nixsight

On the 3rd of October, the team-within-a-team of eLearning Support Officers that I am a part of decamped to Imperial College, London, for the 2008 FOTE Conference.

FOTE stands for, in this case, the “Future Of Technology in Education” – not “Friends Of The Earth”, or “Fruit Of The Earth”, or “Friends Of The Elderly”. Not even, in fact, “From Offending To Employment”. No, this conference was tackling a subject much more important than any of those – though only, possibly, to people working in the education sector. It really is getting so that no acronym is unclaimed, isn’t it?

The journey to London from Southampton started unsociably early, but luckily our next door neighbours had decided to hold a boisterous and noisy party from 3am to 8am on the day, so I was already up. It’s the sort of value added service that makes us really glad that they moved in.

My mood on the morning is well recorded on my Twitter archive from that day. You can see a marked improvement from roughly the point where I drank some Red Bull, and as the day went by, the attendees were well furnished with stimulants of all kinds – well, tea and coffee – and reader, I partook. More than I have in months. By the time I got home, I was vibrating like a humming bird.

I’ll admit, I allowed this one to sneak up on me. I’m used to going to eLearning and tech conferences on my own, and feel like a bit of an old hand at them now, and my colleagues weren’t as jaded and were quite eager to arrange transport times and work out locations etc, so aside from looking briefly at the webpage for the conference, I didn’t know much about it, beyond that it was being organised by Tim Bush of the ULCC, a smart and pleasant chap that I had met at Apple a few weeks back.

On arrival at the venue, the atmosphere was pleasant, with the assembled throng of our peers in quite high spirits, and a pleasant buzz through them as they drank their drinks, ate the venue-supplied pastries and worked through their own chemical support of choice. Again, I’m assuming mostly coffee. The atmosphere is always quite cool at eLearning events – there are a lot of very nice people working in eLearning and education, or at least, the people who come along to events like this are normally the proactive, enthusiastic ones. Even if the content is sometimes a little ropey, there is ordinarily an optimism to the things that wins out over the general cynicism that pervades within the edu-sector.

The Imperial College building that housed us was superficially very impressive, with a wide and open entrance-way, minimal furnishings and lots and lots of glass.

This would, of course, mask the much more ordinary but perfectly pleasant lecture theater that housed us for most of the day – and also the not quite so nice slightly run-down toilets, which had either the most homophobic or most homosupportive graffiti - with various worthies being outed in a crude but effective way, occasionally with metadata such as phone numbers and preferences – that I have seen in ages on the inside of the stall doors. And also this existential gem:

Man has reached the moon
And you are still here

That isn’t the most upbeat thing to read when you’re at a technology event, but I shook it off.

The format of the day was unusual – four sessions, each of three short talks, with questions at the end of each session and breaks for coffee and lunch. For a field that tries to promote collaboration and innovation as often as possible, the nature of the presentations were still relatively traditional – with “chalk – or at least on-screen slides - and talk” the order of the day. I didn’t mind that, though – there are still a lot of occasions when the “lecturer/audience” structure works best for imparting information.

My notes tend not to be all that literal or strictly representative of what was said, and I’ve never written one of these events up before – as I’m sure is obvious, by now – so what I’m going to do is run through each speaker and try and translate my thoughts on hearing them one by one, and hope you get something out of it! Bear in mind that this post isn’t particularly timely – I should have written it on the day, and actually I’m writing it two Mondays later, so this may be a little sketchy.

The presentations should be available online, here. For a much more concise and less rambley write-up of the day, read Lawrie’s Blog. 

09:35 – David Rippon@ULCC
David Rippon mainly acted as keynote speaker to the day – which is going to be my excuse for not having much to say about his talk. The coffee was still working through my system as he went, and I remember him being engaging, but am cloudy on most of the substance of his words.

However, he did at one point mention ULCC’s “pragmatic approach to print”, and that simple, obvious and yet utterly unspoken concept caught my ear. I only recently stopped working at a further education college, where you heard the term “paper-free office” at least a dozen times a week, when organisation strategy was discussed, and I’ve always thought it a piece of counter-intuitive, knee-jerk nonsense. At the very least, I think it’s put about by people who don’t actually work with computers all that much – most of the people I know who work in front of a monitor will tend to print out big wodges of text to read, rather than try and blink their way through it on screen.

“Pragmatic” seems the sensible way to go when it comes to paper. Actually, it was a bit of a theme throughout the day.

