Glen's Blog

I have to agree with George Siemens that the systems and structures of existing educational institutions will need to be radically changed before any real innovation is seen. Having worked in a tertiary organisation I know from experience that the existing structures in these organisations act as a massive brake on any form of change or innovation - particulary if it is to do with the dirty words teaching and learning. The only way of seeing any real innovation in your average University would be to first of all change the entire structure of the organisation. George points to a good example of such systematic change in the corporate sector at Cisco.

A summary of a sesssion by Scott Wilson on how institutional processes can better support flexible learning (including comments from my CORE Ed collegue Richard Millwood in the embedded video). Tertiary institutions, particularly Universities, need to be seriously looking at this subject.

My wife is currently studying at a local University, that shall remain nameless, and is enrolled in a course that is advertised as a ‘Flexible delivery option’. It is about as flexible as lump of 2×4 - it lacks flexibility in almost every aspect, from the fact that they demand you attend courses from 8:30am in the morning to 5pm several days a month, to the heavily  prescribed content and ‘write the answers we want to hear, not what you think’ uncreative essay assessments.

Another Ken Robinson video (this has since been taken offline - trying to track down another copy), thanks to Jedd for this link.  Similar thoughts to his TEDTalks video, but still worth a watch. I like his thoughts about moving from an industrial form of education back to one based on agricultural principles. Also, some good thoughts about the possible negative effect of standardised testing on the divergent thinking ability of children - perhaps somebody should recommend a visit from Sir Ken to the National Party.

Update 18/12/08 - The video was removed, but there is a note at the following address to say highlights will be posted soon - a shame as it was a worthwhile watch in its entirity.

http://imm.specialistschools.org.uk/NatConfNew/at_the_event/keynote_videos.aspx

Being a technology focused company, and also being mostly mac based, we have decided that despite the costs it is worthwhile evaluating the iPhone for wider adoption within our organisation. We are currenly evaluating the devices at two levels:

1. Is there any tangible return on investment to the organisation in terms of employee productivity? Currently our staff mobile phone handsets cost us nothing on a 24 month contract, and we have no data plans. The iPhones will cost us a minimum of $400 per handset on a 24 month contract + a minimum $30 per month for a 200MB data plan. This means that over a two year period each phone costs us $1,120. To roll out iphones to our 50 employees would cost us $28,000 per annum more than we currently pay for moblile phones. We will want to see some significant benefits to justify this level of extra expenditure.
2. Are there any educational  applications of this type of device. How could the iPhone be used to improve teaching and learning? On this side of things it is easier to justify at least a small number of iphones for ‘research’ purposes without the need for any hard and fast ROI data. However there are still some questions to be asked about how much educational potential the iPhone really does have over and above the likes of the iPod Touch, which is a much cheaper option.

I will post more details as our evaluation continues.

A useful article at Open Education - 21st Century Schools - Pedagogy Must Give Way to Andragogy. Nothing new as far as the need to move to a learner centred approach is concerned, but a useful way of framing the arguments for it. But I think a different word is needed - Andragogy always sounds like something unlawful to me

I just recently set up a twitter feed for the Ulearn08 conference currently happening in Christchurch. I looked at a few options for doing this:

• Have people follow a ulearn08 twitter account and then follow everyone that chose to follow this account. The problem with this is the tedious job of monitoring who was following that account and then getting that account to follow them. Also, this would pick up all their tweets, not just conference related ones.

• Use the hashtags bot - only trouble is this seems to have been broken back in June some time.
• Have people enter #ulearn08 on all conference tweets and then get the rss feed of a twitter search for the this string. This worked ok, but the rss feed does not provide links to the user photos, and I didn’t have time to mess around with the twitter api to get this.
• Same as above option but screen scrap the search results page and then wrap a ulearn header around it. I went with this option as it was quick and easy and provided the user photos with each tweet which made the page much nicer than straight text. I used the simple_html_dom php class to pull the search results div out of the page.

Things that would be nice to do for the next conference given a bit more time:

• Have the page refresh with an ajax call in the background rather than with a meta refresh.
• Get the links to show conversation threads in the search results working. These are being stripped out with a regex at the moment as the screen scrapping broke the relative links in the ajax calls.

The current Ulearn08 page is here.

I have spent a bit of time trying to get the video podcast feed sorted for our new EDtalks service. Getting the RSS feed for phpmotion modified to include the enclosure element was reasonably straight forward, but finding the best format for the mp4 files has taken a bit of time. We wanted an mp4 format that would be reasonable quality, good file size, be ipod compatible, and would also provide reasonable quality flv files when converted through ffmpeg by phpmotion. In the end the following settings are what we are using to export the files from Final Cut:

And here is the flv version of a video with these settings:

and a downloadable mp4 version.

I have been busy helping set up a new video resource for educators - EDtalks - this is not another YouTube/TeacherTube clone where educators can upload their own content, but rather a free database of short video interviews with leading educators and thinkers that have been produced by Core Education.

It is based on the open source platform phpMotion which was relatively easy to install and modify. If I can convince my copy of Wordpress that I can be trusted to embed video I will add a sample video here …..