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?

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: