FOTE 11 – future of technology in education
| October 7, 2011 | Posted by Brian Lake under Conferences, Featured |
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Hello everyone,
We’ll be blogging from London today for the annual FOTE conference – future of technology in education. This is an annual event that attracts 350 elearning experts from around the UK. It is an excellent opportunity to share best practice and learn about what other colleges and universities are doing well, and how we can improve.
As usual, my notes will get taken here, along with a few videos and photos. Please leave comments or feedback.
We’ll also be talking with echo 360 – our lecture capture provider and the driving force behind our 509 room. We’ve now enabled the Moodle interface for lecture recording, so this year we hope to move beyond our one room pilot. Perfecting the technology will be key in doing that. We will be enabling HD recording and viewing lectures by mobile devices (iPad, phones) from the mid term break.
Opening Session
ULCC – Richard Macabee, director ULCC.
ULCC is now hosting over 1 million student users. Also announced a partnership with Echo 360.
jan Martin Lowendhal – the CIO and the future of education
How do you manage the flood of services and make the technology useful for education?
Organisation centricity vs people centricity
- how does the death of distance affect learning technology?
- we have to ask ourselves, who has control of the means of production and distribution?
- obvious connection to marx here – but a different revolution this time.
- “what are the things I shouldn’t fiddle with?” – what software is necessary and what is so general that is should be outsourced?
- email is a good example – google and Microsoft give email away to education for free, so why have it internally?
- if I don’t give a service quickly enough, they’ll go to the cloud and get what they want themselves.
What you have is a situation in which staff can now afford to go buy what they need themselves. Might not be perfect, but there is a chance that the tech savvy can do it faster then you can build it from scratch.
- so what does a CIO do? How can you change the processes of the institution
- there is a role – when microsourcing you reduce the possibility for collaboration – you reduce th possibility for collaboration.
So we have a “hype cycle”
- we hit the peak of expectations
- then we have a crash when it turns out what we have is not perfect.
- bring us to the trough of disillusionment
- and we recover to about 20 percent of our initial goals.
And there are key trends
- communication
- sourcing – cloud
- standards – education, technical
Cloud sourcing for items like email is already more than 50 per cent of all email services at UK education institutions.
Nick Skelton – pervasive media and education
What do games do for us?
Games encourage the behaviour we want. Hence the card game we have today – everyone has a playing card, and the goal I to ask “are you Thursday” – I’ll post a photo of the rules in a bit.
Te point of this game is not to use tech, but to get practitioners work with technologists – to make memories that stay with people.
Education is important, but so are all the other thing that take place. If we get our of our technical bubble and interact with other areas, we an create powerful and meaningful experiences.
Bristol uni is just starting to dabble in this, but there is potential in games, and it creates opportunities for learning through social means.
The best idea in this session was the “send yourself a letter” – you write yourself a letter – something you want to tell yourself in six months, six years, whatever. You swap letter with a partner – they send it. A great way to connect to others.
Cailean Hargrave
How can you use analytics to improve student retention?
The idea is to use data modelling to make feedback available to lecturers – let them identify behaviour and attendance patterns that allow them to direct attention to student that need it. IBM has some background here.
As it happens, these predictive analytics allow you to identify problems in student success and address patterns before you lose the student. We have these systems, but it’s difficult to make sure the right people (teachers) see it.
Edinburgh Telford college.
- visual dashboards
- quick reference for predictive analytics
- highlighting attendance issues to staff and students.
The good news is that Guildford College will have this capability as well. It is now built into Moodle and will be implemented for the end of the year as part of our ILP solution.
Birmingham metropolitan college is working on a similar project in concert with IBM. They are working to predict student failure, and pre-empt it.
What if you could text, or Facebook message and let the student know that we know they are having difficulty and there are resources to help. Why if you could remove that burden from teachers?
What if you could identify who needs help straight away based on regional statistics amongst student coming in?
