Archive for July, 2008
I’ve spent the day locked in a hotel room trashing out a draft chapter looking at new technologies and their impact on organisations and individuals. The rather grandeous introduction sets the scene.
The central focus of this chapter is a critique of the impact and future implications of new technologies on different aspects of educational systems – the people, organisational structures and processes, and learning and teaching practice. The strong title of this chapter ‘stepping over the edge’ is used to indicate that we are poised on the threshold of major change in education. I will argue that the implications of new technologies – social networking tools, mobile and smart devices, the drive towards near ubiquitous access - are profound and that they will impact on all aspects of educational institutions. These are exciting, but challenging times - the decisions we make as institutions and as individuals within the next few years will have far reaching consequences.
I conclude by putting forward two suggestions for making sense of the complexity.
Having outlined the inherent characteristics of new technologies and discussed the implications for institutions I now want to provide some suggestions of how we might tackle this complexity. I will provide two suggestions from current research and literature: using learning design as a means of guiding teacher practice, and using the notion of metaphors and other methods of meaning making to provide different lenses on the digital landscape and help users navigate through this space. These case studies address specific issues in an educational context. Firstly, how can we design for this new environment, to create pedagogical effective learning activities for our students which met their needs and which harness the affordances of the new technologies? Secondly how can we navigate the complex digital landscape and make sense of the space, how can we represent it and use different metaphors to describe different aspects of the activities occurring?
The draft chapter, riddled no doubt with errors, is available here. Would welcome thoughts!
Wow it’s weird reading someone else’s interpretation of what you say! Just accidently come across an article in Information World Review, which is the result of an interview I did back in May on how I got into blogging. The interview was bizarre as it took place on my mobile in the car haring up the M1 to catch a flight with my partner sniggering at all the silly or pompous things I was saying!! Now that’s the mobile, digital world for you!
An video version of the talk I recently gave at the Eduserv Foundation Symposium is now available. Thankfully from my point of view it’s mainly audio plus slides rather than video! In the talk I focussed on some ideas I am working on in terms of developing new models/ways of thinking about new technologies - very much “work in progress” but would really welcome people’s thoughts on this.
Interesting article on the difference between web 1.0 and 2.0 via John Naughton
There has been lots of discussion here at the conference about Twitter and the Edmedia twitter stream and tweme seem to be working well. But it’s fair to say that not everyone can see the point; as with other tools I think there is an element of personal preference but it’s also that people need to see the benefit to them in terms of how using a new tool will make a difference to their own practice. I was explaining before my session what Twitter was and how it could be used and I could see that some people could immediately see the value, whilst others were probably thinking ‘Oh no not another thing…’ Given this, it was very timely to see that Andy Ramsden has just tweeted (of course how else would he do it? ;-)) about the survey they have just done about Twitter - it’s available here.