Anyway, having perused the supplement a number of times my conclusions are that:

• The learner does really seem to be at the heart of things with regard to most of the colleges and universities featured in the articles in this supplement … a reassurance for a person like me who really does want this to be the case.
• There’s lots of evidence of good stuff (that is working) going on in the world of education with regard to technology … another reassurance for someone whose job is about ’stimulating and supporting innovation in learning’ through the effective use of technology.
• Despite there being negatives about the experiences with technology this hasn’t stopped the featured colleges and universities carrying on because the value to staff and learners outweighs the difficulties encountered. The first of 2 examples of this that stand out for me are the Oaklands College eMentors, where despite some staff being initially reluctant to accept the role reversal idea of the learners being the teachers when it came to using technology, they now appreciate it, as do the learners who have been given the responsibility of being eMentors. The second example is the use of audio feedback for learner’s assignments at Leeds Metropolitan University. Here a group of staff and students have been piloting (as part of the JISC Sounds Good project) audio feedback to establish whether this will save staff time and give students better feedback. The conclusions so far seem to be that although it generally takes staff longer to give audio feedback compared to the more traditional feedback,  that they feel “they are giving students a better service” outweighs this and they will carry on.

… and so we come back to the learners being at the heart of everything we do …

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T) Media Lab have announced the creation of a Centre for Future Storytelling.

The goal is to create “a sort of living story that can continue to evolve and shape depending on who is listening to it and how they can derive meaning from it.”

Amongst the technologies that they are investigating will be Everything Tells A Story: A project that will enable everyday objects to keep running “diaries,” of what happened to them. The information could be used for “personal story creation” by individuals.

Could this technology develop into a self writing e-portfolio?

For more information on Media Lab’s projects click here

The students who expressed these views are 17-18 year olds from Australia … but I’m sure that they are the views of many young learners around the world … and it’s not just Moodle that this would apply too.

So what do we do? Say … what do they know, they are only young? Or do we do what one Hertfordshire college is doing and admit that the teachers don’t have to know everything and that the young people can help when it comes to technology? Oaklands College started its e-mentors scheme in 2006 and won an award from the Learning and Skills Improvement Service for it in 2008 . I first heard about it (several times) 2 days ago at the JISC Online Conference and I’ve since found more information from the Institute for Learning, an article about them on the BBC website and a video on You Tube.

The whole idea of ‘Learner voice’ and listening to what learners think is, in my opinion, a step in the right direction … but actually showing that you have listened and doing something different as a result has go to be what it should all be about … hasn’t it?

Emirates Stadium is new, shiny and has plenty of natural light, natural light can obviously be a problem where projection screens were concerned and some of the presentations were difficult to see. It was nice to be told to keep your mobiles turned on (in silent mode of course!). The conference accepted questions using an SMS system and other workshops used SMS for demonstration purposes.

The day had a packed agenda and could easily have been a two day event. There were workshops and presentations by institutions that had gained MoLeNET funding for mobile learning projects. Finding the presentation you were looking for was difficult at times due to a few labelling anomalies but luckily there didn’t seem to be a duff presentation on the schedule so it didn’t really matter too much which ones I attended.

My first set of presentations were listed as assessment, e-portfolios and vocational applications but really everyone was just excited to talk about their projects so there wasn’t much assessment of e-portfolio work talked about. It was really interesting to hear about the use of UMPCs (Ultra Mobile PCs) in vocational training – particularly the hairdressing and automotive areas. The main points I took away from it were:

• Choose your devices carefully

• You don’t know what you don’t know
• Students love using UMPCs and mobile devices, they like the access to the internet, the way they can make notes and document their work. They like been trusted with the kit and in the case of the automotive students they likes the fact that the paper didn’t get dirty because they weren’t using paper any more!
• The hair and beauty students loved being able to simulate hair styles on their clients and the fact that they could look up information about hair care products online.
• Some colleges bought devices for their students to use – others found ways of allowing the students to use their own devices.

After lunch there was a “Question time” debate; it was interesting to see the difference in opinion between students using their own devices and the organisation supplying them. It seems the biggest issue was creating compatible content; if everyone has the same device then you don’t need to create several file types etc. However one opinion was that technology is slowly converging and “one day” we won’t have these content issues.Some other interesting facts:

• Only a very small percentage of devices provided to learners were lost, stolen or damaged.
• Where devices were taken home other family members became interested in learning some family members learning together and in some cases started courses themselves.
• Retention of students increased in courses that introduced Mobile Learning – overall (as far as I remember) there was a 10% increase over previous years.

I attended a Learner Voice session; something that the RSC and a lot of providers are interested in. It was great to see that South Thames college actually brought a learner along with them! They presented a session called Mobile Inclusion: using mobile technology to fight gang and gun culture. The project equipped learners with Smart Phones to capture digital images, video as well as browse the web and communicate using Skype and SMS. The amount of collaboration was amazing spanning not only different disciplines (Art, Multimedia, Business Studies, Music) but also several schools and colleges. The results fed back into their courses as well as kick starting the LIFEWISE anti-gun and knife crime project. http://www.wandsworthclc.org/gunandknife/

The last interactive session that I attended was hosted by Lillian Soon from XLearn. Lillian was a very entertaining speaker, she introduced her take on using SMS messages for teaching and learning. It was interesting to note that use of SMS messaging in certain courses increased retention by 13% and significant increases in attainment were demonstrated. Lillian reckons that just retaining one extra student pays for the SMS provision she uses.

There are lots of interesting ways to engage learners with SMS from communicating college and course information such as room changes and other admin to course information such as “assignments to be handed in by…”,”please read chapter 14 before the next lesson”. SMS can be used during the lesson and to keep the subject matter in mind in between lessons; Using the Mobile as a voting system via SMS, asking questions using text messaging (requires a little bit of skill to ensure that the question is useful and the replies are meaningful), crafting questions to demonstrate understanding.

There are a few pros and cons to using SMS for education but as far as I can see the Pros outweigh the Cons. Lillian’s Blog can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/244yfy

The final session was about year 2 of the MoLeNET project and inviting organisations to tender. As MoLeNET is LSC funded unfortunately Welsh colleges can’t apply however that doesn’t stop us from being able to reap the benefit of experience gained from organisations lucky enough to be part of the project.

More information about MoLeNET services can be found here:

MoLeShare

Provides learning materials produced by MoLeNET community, that can be downloaded and re-purposed free of charge: www.learningtechnologies.ac.uk/moleshare

MoLeTech

A site dedicated to sharing ideas and practice – to see how m-learning can enhance the learner’s experience whoever and wherever they may be: www.molenetprojects.org.uk/moletech

MoLeNET projects

Moodle for knowledge sharing, discussion and peer-to-peer support. Much of this site is for MoLeNET members but there is an area for the Wider MoLeNET community that allows those not directly involved with MoLeNET to keep up to date and access resources:

www.molenetprojects.org.uk