Call to action – IBM.com/smartplanet/analytics
COFFEE!!!
Ahhhhh….
Flipping naked – 140 seconds to tell us your vision of learning
Andrew Stewart
Technology in education is bleak
1. We don’t yet understand what education is
2. We play constant catchup
Debate this, online at purpose.org.uk
Educational adoption of mobile tech vs mainstream tech adoption.
- this is a bit of a depressing graph
- we never get to systemic adoption
John Bernard – BBC
future of tech is mobile
- BBC learning have noticed growth in UK secondary students accessing bite size elearning service.
- 1.2 million
- 40 percent mobile uptake in sub Saharan Africa
- the rise of mobile learning time and place shifts learning
- becomes bite size, or pocket sized.
- micro learning – can be triggered at any time.
- mobile learning is social. Mobiles are already being used for social purposes.
Michelle Hoyle
Gaming and online activity
- World of Warcraft
- more of an even gender balance than you’d think
- how is it related to HE?
- many of the same social issues, diplomacy, and social interaction.
- useful learning opportunities
Paul Johnson
- mobile device as future of elearning
- repositories for research data
- created an object store for android, iPhone, and iPad
Last session – Janet UK
The future is with the user
- they bring their own device
- they choose what they access or what they do
- financial background also applies – they pay fees, students are customers now.
- Janet provides this service, it should be there and invisible. Much like janet is to 18 million users
Panel discussion
Universities don’t know what students want.
So what do they want?
Best points from the panel:
- why is it we only say we need to provide good services now that students are paying £9000
- didn’t we always have to provide good service?
- it is insanity to have IT security or usage committee that don’t have students on them
- there will never be enough student PCs to satisfy everyone.
- they want to know it works on their device, that there are no problems
- making them aware that using your private device on an education network has implications
What about the students who can’t be bothered to bring the tech with them?
- security issues
- lugging around laptops
- didn’t know they can access materials via the cloud.
- this is a communication issue. Will the student be bothered to come see the IT team?
I ask a question – what about BYODB – bring your own device bias? Should we concentrate on specific majority devices to extract value or be more agnostic and accept a lower common denominator for functionality?
Top tips
- the needs for students need to be embedded in a while bunch of other strategies
- learning and estates strategies
- governance: how change is introduced and managed
- engagement with the student body
afternoon session James Clay
How often do you hear “it’s really nice when the students aren’t here”
- students are dangerous
- they bring in untested devices!
- they may not pay fees!
- they are a health and safety threat!
- they plug in their own devices!
- they unplug computers!
STUDENTS ARE A THREAT!!!
We need to change the culture of our organisation – we still see students as dangerous and a threat.
PEOPLE DO NOT LIKE CHANGE
How can we label students a voice to be heard?
GET RID OF THE LEARNERS
- no Id badges
- no security issues
silos
- political inertia
- little kingdoms
- we’ve always done it this way
September is the busiest time of the year
- it happens every year!
- why do we not change?
BECAUSE OF POLITICS AND INERTIA
do learners know what they need?
- no, if they knew everything, they wouldn’t be learners
- we should listen but they do not necessarily know what they want
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A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them – Steve Jobs.
Not: what do you want
Try: what do you want to do?
Librarians have a tendency to solve problems by putting up a sign. James put up a sign that said “no swimming” and it’s not been a problem since!
Don’t be led by learners, but be informed.
The key for James is that we often let politics get in the way and forget our students. We forget where our bread and butter comes from.
Emily Nash – student representative, NUS
Charter on technology in higher education
Problems
- cost
- hesitancy in adopting new technologies.
Students want to contribute to the agenda. The demographics of students tend to be changing. The student experience is more central than ever in the face of education reforms.
NUS think that more needs to be invested in communications technology and has been conducing research to find out more.
- hard for students to understand
- students complain a lot about the environment, but the emphasis should not be on them to come up with solutions
- NUS has a charter on technology in higher education.
