technology is going to be about gadgets that just do what they're supposed to do - he's not a technologist himself and doesn't need to know how technology works.
He's very busy and doesn't have much time to spend with his students, he usually gets to see a student for 15-20 mins a term and has to look up his students notes beforehand to remind himself. With this in mind, he feels the challenge is how do we make effective learning tools to suit the pedagogy. Learning culture is shifting it's no longer about passive learning, but utilising the tools available to us placing the learner at the centre.
He showed us a personalisation framework called LearnZone which allows students to add their goals, what their barriers to learning are and more. He mentioned that this was inspired by the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ's Learning websites.
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Miles Metcalf, - Campus of the future
Miles talked about the challenges of IT in colleges, about user-owned technology and how empowering it is. His vision of the future included using some of the money spent on computer labs to subsidise personal technology. Provide higher-end resources and integrate with user-owned workflows. He mentioned how not long ago that software was designed where user experience didn't matter - his has changed. He says what IT departments aren't used to is users taking over their ports with their P2P stuff. What is tomorrow's IT department? Is it a defender of scarce resource and arbiter of fair use? Are we in an age of enterprise transformation?
He says it's about the pedagogy - it's a coherent pedagogy where today's students can become the practitioners and a negotiate public identity, Integrating extra-institutional practice into their institutional-bound learning - it's a personal learning environment via a social stack of software.
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Tim Marshal - CEO
He opened with asking how can the people who are presently teaching keep up with evolving technology fast enough to train the next generation? It's a big challenge! He talked about seeing a at a car boot sale. Once upon a time this was the cutting egde of digital imagery technology 20 years ago. He gave a brief talk about the evolution of TV formats from 405 line black and white, to the present.
Tim talked about and the recent groundbreaking live link with London and the in Amsterdam, which featured an interview with Erik Huggers.
Future of high-definition - uses:
* Communication
* Sharing - our stuff
* Teaching - great for learning eg medical
* Learning
* Research - hi-def cameras on sea bed - collecting data for analysis
* Creating - creative industries opportunities
* Innovating - all sorts
Challenges
* Financing considerations - hi-def is an expensive bit of kit at the moment, but there's ways of mitigating this - ie sharing kit
* Don't let the people who want to stop you from doing things stop you from innovating
* Be inventive and work in multidisciplinary teams - ie use the resources we have
* Leadership, UK has a lot of talented people, but needs to be more collaborative and joined up.
* Don't forget to make sure our students have the very best - don't forget them when planning and thinking about technology in education
