Author Archives: admin_cetis

Hans Rosling inspires ALT-C with educational animations

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I’ve just listened to the opening keynote from ALT-C 2008 via Eluminate. Hans Rosling Professor of International Health from the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm gave an inspiring talk about the work his company Gapminder.org has done to animate and present world health data in order to increase our understanding of world trends in health and economic growth.

One of the animated graphs Hans presented plotted the number of children per woman against life expectancy. Looking over the last 50 years he demonstrated how countries like China and India had now caught up with OECD countries in terms of life expectancy. With lots of other examples Hans showed just how engaging, educational and entertaining learning through animation can be. He discussed the huge possibilities for using statistical data to create educational mash-ups.

The Eluminate experience was pretty good, although it took a few minutes to set up – the video and audio were clear – and it certainly gave a flavour of actually being in the lecture theatre.

Keynotes like this are (in my opinion) what ALT-C does best. Access to Hans’s talk is available via Eluminate http://conference-weblog.alt.ac.uk/alt_conference_weblog/remote-access-to-altc-200.html. The other conference keynotes by Itiel Dror (Cognitive neuroscience at Southampton) on Wednesday (1400-1500) and David Cavallo (One laptop per child) on Thursday (1210-1310) are also being broadcast via Eluminate, tune in if you can.

An OpenSocial Foundation

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Yesterday Google announced that it was:

joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property. This foundation, modeled after the community-led and industry-supported OpenID Foundation, will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity.

It has also launched opensocial.org, as a home for the developer community and the OpenSocial specifications.

http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2008/03/opensocial-foundation.html

via OLDaily

Horizon Report 2008 the emergence of mobile broadband and social operating systems

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Once again the New Media Consortium and EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative consider key emerging technologies in their annual Horizon Report.

Predictions include the increasing use of mobile broadband. The report estimates that over the next two to three years :

“Mobile broadband, fully-featured internet, touch screen interfaces, remotely upgradable software, and high-quality displays will become as common as cameras are today”.

Also highlighted is the emergence of innovative data mash-ups which

“Help us reach new conclusions or discern new relationships by uniting large amounts of data in a manageable way”

On the further horizon (four to five years) are developments in collective intellenge and social operating systems which will further harness the power of the crowd:

“The first social
operating system tools, only just emerging now, understand who we know, how we know them, and how deep
our relationships actually are.”

This report also contains a look back at the last 5 years and reflects on how accurate their predictions have been. Seven metatrends are identified:

“These seven metatrends include the evolving
approaches to communication between humans
and machines; the collective sharing and generation
of knowledge; computing in three dimensions;
connecting people via the network; games as
pedagogical platforms; the shifting of content
production to users; and the evolution of a ubiquitous
platform.”

My Space – study group glue?

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In the latest issue of the ALT newsletter Mike Thelwall looks at students’ use of social networking sites and considers how students are using these sites. He observes that while students may not be using My Space to hold academic discussions, many are using social networking for “organising their offline meetings and group work”.

Mike discusses ways in which tutors could encourage students to use social networking sites to create online study groups for their courses.

Martin Weller:The VLE/LMS is dead

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Martin lays out his argument as to why the age of the VLE is passing in his blog:

http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/11/the-vlelms-is-d.html

He suggests some good new tools for creating a loosely coupled environment for learners and teachers.

There also an interesting discussion emerging in the comments to the blog about whether institutions are ready to move into an age where systems and tools are more loosely coupled. I suspect the answer is that some are and some aren’t.

via Stephen Downes.

Jim Farmer: Faculty and publishers advance e-learning

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Writing in the ALT newsletter Jim Farmer charts the rise in the popularity of textbooks and accompanying supplementary material (e-learning content) amongst Faculty in the US.

Publishers are investing billions of dollars in developing these materials, an investment colleges and universities will not able to match – even if they work collectively.

Jim concludes:

Publishers have developed a business model to support a large investment in the development of course materials, have created a direct and productive relationship with faculty, and have focused on learning how students learn. This seems to be model where faculty, students, and publishers all benefit at least in the short term and in the absence of any more creative approach within higher education.

As always Jim illustrates his arguments with lots of thought provoking statistics. Well worth a read.

Heron island

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I’ve been playing about with my blog in the last two days and have realised that the rss feed only works for public postings. I’m afraid most of my posts will be for internal CETIS things because most of the things I want to say the world are published on e-learning Focus the web site Sarah Holyfield and I run for the JISC e-Learning programme.

The photo at the top is from Heron Island on the barrier reef, where we were lucky enough to spend a few days last August. One day I’m going back to see the baby turtles hatching…..