1. Institutions should have an ICT strategy
2. Institutions should invest in staff development and effective us of technologies should be recognised and shared.
2. Staff and students should be holistically trained. Regular training and support should be available
3. Technology jaws should be accessible to all.
4. Innovative us of digital technology should be supported by the curriculum development process.
5. Administration should be more accessible through the technology
6. Institutions should highlight link between technology and employability
7. Infrastructure needs to be in place
Talk to your academic VP – a good place to start.
JISC Moodlefest, Guildford College, July 20
| July 20, 2011 | Conferences, Featured |
Hello all, Writing from home today, Guildford College! We are hosting Moodle Fest 2011 on behalf of JISC. All sessions will be recorded today, so they’ll be available from here soon. Update: videos available here: http://bit.ly/moodlefest1 http://bit.ly/moodlefest2 The first session is myself. I gave a brief overview of our transition to Moodle from Blackboard and…
iPad mobile event: George Abbot School, Surrey
| June 23, 2011 | Conferences, Featured, iphone, Mobile Learning |
Hello all! Blogging from George Abbot school today. We’ll be looking at the use of iPads in education and deployment via our mobile learning forum Session is being run today by Simon Birch – Solutions Inc Apple reseller. They do a fair bit of apple sales in the education sector. Simon is focused on teaching…
LSN-LRI Technology for learning workshop, Cambridge College
| June 15, 2011 | Conferences, Featured |
Good morning all, I’ll be blogging from the Cambridge LSN-LRI technology for learning workshop today. I’ll be giving highlights from each session, and videoing a session or two for those who have expressed interest in particular sessions, especially ILP. As a starting point, it is worth nothing that several other colleges in attendance are using…
MoodleMoot 2011 – day 2
| April 20, 2011 | Conferences, Featured |
Hello all – day two of Moodlemoot UK. Open university of Israel. Interesting item on the “scroll of death” – Moodle courses tend to be flat – if it is extensive, it tend to go on, and on, and on. They’ve used collapsible content items to address this. New activities Files activities video record activity…
Blogging from MoodleMoot 2011
| April 19, 2011 | Posted by Brian Lake under Conferences, Featured |
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Hi all,
Blogging from MoodleMoot 2011 today. Morning session covered a fair amount about data migration and Sharepoint integration for portals. 
Current presentation is from Ross Mackenzie – open university
Moving the open University to Moodle 2.0
- Clear visual difference between Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 was desired to help you know where you are.
- 69% apple and 22% android mobile traffic.
- how to handle this traffic? App or mobile web?
Feedback is around using browser-based renders. as a result they’ve co concentrated on theme based web pages.
OU is going down the path of making the whole course available via a mobile device.
June 13 – OU hosting session for people dealing with issues surrounding Moodle 2.0. Good opportunity for technical and non-technical alike.
Moodle 2.1 will introduce changes to quizzes – rather substantial.
Poor connection today -will go into more substantial detail tomorrow.
Final session:Moot UK 11 “unconference” report
This session is more oriented towards Moodle development community and the usefulness of developer meetings in solving common problems. Some points:
- The value of local developers – having people who know Moodle in-house is valuable. Complete outsourcing can leave you feeling a little helpless.
- Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Lessons learned:
- Listen to student needs
- Deliver when they want and give it to them immediately
- Avoid what they dislike
Seems obvious, but you’d be surprised.
Wifi will be improved tomorrow 300 of us in attendance and 720 devices trying to register.
And onto last event of the day.
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4:00pm, Frank McLoughlin CBE, Principal City and Islington College.
Presentation: Its the culture stupid!
Reflections on where FE/HE is going.
- It is a transformed sector
- 1993 – report “levels of non-completion is a substantial waste of a national resource”
- Moving on to now : success and retention rates multiplied outwards.
- 59 percent to 79 percent retention over 8 years . We are now doing substantially better – about 90 percent achievement/retention. Low drop off rate.
