Rock and a hard place

Earlier today Shelly Terrell tweeted that she would prefer to see schools invest in mobile technologies than in Interactive White Boards (IWBs). Here's what she said: "Personally, I feel $$ better spent on mobile devices in classrooms vs IWBs." Actually, I can see her reasoning behind this, because although I have observed some excellent learning and teaching using IWBs in some schools, they are few and far between. Many teachers I have watched tend to use IWBs like an expensive display board. They won't let smaller hands anywhere near it. Perhaps the boards are positioned wrongly on walls so the kids can't reach them, as in Neil Selwyn's account Revisiting the promise of digital technology in schools. Perhaps the teacher simply wants to maintain control of the classroom, and feels that letting kids interact with the screen might unleash some kind of diabolical anarchy. Kids at the front of the class? Never! They should be sat down behind their desks, listening quietly, making notes! 'Elf and safety mate. Perhaps the teacher thinks the kids might damage the board, because after all, IWBs can be expensive to repair? Sticky fingers all over the board - not on my watch my friend. Or perhaps, most likely, the teacher is too hard pressed for time to dream up activities in which the children can actually leave their seats and interact with the resources on the screen.

It's a shame, really it is. When kids are allowed to interact with the IWBs in the ways they were intended to be used, there is a great deal of excitement, and a lot of engaged learning. When they are not allowed to touch the screen, it becomes just another teaching tool, and it's a 'so what?' from the class. I have seen both in the classroom, and I know which one I prefer to watch.

Mobile phones are different. Many children have them, and they are very adept at using them, but usually only to send texts or access their Facebook accounts. How many of them would actually consider using their phone to access learning? And waht's worse, many schools have imposed a ban on mobile phones in the classroom, because they consider there is greater potential to disrupt, bully, subvert or otherwise use the devices in ways too nefarious to mention.

Perhaps Shelly meant that schools should invest in iPads, or the more affordable mini-iPads? (er, I mean iPod Touches) Now there's an idea. I can think of a whole raft of ideas for learning activities using iPods as a tool. Then there are games consoles such as the Nintendo DS with its Pictochat features. We could go on - the world, as Del Boy once said, is our lobster.

Here's my take. It would be a shame to abandon the Interactive White Board in favour of mobile devices, just because many teachers can't seem to use them in an engaging way. The same could apply to handheld mobile devices, if teachers haven't got the time to think up good uses, or there is not enough cash available to purchase them because - well, the budget has all been spent on installing IWBs that are not gong to be used properly. Hmmm. I think we're caught between a rock and a hard place. Anyone know a way out?

Image source by Rob Schenk

Rock and a hard place by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Child friendly technologies

Along with some of my third year Primary education students I'm presenting four papers at the Plymouth e-Learning Conference later this month. One of the papers, co-written by Gareth Excell and John Edwards, is entitled: How can child-friendly technologies enhance children’s learning? I'm particularly excited by this one, because the notion of 'child friendly' technologies has not been addressed that often in the recent literature. It may even be a new term for educators to consider. Fact is, most technologies children like to use informally, are banned by most schools.

I had a conversation with a veteran secondary school teacher last night about the use of personal technologies in schools. He came to the conclusion that although devices like mobile phone could be used to great effect during lessons for texting dialogue, he and his colleagues would be very reluctant to do so, unless they had total control over what students could text and who they could text it to, during the lessons. Regardless of the reticence, child friendly technologies will come to the fore I believe, and it is important for teachers to begin discussing now, what the pedagogical potential is, and what safeguards they need to employ to make them a success.

Here's the abstract of the paper (comments are very welcome):

Technology is now a central component of the Primary teacher’s toolkit, and there has been a significant increase in the use of learning technologies in classrooms in recent years (John & Wheeler, 2008). However, several technologies have been viewed as undesirable when viewed in a formal education context. Such devices, including Nintendo game consoles (Wii and DS), mobile phones and iPod Touches can be identified as ‘child-friendly’ technologies, because they are fun and culturally relevant to children, yet they are perceived as either troublesome, or having little relevance in a formal education setting. Teachers often use technology to support their own teaching, but may often fail to see the relevance of child-friendly tools as a means to support children’s learning. Further, many schools have banned the use of such devices due to a perceived threat of misuse and abuse.

