At the RSC we are regularly pointing out web based tools that can be used to enhance teaching and learning. A lot of sites and tools on the internet are available for free, some of them charge for an enhanced version with more features and facilities but for obvious reasons we try to focus on the free ones.

With the recent news that the social bookmarking site Delicious and the video communications tool Skype have just been sold to other organisations it’s important to look at what can happen to services on the web that we are relying on for day to day activities.
In the above cases we aren’t likely to see too much in the way of change in the near future, Yahoo are in the process of transferring Delicious to AVOS (set up by the founders of YouTube) and are currently asking Delicious users for permission to transfer their details to the new owners. AVOS haven’t revealed their plans for Delicious yet but they say it’ll be business as usual for a while as they work on enhancements for the service. For enhancements I read “finding a way to make money from the service”, something that Yahoo didn’t really manage to do. I don’t expect Delicious to become a subscription based service but I do think that some sort of link to advertising or statistics gathering system is in the pipeline.

In my opinion the purchase of Skype by Microsoft is a very interesting development, Microsoft and Skype both have a huge user base and there are many exciting possibilities ahead for the service, as it gets integrated into more devices like MS Windows based smartphones and tablets. Imagine Skype running on an Xbox 360 with their Kinect system, Skype would be able to recognise the user that walked into the room, log them into their account and enable them to video conference from their home, office or classroom. The current version of Skype is also available on many more platforms and devices than just Windows based ones (Linux, Apple, i-Phone, Android) and must be one of the most widespread cross platform communication applications available.

Of course it isn’t all good news, some web based services just disappear or become so useful that they are bought by another company and become a subscription only service. The model that a lot of these new technologies works on relies on their success and popularity, they need to have a large user base to have value so they are funded by venture capitalist organisations, developed, and often plan to run at a financial loss for a number of years to allow this to happen.

We have to bear these issues in mind when we are planning to deploy services that rely on web based tools, what will happen if they disappear, start charging or increase their prices? In many cases the changes will benefit the users but if a tool is discontinued or becomes too expensive how will that affect your service and your learners?

Yesterday I eventually managed to catch up with the latest JISC Inform, when I took myself and a paper copy to the coffee shop to get away from my computer! One article that particulary took my eye was ‘Blue sky thinking or head in the clouds?’ which considers if and how ‘cloud computing’ could be used effectively in education.

It is a great article (that, for those of you who aren’t sure, starts by describing what cloud computing is) and I will be following the JISC work on this one with interest from now … but it also got me thinking about whether I have my head in the clouds. My initial conclusion, just from a few things I have done this morning before writing this, is that my head is much more in the clouds that it has ever been … but it is all so integrated in what I do regarding using technology that I wasn’t aware of it. Here’s what I mean:

So far today my head has been in the clouds when I have used:

• Google Docs – to update a document I am collaborating on with a colleague

• Delicious to bookmark a Moodle resource

• Dropbox to store a document I might want to access on another computer but which I also wanted to share (via a URL) with others

• Twitter to share my (RSC Wales) thoughts on a resource I’ve found and also to serve as another sort of bookmark for me too

… but then my feet have been on the ground as I am drafting this in my One Note and I guess I was ‘hovering’ when I accessed my emails from my Outlook client and then replied to a few

The point of all of this is that the cloud has become so much a part of the way that I do things that I don’t even realise I’m using it … and my choices about the tool I use are not to do with if they are cloud based or not but if they are the most effective for the job (to be able to quickly and easily access, collborate, share with others in the examples above) … and at the end of the day isn’t this how we should all (organisations, teachers and learners alike) be choosing if and how to use any technology?

Recently I’ve heard a few comments and queries about the role of social networking in education, as you would expect there are a wide range of opinions from a resounding “yes” to “no, it’s a waste of time”.

It seems to me that there is really not a lot of concrete evidence out there to say one way or another that sites like Facebook and Myspace have a place in education.  I did find some research undertaken by Christine Greenhow from the University of Minnesota which does demonstrate some benefits of social networking.

They have found that social networking fosters communication and creativity and allows students to express their opinions, emotions and thoughts.

They also found that where students may get some training in class on a subject such as video creation or creative writing if the student is interested and inspired by the subject they may go on learning in their own time. Social networks allow students to display their creations and get feedback and reviews from their peers.

Sir Ken Robinson said at a recent TED conference “Creativity is as important as literacy” and that “We are educating people out of their creative capacities”. With that in mind don’t you think Social networking is a great way to encourage creativity as well as literacy?