- City and Islington graded outstanding in every measure
- Queen’s anniversary prize – the only college to win it twice.
The loss of the EMA has been catastrophic – we, ‘re back in a situation where coming to College will get much harder. People in the middle class don’t have to worry about working or out of school responsibilities – EMA recipients were able to equalise.
In 2012, students will have to take out a loan in order to do access courses. You’ll have to take out a loan before you take out a uni loan. Hard times ahead.
The point here is that the quality of the student cannot exceed the quality of the education. It is the culture of learning and teaching that defines the type o students that will be created.
What were the terms and values associated with FE? :Aspiration, excellence, social justice, communication, empowerment, performance.
Is about engaging people with what we’re trying to do. If people aren’t engage, there’s no point. Its about the extra voluntary work people put into a job they believe in. As a principal he’s been in a position to tell people that they should move on – not to sack them but to say, “your cynicism is causing rot inside – life is too short, find something to do that you love!” Pretty frank, but very h0nest.
Coaching: You’re not born a good teacher. Working with teacher is not about pinning them to the wall, its about working with them to make them better players. In some cases, its only working with other teachers that gets you through the process of becoming a teacher.
So how have we changes the culture over the years to encourage this?
- Build a framework for reflection and dialogue
Peer and join observation, sharing best practice,systemic self assessment.
The idea of teacher observation as a form of management is mad. Its not about that. Lecturers are not teachers – intensive training of teachers is a vital part of improvement.
They don’t call it the Quality Unit – they call it the “Teaching and learning Unit” – because thats what its about.
A question posed – what does outstanding teaching look like?
We avoid punishment – instead follow up with coaching of teachers. There isn’t an instance where this has not worked.
Training on innovation – in total, not just in the “e” bit.
NLNN – millions put into wonderful learning objects that came to no use whatsoever.
Useful features – your attendance – part of the Individual Learning Plan.
The ILP lets you have a two way conversation – the student can see where they need to work and they are assessed on an ongoing basis. The idea is to start getting them to manage their own learning.
Does this work?
For City College 93 per cent would recommend it to a friend. 80 per cent agree that continuous improvement is part of the college.
He is the principal and chief exec, but he does not use the latter term – he’s a teacher in an admin role. If he wanted to be an exec he could have gone into private industry. College is not like that – the dynamic is different.
Lessons
- Give power away – particularly to the learner
- High expectation curriculum and offer with parity of esteem between the education pathways
- Develop employability skills
- strong links with employers and jobs and a work related cirriculum.
- Innovate, but be aware of boy and girls with toys – don’t rely on a technological fix . The toys help, but in the end its about the teaching and learning.
- 40 per cent of kids in Islington are not going to work/schoool. Some people are third generation unemployed.
- There is a real isuse around employability and getting local people into jobs.
Presenting Moodle to the Curriculum Manager’s Meeting
| March 7, 2011 | Posted by Brian Lake under Featured, Learning Technologies, Mobile Learning, Web Services Blog |
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I presented the results of our Strategic VLE review recently, the result of several months of research and effort. We concluded that Moodle offered the best means of taking the mission of the College forward, combining the great work being done by teachers with an easy to use and well supported learning resource.
Some of the topic covered in the presentation include why we recommended the move to Moodle, who else is using it, how it will improve teaching and learning and Guildford, and the proposed schedule for implementation.
For those with an interest, the report is available. As teachers, learners, and support staff, we welcome your feedback. You can also view the presentation below:
Blogging from JISC Havant Moodle Forum
| February 9, 2011 | Posted by Brian Lake under Conferences, Featured, Mobile Learning |
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Morning all. Blogging from Havant College today on Moodle. JISC hosts these forums regularly and we like to get out to see how others are implementing Moodle, and what issues they have to address.
10am – the moring starts with students talking about their experience of Moodle. Forums are a popular tool with students, especially geography forums.