In this paper, we contend that child-friendly technologies should be considered as serious learning tools in the formal learning environment of the primary classroom. Several previous studies have established that handheld and mobile technologies have relevance in formal education to encourage collaborative and project based learning (Norris & Soloway, 2004) especially when coupled with social media (So et al, 2009). Such studies reveal that children collaborate more freely, engage more readily and enjoy learning more.

Our study initially involved identifying the range of child-friendly technologies available, and then theorising how the most popular devices might be successfully embedded into the Primary classroom. This was achieved by delivering the same lesson to two groups of children, once using the child-friendly technologies, and once using no supporting technology. We hypothesise that children will engage more with learning when they are able to access technologies they are comfortable and familiar with. We will reveal our results from this study during the presentation.

References
John, P. D. and Wheeler, S. (2008) The Digital Classroom: Harnessing the power of technology for the future of learning and teaching. London: Routledge/David Falmer.
Norris, C. and Soloway, E. (2004) Envisioning the Hand-Held Centric Classroom. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 30 (4), 281-294.
So, H-J., Seow, P. and Looi, C. K. (2009) Location matter: leveraging knowledge building with mobile devices and Web 2.0 technology. Interactive Learning Environments, 17 (4), 367-382.


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Noughties ... but nice

The first decade of the 21st Century was highly significant for personal learning. Such a vast array of new personal devices and web applications was introduced that have become so deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, many of us would probably feel at a loss if we were suddenly transported back to 1999. If we time jumped from then to 2009, the way we now communicate, learn, search for information, share content and consume entertainment would be unrecognisable. The concept of personal learning environments was also introduced, as a counterpoint to the notion of the VLE. Here are just a few of the personal technological innovations (good or bad) that emerged in the noughties:

Mobile ringtones: OK.... perhaps we could do without ringtones. Those irritating little tunes you hear on the train, in the supermarket queue and even interrupting performances in the theatre have actually grossed over £112 million in sales in the UK alone, and they ain't finished yet. As the next generation of mobile users comes of age, they too will demand that their favourite tunes be made into ringtones. The music industry must be rubbing its hands with glee.

iPods and Podcasts: The Touch, the Nano, the Shuffle, the Classic, you name it, versions of the iPod popped up and grabbed our attention in the noughties. First appearing in 2001, the iPod series is now the most successful digital audio player in history with over 220 million worldwide sales at the time of writing.

The Nintendo DS (Dual Screen) appeared in 2004 and was one of the first handheld games consoles with a built in microphone and wireless connectivity. The dual screen technology was not as smart as we first thought, but never the less, it's a great little device to amuse yourself with for a few hours whilst waiting for a train, on the bus, or in the dentist's chair (eew).

The iPhone: Apple strikes again. For most people who have them they are the best thing since sliced bread. But there are those who absolutely hate this smart, touch surface mobile phone. Battery life sucks, the camera on the first series was naff and they are expensive when you are locked into an O2 contract. But they have revolutionised mobile phones with their pinch gesturing and responsive multi-touch screens, and with several copycat devices available, there really is no going back now.

Social networking sites: Facebook (2006), Myspace (2003), Bebo (2005), LinkedIn (2003) and other sites together have changed the face of social networking for ever. For good or bad, millions of users worldwide flock every day to their favourite social networking sites for their daily fix of pokes, foodfights, online games status updates and live chat. Friends and friends of friends - the race is on to see who can collect the most links to people they will never ever meet. Seriously, social networking has blurred the boundaries between public and private, business and leisure, even good and bad taste. The way you manage your on-line identity is more important than ever. Nothing it seems, is 'yours' anymore - once you have posted personal information or photos to Facebook, they are no longer simply 'your property'. They are there forever, and burying the past may prove to be a problem for many...

YouTube: Freaking out, spoofing, parodies, pirated music videos and plenty of dross - that's YouTube for you. Before Youtube it was very difficult to upload your video clips to the Internet. Youtube made it easy for millions. If you want to know a fact you Google it, but if you want to see a clip, you YouTube it.

Nintendo Wii: This small object of desire appeared in November 2006. If we were cynical, we could surmise that Nintendo worked out if all their games playing customers continued to sit on their backsides, they would get fat and die of heart attacks. So they invented an active sports style handset to get games players up and moving about, thus keeping them alive longer so they could earn more money and spend it on Nintendo games and Wii technology. Clever.

Wikipedia: Created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has grown rapidly to become one of the largest reference web sites, attracting approximately 65 million visitors each month. It's the first stop students make when they need to know something, and also the most vilified reference source for many scholars and academics. Where else would most of us go though, for quick information.

Google apps: Streetview, Scholar, Google Earth, Docs, etc - all of these applications appeared in the last decade, and have revolutionised the way we learn, work together, look up information and generally play out our online lives. Augmented reality was introduced as a result of the combination of a number of smart device apps including mashups, global positioning and touch screen technologies. The coming decade will see smart devices, augmented reality and haptic semantic applications coming of age. We will then see how these can be applied to enhance and extend the personal learning environment.

...and of course.... there was Twitter: Forget all the celebrity rubbish and media hype. Twitter is one of the best stripped down social networking tools available to humankind. Don't be deceived by it's simplistic appearance though. It's a powerful tool with plenty of filtering capability and its amplification and connection potential is yet to be fully tapped. Twitter and its third party bolt-on tools will be one to watch in the next few years.

So what are we to make of this truly technological ten years? We have seen radical shifts in our views of identity, relationships, copyright, communication and learning. These are deep changes that will not be recinded, and as we move into an ever more connected society, the changes will increase in their pace and intensity. Personalised learning has never been so easy to establish, and never more contentious. No-one can quite agree on what a personal learning environment is, but that is predictable, because for each of us, it is something different. And what of the future? We don't know what the next decade will hold, but we do know this - it will be increasingly connected. It will also be different - probably more different than we can begin to imagine.

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All in hand

I have just returned from another excellent Handheld Learning conference in London. Because it was a conference focused on handheld technologies, I promised I would do an experiment and see if I could survive for three days without a laptop, and using only my newly acquired iPod Touch. Well, I survived, and some things worked, whilst other things were a little more problematic (the wifi service was second to none, by the way - congratulations to Graham Brown-Martin - pictured - and his team for this).

For example, I was able to Tweet live from the event, firstly with the standard Twitter application on my Safari web browser. A bright young thing then introduced me to EchoFon which I downloaded for free from the iPod App Store. This made my life a lot easier, and I was able to see more clearly what I was tweeting, who was responding to me, and I could also more easily reply, DM and RT other people's tweets. EchoFon used to be known as TwitterFon, and it's designed for mobile phone use, so it was ideal for the task.

Less easy was updating my blog which I found quite difficult. For some reason, Safari would not allow me to modify text once it was saved on Blogger. Not sure why that was, but James Clay showed me how to e-mail direct to my blog, including the posting of images as attachments, which I will try when I can pluck up enough courage.

I was also able to respond to e-mails until someone sent me 13 MB of pictures which clogged my university e-mail inbox, and then I couldn't send or receive anything. I would normally save the pictures onto my laptop, but of course, with only my iPod Touch this wasn't possible. Unless, of course, someone out there knows differently.

My hashtagging wasn't being picked up by the conference feed or Twitter either - someone told me that Echofon has some problems here, but I think there may be a more deep seated problem than that, and I'm sure someone out there has a solution...?

It was an interesting experiment to conduct, and I will do it again for other conferences. It was wonderful to not have to lug my laptop across airport lounges and drag it across London. Oh, what liberty, but at a small price of reduced functionality. More from the conference when I get some time to reflect and post my comments.

Wiimote control

Yesterday, in the technology section of BBC Breakfast, I watched as Rory Cellan-Jones talked to Bill Gates at a Las Vegas Techno-Fair. Gates (of Hell) was demonstrating a new, and sickenly clever table top touch screen computer, the 'Microsoft Surface' which he confidently claims, millions of punters will have bought over the next 5 years. He's probably right, I thought, and there goes a few billion more dollars into Mr Gate's already obscenely bulging trouser pockets (priced at around $10,000 a piece, it wouldn't be long...)

Then, lo and behold, the angel of heaven descended, and brought us great tidings of joy (I know, I know ..... that was last month...). A wizz kid called Jimmy Chung Lee has just created a hardware hack on... wait for it... the Nintendo Wii. Using nothing more than a few simple ballpoint pens, he replaced the guts with Infra Red lights. Because the Wii works by tracking IR lights, any surface, whether a projector screen, an LCD screen, or even a coffee table top can be turned into a multi-touch screen similar to the iPod Touch or Microsoft Surface. And what's more, the software can be downloaded for free. Hooray! So is that hard cheese for Microsoft? Wii hope so....