Blogging and communication tools can be used for reflection as well as interaction, there is evidence that these tools improve literacy and can help develop a social conscience. A lot of organisations are becoming increasingly interested in e-portfolios but there are currently many definitions of what an e-portfolio is. Some e-portfolios encourage reflection and the keeping of a diary, some allow work and evidence to be uploaded and some allow peer review.  As far as I can see the IT and social skills required for interacting with an e-portfolio are already being developed, social networking sites are working as a training ground without anyone realising it!

We do need to be careful though, I recently came across a quote which I’ll have to paraphrase as unfortunately I can’t find the original source: The best way for a social network (such as Facebook) to kill off a rival would be to say that the rival is educational.

Expecting that we can shoehorn education into students’ existing social networks is probably the wrong idea. Trying to create copies of social networks in education and expecting students to use them like Facebook may also be a mistake. Beware of trying to be too cool and creating a Creepy Treehouse*

Obviously Social networks have downsides too, most students realise that they can be a distraction from their studies, one thing that we should perhaps think about rather than banning and blocking sites is how to encourage their use as an effective study break.

The other main hazards are breaches of privacy, security and digital identity; however the online world isn’t going to go away and can be hazardous to everyone no matter what age they are or what experience they have. Learning to be safe online is an essential life skill these days, effective teaching about these dangers should form a core part of education.

Interestingly whilst I’ve been writing this article I’ve had several related tweets on Twitter pointing to some relevant articles,  I’ll leave you with some links to follow should you want to explore this subject more.

Christine Greenhow from the University of Minnesota:

http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/Multimedia_Videos/social_network.htm

Very entertaining talk by Sir Ken Robinson on education and creativity

Schoolchildren should be encouraged to write blogs and use social networking sites like Facebook to improve literacy levels

Children who use technology are ‘better writers’

* A creepy treehouse is a place built by scheming adults to lure in kids. Kids tend to sense there’s something creepy about that treehouse and avoid it. Hence, a new definition: “Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.”

At the FOTE09 conference we heard a lot of common sense advice about our digital identities from Professor Shirley Williams from the University of Reading.  She talked about many of the ways our digital identity can represent us.

Our digital identity can work in our favour, allowing people to search for all the cool things that we’ve done such as conferences we’ve addressed, photographs we’ve taken, even allow people to find our online CV.

However a poorly managed digital identity could have repercussions for a very long time.

It seems that not everybody is worried about the kind of impression that things such as an email address can give, imagine if you were an employer receiving a job application from bob@Icantbebothered.com or pinkfluffybunnyknickers@hotmail.com, what would you think? OK so they’re made up e-mail addresses but they’re not far from real ones!

If you type your name into a search engine such as Google what do you find?  The chances are you’ll find a whole bunch of people with the same name as you, but you will almost certainly find references to yourself.  What do those references contain?  Is it all stuff that you don’t mind everybody reading?  Facebook and other social networking sites are in the news constantly for many reasons, people posting pictures of themselves doing silly things in their work uniforms, making comments about their colleagues or their boss and losing their jobs, in fact only this week a man wanted by the Authorities in the United States gave away his location on Facebook.

Sometimes you can appear “guilty” just by association, many things true or not can be gleaned from  other people’s social networking sites and by the pictures they post in their galleries.  I’m sure there are a lot of people who really wish their friends hadn’t posted pictures of the party last weekend.  Or perhaps they don’t even think of the consequences, once information is out in the cloud we call the Internet it’s more or less impossible to get rid of it.

I know the tone of this post is a bit gloomy for a Friday afternoon but it’s important that the good and bad sides of the digital world are presented fairly. I guess the conclusion to this entry is to go out into the digital world and have fun but think twice before posting anything online that could show you in a bad light now, or in the future.  Check the security of your accounts to limit the number of people who have open access to your private information and be careful who you make friends with… because in the social networking world your friends might not actually be your friends.

Last week I attended (along with Justin from the RSC) the Future of Technology in Education 2009 event in London. It was one of those events where there were so many speakers and so much was said that there is far too much to record in one blog post … so all I am going to do here is to note down a few of the key points (imo) that were made and to display some of the photos that Justin took throughout the day for you to browse through.

The title of the event explains what it was all about but the event mainly focussed on cloud computing and social media. The speakers were from industry (Microsoft, Amazon, Huddle …) and education (numerous universities, one college, the School of Everthing …). The event was broadcast in Second Life, tweeted about and videos and presentations are available via the FOTE09 website.