The students say they used to be a bit shy about posting, but as exams came on they started posting links that the teacher encouraged. They have a habit of putting video links on the forums to illustrate concepts (like in this case, volcano). It saves the trouble of trolling through the Internet for materials – its more of a shared effort.
Student Union – difficult to get students motivated . Publicising events is important. Posting a blurb on Moodle gets it emailed out to everyone – which is a real strength of Moodle.
Thats a snapshot of how Hants does Moodle.
Question: How do you motivate the staff?
Ans: 500 per cent increase in the past 5 months. They’ve made it easy. Moodle vouchers to help with 1:1 sessions and workshops. Workshops at the beginning was fine, but now they do “speed moodle” -10-15 mins on how to do simple tasks. How to create quizzes for example.
New strategy is speed and impact.
This leads to the students asking “why isn’t it on Moodle?”
10:20 – we’ve moved onto a tour of Havant’s Moodle.
They use it a little like a portal, but they do group together courses and present information to students who may be interested in the next course/level – A2 and AS for instance.
The use of Moodle in this case is pretty typical. Information such as trip info, exam papers, and so on are typically put onto Moodle – it just makes it easier.
Quizzes: Hot potatoes is used. Gradebook works well and is used quite a lot.
Read reciepts for forum posts allows them to tell how popular individual posts and topics are amongst students. Polling has also been very popular with students. Took half an hour to install the necessary plugin. Very simple and part of the standard moodle plugin site.
Good question – is there a seprate student Intranet? Ans: no – this is the Intranet. What they’re doing is using the My Moodle page to push certain information. The problem the questioner had is that for him the portal, the VLE and the work calendar are separate, and there is no way to coordinate them.
They do want to make more use of the calendar, as it is very flexible in how it can set events – either at user, course, programme or site level.
It does raise the interesting question of if using Moodle as an Intranet is a useful idea. I’m a bit mixed on this. Moodle is useful as a VLE, but it appears they’ve adapted Moodle to serve the purposes of an Intranet. As he puts it, its a bit of a mish-mash and a dumping ground. I’d prefer a bit more structure. They still use the college network for things like HR documents and confidential materials – in this case more security is needed.
Lesson here is that Moodle has been very well recieved as a learning and teaching tool for staff and students, but its value as an Intranet is less well defined and the implementation needs work.
11am:Southampton Solent Update/Showcase - Roger Emery, Southampton Solent University - online submission using Turnitin.
Solent is using a very clean and good looking Moodle VLE. Design does make a significant difference. They have moved to complete online submission of papers. They spent 3 years piloting Turnitin before making this leap. They use Moodle 1.98-1.99 at the moment.
They modified the turnitin plugin – its open source so you can do that. What they’ve done is move all the extra options to the advanced button – so you don’t see it by default and don’t get confused.
They’ve also developed a good approach to help. at the bottom of the page are notes, videos, and a help form. The help form lets you ask a question, but it also takes n0te of where you were, what you were doing, and emails your tutor as well as the support team. This is new, and exceptionally useful. I dno’t think anyone has thought of doing this sort of thing before.
Videos are used as well to good effect. They have professionally produced videos with a student demonstrating typical tasks such as assignment submisstion.
http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/ is the Moodle site for Solent University. It is exceptionally well done and a good model for what I’d like GC Moodle VLE to look like. The bulk of the talk is on Turnitin, but much more interesting is how they’ve laid out and organised their Moodle instance and a central portal. The seperation is very well done and student life and student learning are separate, but implemented very well indeed.
They’ve also got an excellent course in Moodle called Succeed@Solent: http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3257
11:30 – Planning towards Moodle 2.0 migration – John Potter, RSC South East
Themes, plugins and courses aren’t compatible. If your 1.9 is marginal 2.0 will be a bit of a push. They run their Moodle off virtual servers at Kent. Those servers are based on Sun Solaris virtual machines (I’ve some experience of their setup).
Filesystem repository must be enabled.
