With this having been my second time at a ‘Future of Technology in Education‘ event I was much more prepared and so I didn’t attend FOTE10 (last Friday) expecting to come away with answers about the future! What I did come away with though are a number of ideas to investigate further and several questions to ponder…

Is it an exciting or a scary future?

Ray Fleming from Microsoft talked about a future vision where technology was everywhere and used for eveything. James Alliban from Skive talked about augmented reality and the directions it could take. James Clay suggested iPads could be the catalyst for changing books and reading quite radically (more than ebooks or ebook readers). This is potentially a very exciting future if technology engages you but a scary one if it doesn’t :-S

Does everything have to be enhanced?

Jeremy Speller from UCL challenged the idea of mobile learning, suggesting that mobile devices were just replacing existing ways of doing stuff not enhancing the learning experience. Hugh Griffiths from oMbiel asked how we could provide learners with the mobile (learning) experience theyexpect; according to research they have done, at the moment learners just want to use mobile technology to change the way stuff is presented to them, like timetables, campus maps and library information. Does all technology have to enhance everything, isn’t it ok to use it just to make a learner’s life easier?

Are we redefining the role of the teacher?

Ollie Bray (Learning and Teaching, Scotland) suggested that teachers are architects of learning, which I interpreted as teachers carefully constructing the environment in which learning can happen, making available all of the essential bits but leaving room for the learner to make it their own. He talked specifically about using commercial games to engage learners and enable learning, with the teacher structuring the experience and guiding the learners through. Ollie also asked whether it really mattered if children aren’t always aware of exactly what they are learning  … they think they are just having fun while playing a game, whereas the teacher has actually structured the learning experience so that they are, for example, collecting data for later analysis, collaborating to solve a problem or even motivating themselves to persevere and improve their own performance. If we learn (in a structured way) and enjoy it, does it matter how it happens?

Enthusiasm for technology is good BUT are we all really as digitally literate as we should be?

Miles Metcalfe (consultant) pointed out to us all that although using geolocation technology in education can be a very positive experience, we should remember that for many organisations we are ‘the product’, with the data we generate and share being used by these commercial organisations for their own benefit. Whilst being optimistic and creative about the use of technology to support teaching and learning, we all need to be aware of this bigger picture so that we can at least make informed choices and particularly so that this can be passed on to others, especially the learners. Are we all really as digitally literate as we should be?

Open source is about more than ‘free’ and is this what we want for education?

Miles Berry from Roehampton University extolled the benefits of open source and suggested that the characteristics of open source are, in fact, what we might want our education system to be like; that is:

• a collaborative experience
• community based
• modular approach
• tinkering enabled (bricolage)
• innovative culture
• money saving

Does this describe our education system today … and if it doesn’t do we want it to be like this?

Engaging teachers who don’t want to be engaged – is there an answer?

Matt Lingard from LSE asked us why teachers, despite having access to more technology than ever today and expertise and support to help them use it, still don’t choose to use technology to support teaching and learning. The quick poll he conducted suggested ‘fear’ and ‘lack of confidence’ as just two of the reasons but there were more. This is the real challenge isn’t it, finding the answer to why all teachers don’t engage with technology, in order that we can all move forward together?

I think that the main message that I took away fom FOTE10 was that it really isn’t about us and what we know or used to do or want to do, it’s about what the future could possibly be and attempting to prepare the young people today for this future. However, we can’t really predict the future (of anything, never mind technology in education) but it is certainly an interesting experience considering the possibilities!

As I said at the beginning of this post, this is the second FOTE event I have attended and although I got lots out of the first event I don’t think I was as prepared as I could have been, so in case anyone reading is planning on attending FOTE11 here are my tips for getting the most out of the event:

• Go with an open mind
• Be prepared to listen
• Take the chance to reflect and reconsider
• Accept that you won’t come away with answers, just possibilities.

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).

I was asked to write a guest blog post for ULCCs ‘Future of Technology in Education’ 2010 event last week. As I said in the blog post , FOTE09 was one of the best events I attended last year … there was a wide range of speakers and the ideas they put forward were challenging … but made sense. Here are a few of the key messages I picked up and that I reported in my blog post last year:

• 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)
• 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)

For those of you who attended our big event ‘Learning in a Digital Wales – Dysgu mewn Cymru Digidol‘ in June, you will have heard Dougald Hine speak about ‘Unexpected Transformations‘, offering his perspective on the way that technology becomes part of the fabric of our lives. You may also have heard (or read or seen) the latest reports from OFCOM suggesting that on average many of us spend half our waking lives using media and communcations.  Technology is already part of education for so many people in so many different ways and with the Welsh Assembly Government aiming to transform learning in Wales working out how technology can help to address the challenges of the future of education is more important than ever. Hopefully FOTE10 will have some of the answers!

(If you would like this blog post as an audio file please click this link or right click the link and choose to save the mp3 file. Please note: the audio file was created quite simply by pasting the text into Balabolka (one of the tools available as part of My Study Bar/EduApps) and saving as an mp3 audio file).