For me, however, these were the key things that I heard:

• Embrace the cloud because it solves a problem you actually have, not just because it is cool (Dr Paul Miller, Cloud of Data)
• We used to be navigators finding our way along planned routes through the wealth of information available to us … now we are explorers finding our own way (Ray Fleming, Microsoft)
• Teachers and learners expect to be able to ‘plug and teach’ or ‘plug and learn’ i.e. they don’t want to have to know how all of the behind the scenes stuff works, they just want it to happen (Dr Bill Ashraf, University of Sussex)
• Leeds Metropolitain University love Google Apps and have learnt that you need to get in there and just do it because if you don’t the students will and the universities (organisations) will just be following. (Robert Moores)
• The world feels like it is spinning faster and faster  … technology has made the world more connected than ever before … the internet is changing everything … we need to change too (Will McInnes, Nixon McInnes)
• Students and teachers need to understand the potential of technology to get the most out of it (James Clay, Gloucester College)
• Things to do with regard to living (and educating) in a networked world: think globally not institutionally; the default for information needs to be ‘open’ not ‘closed’ so that people can always find what they are looking for; anything can be copied so don’t worry about it… and our role in all of this is as a ‘trusted guide’ (Nick Skelton, University of Bristol)
• Universities have lots of good ‘stuff’ that students (and others) don’t know is there … Oxford University have used iTunes U to help them with this (Peter Robinson, Oxford University).
• Digital identity is not just about what you put on the web about yourself, its about what others put on there about you too (Shirley Williams, University of Reading)
• We have to all accept that learning does not just happen in institutions … that degree certificates are probably not the best way of representing a person and their abilities to an employer … that if universities don’t give people what they want, how they want it then learning will still happen outside universities… it did before they existed, after all (Dougald Hine, School of Everything)

That’s it for now but I will be blogging again soon in more detail about a few of the things I heard … until then, click the image below to be taken to the  photos I promised earlier:

Jane Hart of C4PLT (Centre for Performance and Learning Technologies) is once again encouraging learning professionals to send her their ‘Top 10 Tools for Learning’ which will be aggregated into her top 100 (contributions are accepted until November).  The “Learning” here means both formal and informal learning and performance support, and the emphasis is on creating learning for others, and professional practice or productivity. The “tools” refers to software, online tools and services – so, if I’ve understood correctly, technologies such as voting systems and interactive whiteboards are not included.
This has prompted me to come up with my own Top Ten – as indicated above, this is mainly for online/onscreen tools, and isn’t really intended as a Top Ten priorities for teachers, especially those who are fairly new to technology (I’ve thought about that elsewhere). I’ve also added brief reasons why I like these technologies :-

1. Google reader: great way of receiving & organising incoming information
2. Blogs : more detail possible than in Twitter; allows reflection
3. Twitter : good for receiving (and giving) information, especially for ‘professional’ learning
4. Google docs : joint editing – really useful
5. Camstudio: free screen-casting application; great for making instructional videos
6. Google Earth : just brilliant for Geographical Sciences, Tourism etc (and a whole load of other things!)
7. Vue : free, downloadable, & v.adaptable application for flow-charts , mind-maps etc
8. Textwall: way of using mobile phones for feedback, voting etc
9. TeacherTube:  v,useful educational videos (watch, download, upload)
10. Del.icio.us : excellent research tool

I could have carried on, for there are plenty of other tools worthy of a mention -eg. Survey monkey, Phoebe pedagogic planner, VideoJug, DSpeech, Ning. Are there any obvious ones that I’be left out? Are there any good reasons for using an application that I haven’t listed?

Web 2.0 is a term that has been around for sometime now and is one I hear being used more and more in education in particular. One of the queries I have had and have read about several times over the last few weeks has been about Web 2.0 guidelines or policies for use in a teaching and learning context.

In true RSC Wales fashion, when I was asked for some help on this I immediately turned to (a) the web and (b) my UK wide RSC colleagues. Both were very informative but also made me aware that although quite a few organisations are thinking about whether we need guidelines or policies, quite a few aren’t. Now is this because they don’t think they need them …or because they really don’t?

In many cases I think that having guidelines or policies is a good idea, with how they are written being one of the keys as to whether they are effective. I will always remember the valuable lesson I learnt when teaching … to instruct the children in what you wanted them to do, not what you didn’t want them to because you were only putting ideas into their head … so ‘please walk’, rather than ‘don’t run’ was much more effective, as was ‘remember to use start, shutdown to switch your computer off’, rather than ‘don’t just press the button to switch the computer off’.

So ‘Web 2.0 guidelines or no Web 2.0 guidelines?’ is the question I leave you with today … along with a link to the Web 2.0 technologies for learning information and resources area I have created as a result of my ponderings.

P.S. I know lots of people are now talking about Web 3.0 … but lets just stick with Web 2.0 for now, if that is OK!