There is a lot of concern over database load and third party plugins. The database load is going to increase quite a lot. The question becomes – do I run it as a database centric install, or do I hold onto the moodle data directory?
A database-centric approach is a decent option, the question is if the single server is strong enough to keep up with it. A virtual server environment would be best though – it can scale to match performance. The question for us here is how much server capacity is required.
Viewing documents is an issue as well. Google docs integration has been extremely useful – no more requirements for Word or Powerpoint to be installed. But the setup is complicated.
The Open Univeristy is moving to Moodle 2.0 in 2 releases – the first in June. They’ve invested 4.5 million in Moodle and they’re pushing bug changes very quickly. This bodes well for anyone doing a 2010 launch.
The consensus is that its best to run Moodle in Virtual machines – the scaling is much much better.
Lunch!
1:15pm Parallel session 1: Open Forum – Round table showcasing/troubleshooting – facilitated by Artie Vossel-Newman
Parallel session 2: Havant College Moodle User Showcase – facilitated by John Illsley/Jayne Morris
Some discussion of how moodle integrates with MIS for student data . The data structure that they use is interesting. All courses are assigned to certain default groups. These groups and the course IDs are associated with the identifer in the MIS system.
Manual course enrollments are in the central group, but are kept separate. This works like data keys in Blackboard.
This leans a bit technical, but a good question just came up – how can you prove that the sysetm is doing well? How to you measure student or teacher usage?
The feedback has changed from “I wish my tutor used Moodle” to “I wish my tutor used Moodle as well as other tutors do.” The emphasis has changed from using Moodle to using Moodle well.
Moodle has proven useful for cases of student appeals – evidence showing when a student read a document, which one it was and what the student is using is becoming increasingly common at Solent Uni.
Nanogong is used for audio/language training at Hants. They use the script and the voice in the course to train, and submit an audio message. Works better when the mic is plugged in. You submit it as a message but pressing the record button, giving the message a title, and submit it like any other item. The teacher can then play it back.
The teacher can reply via a recording and place it next to the student’s audio submission. So the student can hear the correct pronunciation. Its reliant on Java, which is a bit of a shortcoming, but still a useful tool under evaluation. This has been a really useful exam tool. When they revise from home the teacher can help them out by giving feedback. The potential for distance learning for English as Second Language Students is quite good.
Two goals here:
1. Learn vocubulary in a fun way
2. Try and check their notes – how good are the notes they are taking?
Teacher checks, edits, and students can then go back and see the changes. If a student misses the class, they also get the vocabulary, which they would otherwise miss. This is done through a combination of Nanogong and the Moodle glossary tool.
The great thing is that this idea went from proposal to implementation in about half an hour. Installation was not complicated.
They have a Japanese course here, and Moodle is set to Japanese language mode for this teacher. Live videos and embedded videos. As a rule, you can set a course to the individual language you are working in.
Creative commons images used in Moodle are getting better and better – an increasingly valuable resource . They link through to the original image.
Useful forum discussion follows after this – knocked down some very interesting questions, and had an incredibly useful conversation with the guys from Solent – the ability to record a quick video from a webcam is exceptionally good. It can then be attached into your Moodle course as a personalised instruction from the teacher. Considering every laptop has a camera these days, this is a brilliant idea. We’ll be keeping an eye on this closely.
Finishing up closer to 3pm today. Q&A session on talking to MIS systems.
Very useful day – will inform Moodle strategy going forward.
Next Moodle meet will be a regional event. Maybe at Guildford? Worth talking about.
Blogging from BETT – London, Jan 2011
| January 17, 2011 | Posted by Brian Lake under Featured, Learning Technologies, Mobile Learning, Resources |
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Hi All,
Back to publishing here, and we’ve got some interesting tidbits from BETT 2011. I wasn’t expecting much from the show, so rather than lose time on projects I need to finish, I sauntered up on a Saturday for a look. I was in for a bit of a surprise. Last year, I was just getting started in the job. This year, a lot of my main goals have been accomplished – the VLE review is complete, the recording classroom is built (if not fully out of pilot just yet) and I’ve learned a lot.
There are still major issues though, including how much value we get for money on these projects, and can we do more for less? I’m really pleased to say the answer is “easily, yes”
Some highlights then. 
Telepresence: I’ve been looking into ways to connect our three campuses, and the cost associated with it is just astonishing. Its hypercar money. Obviously that isn’t going to happen in the current climate. So in steps Avermedia with this little number:
this is a H300 conferencing unit. You can get a H100 as well, but the 300 allows you to connect up to four sites at once. Its HD, records the session if you want, and is dead simple to initiate calls with. In essence its a sub £2k multi site conferencing solution with all the bells and whistles built in. I tried it out at BETT and we called up a camera set up at the Gherkin. Quality was excellent, even over a busy connection. Standards compliant, open, and can call anything. Its a show stopper. If the camera can be plugged into an Echo 360 unit, then life is good. We’ll see on that one.
Desks: As part of the learning-enhanced classroom project, I had a custom desk installed in a classroom and the equipment embedded into it. I didn’t have much choice according to my reseller, and I can’t say the final product
grabbed me. See left. Meh. It was remarkably expensive, overdue and I couldn’t vet it beforehand to make sure it suited. What I saw at delivery was what I got.
So what I found when I got to BETT was surprising: fully prepped lecterns! They’re done by an outfit called TOP-TEC. I was duly impressed at the embedded monitor arm, Crestron device point, and electronic switch for raising or lowering th
e unit (sit, stand – its all good). Better yet, they’ll laser engrave your college’s logo and light it accurately with led lighting. All good. Shame it costs a fortune right? Thats the kicker. It costs half what I paid a cabinet maker to do it for. They even showed me a price list on the spot and guaranteed 4 week delivery. You can slot a PC, an echo 360 unit and a conferencing unit in. If you want, you can have up to twelve 1u slots. All in a very attractive desk package. Did I mention you could choose your colour scheme from a variety pack? I can’t possibly imagine why I’d go through the pain of building another wooden, ergonomically suspect desk again.
Crestron touchpad controls: So not bad really, but the goal was to figure out telepresence, and reducing the cost of lecture recording classrooms by at least half. So onto the Crestron booth. The guys there were chatty and friendly, and they got the idea that I didn’t necessarily want a £2k unit for every single classroom. So they showed me the £300 one.
Its just like the £2k one – except it controls only 4 devices. I only have four devices in the current room! Thats not a faceplate in the pic to the left – its the full alternative to the 1u racked unit. Ethernet and control chips are embedded in the back. Seems that I was given the most expensive option first time around. Funny that. These are the entry level items – embedded controller and easy to mount. Push button interface if you want to switch between devices. However we have something more – a fully customised control program that we desig
ned in house. Will it work on this device? Oh yes it will! Works exactly the same – you just copy on the firmware and go. Which means you can also the graphical interface. This cost a 
pretty penny last time, but go figure – there’s a cheaper option there too. On the right you see the £700 graphic controller. push buttons are optional – I tend to remove them to keep things simple.
So what does this mean? We can now eliminate the remotes for the conferencing system. This means that you enter a room with one of these desks, touch the screen to star, and we add a button called “conference call” to the current selection. You then pick from pre-set locations and it automatically calls. You can zoom, hold, or conference in others – no need for a remote. Conferencing becomes dead easy.
So potentially we have professional, Guildford College branded teaching desks, with built in telepresence in some cases, lecture recording in others, and all containing a PC, DVD player and various bits safely locked in a height adjustable desk. All controlled through a simple touch pad on the top of the desk. Sounds terribly expensive right?
Some back of the napkin math drove it home for me. I could get the desk, the control system, and a telepresence/recording system. And I could do it for under £6k. Thats more than 2/3 cheaper than before. I’m astonished. To be fair, I’ve learned enough from the pilot project to know what to avoid, who to talk to and how to move the process along, but that’s why you do pilots.
So what did I get our of BETT? Well, we’ve found an inexpensive telepresence solution, a common means of cheaply eliminating remotes via our now-mature touchscreen software, and the ability to do a cutting edge learning-enhanced classroom for less than half of what we used to pay. Not a bad day out really.
All a bit technical in terms of chat, but there are learning objectives here that often get overlooked. The object is to have a simple, intuitive, and consistent user experience. Teachers don’t want to wrestle with equipment – they want to have a experience that frees them to teach, and teach well. The equipment should fade into the background. Hopefully, the tech we’ve found at BETT will let us do just that.
Blogging from appsworld
| November 30, 2010 | Posted by admin under Conferences, iphone, Learning Technologies, Mobile Learning, Web Services Blog |
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Hugh will be attending appsworld today to find out what’s new in app development. For more information on the event check out the apps world website, the blog or Twitter #appsworld.
PS I was intending to blog during the day but relied on the WordPress iPhone app. I created a post, saved it and published it – all fine, but when I came back to edit it, none of my changes were being saved.
The event was at London Olympia (Olympia 2), I attended the Developers Zone (free to attend) session on App design and creation. There was a good range of speakers from a wide range of companies.
All speakers spoke about the need to apps to be cross platform (Blackberry (big with 16-19 female teenagers), OVI (Nokia), iPhone and Android (getting bigger and bigger by the day). Interesting they said that the iPhone app store was not used a great deal for finding apps, word of mouth and advertising were most common methods. Interesting example about Angry Birds, it’s sold on iPhone/iPod for 59p but on Android its free (with ads), they can make more money this way. They have 6 million total sales on iPhone compared with 1 million sales on Android in one day – very big in Asia market. Grapple representative gave his views on developing apps saying don’t rely on top 100 model, try and get your app featured and stick to usual marketing methods.
Adobe gave a good presentation of software to help build mobile software, lots of things in common with Apple’s xcode, except it looks like all other Adobe products so should be easier to pick up. Adobe AIR enables developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® Professional software, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run standalone without the constraints of a browser. Adobe AIR is a development environment for the delivery of applications across devices and platforms. Support for Android™ BlackBerry™ Tablet OS and iOS* mobile operating system, and TVs is now available. (except the iPhone is not supported).
Adobe InMarket is a distribution service that lets you bring your applications to market, reach consumers, and make money. They are working with several store partners to provide the widest distribution possible for your applications across devices. You receive 70% of the sales revenue; Adobe and its partners take care of credit card processing, hosting, and marketing. InMarket makes it easy to publish and manage your applications across stores through a centralized portal.
Appcelerator was mentioned as an open source application development platform for creating native mobile, tablet and desktop application experiences using existing web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP.
There weren’t too many exhibitors, some big names, mainly small independents. The quality of the stands was quite basic, lots of nice comfy bean bags to sit though! There were a couple worth noting:
Appshed
Build a multiplatform app for just £475. This could all be done via a website. I had a demonstration, it looked quite good. You wouldn’t be able to edit the code but there was quite a range of tools to choose from.
Live Code (Runrev)
LiveCode empowers you to develop applications that run in any environment, using a fast and easy compile-free workflow.
mVenture
Online DIY App Builder for £45 per month. They specialise in developing iphone applications but can build apps for Blackberry, Windows, Symbian or Android platforms. Examples include an iPhone meeting planner for the conservative party conference, a windows mobile application that works in conjunction with another product to detect narcotics and explosives at airports and most recently, an iPhone app for sports including golf training and snowboarding.
But I’m not sure solutions like these will last term. They look good and will get better but will probably get bought out by the likes of Adobe and Co.
On the whole, a good event, mainly based on marketing, commercial app development and not educational content but mobile development it still in infancy.
Useful terms to research further (GetJar, Adobe Inmarket)