09:40 - Sam Peters@Google – Cloud Computing
I think I’m out of step with what the general consensus understanding of “cloud computing” is. I get this feeling because to me, it seems to be how I, and most of the people I know, already use the internet, and internet technology.

Sam Peters was a sympathetic speaker, and most of what she said during her talk made perfect sense, in relation to how I already saw things. She described “cloud computing” as a way of shifting a lot of our daily functionality onto services on the web that are maybe better designed to handle that functionality, and I buy that – and in fact already promote it as part of my job. The concept is a fairly universal, straightforward one – why spend loads of time and money creating internal galleries or video delivery tools, when Flickr or YouTube can do the same?

However, she queers the deal a little by turning the latter part of her presentation onto Google-specific commercial products – the suggestion that key infrastructure such as e-mail and user databases could be out-sourced and shifted online to Google’s services was understandably self-serving, but turned the audience’s sympathies somewhat.

But you know, sod that. I’ve been to a few of these things, now, and the pitch is always there, because hardly anybody can afford to send a delegate for the good of furthering mankind. If anything, Peters and the other speakers here keep the whole thing advertising-lite compared to other conferences. And the lady – Goo-Girl as I referred to her rather naively in my Tweets – did a good job of explaining the key ideas of the “Cloud”.

Even when an analogy that was clearly of a distant, more carefree time – two or three months ago, I guess – that hadn’t been edited out of her presentation, about how we use banks to store our money because it’s safer than hiding it under our mattress, she picked up on it, and joked about the anachronism.

Despite the fact that the central idea holds: In a properly functioning system, banks are a more secure and sensible way of looking after your money. When they aren’t run by greedy, short-sighted fucks. What she should have said was that putting your money in a bank was a good idea… if that bank was run by Google.

One key idea that Peters raised, that I liked enough to note down, was her description of “vectors of innovation”:

1. The falling cost of storage.
2. Ubiquitous broadband.
3. Democratised tools of production.

As well as her use of the quote:

“If I had asked everyone what they wanted, they’d have asked for a faster horse.” – Henry Ford

Those two things seemed like as good a summation of how Google have managed to succeed as anything else, and I’ve noted them both here because I have the intention of stealing them both at some point in the future.

There’s a lot to be said about the “Cloud Computing” that Peters ended up talking about – the notion of fundamental functions and infrastructure being outsourced to online, external vendors – and it’s not got the same focus as the version I’m interested in right now. Certainly, I’ve got opinions on it – you knew that, right? – but they won’t be informed, and they’re probably daft enough for their whole own post.

10:00 – Pauline Randall@Virtual-E – Do I Really Need A Second Life?
My rather impetuous, short answer to this question is “No”.

The more respectful answer I could give is that Pauline Randall did a good job of answering the question, in a much more pragmatic way than I’m used to hearing people talk about Second Life.

I’ve used Second Life a little bit, over the last few years - probably since Warren Ellis first mentioned it, and as such before UK eLearning at large, and probably the Guardian, noticed it. Even now, years on, it’s still only an interesting place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to holiday there.

Where Randall’s talk differed from most of the stuff you hear about the virtual world is that she took great pains to remind us that Second Life isn’t a miraculous solution to all of our education needs. There’s a telling moment when she asks the attendees for a show of hands of people who have been on Second Life at some point, and then asks the same of people who still use it regularly. The contrast between the two gives a good indication of how Linden can spin their statistics to make their virtual population look so vital.

In fact, for me, the key to her talk was the point at which she asks ”Why A Virtual World?”. The proposition – that you should ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve, and whether this could be done more effectively with another tool, such as a simple web page or a VLE - shouldn’t be the rare insight that it is in this arena.

This idea, the “toolkit” approach to using tech in education, is compatible with the idea of cloud computing – it’s a useful approach to take, and it’s certainly reassuring to see people finally discussing it at this level of event. But I have to ask, is a “tool” that is so high maintenance, has such high base-level requirements, both of the hardware and of the end-user’s ability level, and that falls over so often really a useful tool for the job?

One quite cool idea that Randall suggested was the recreation of real spaces – a Starbucks was her example – in Second Life, but with involved meta-data inside objects that can be accessed as students move around that space.

Which made me think – if UK education is trying to move towards closer relationships with business, why not look at doing this outside of Second Life? I don’t know how far along RFID is, or how easy it is to retask the barcode systems that businesses already have in place, but we’re already becoming a meta-textual culture in meatspace – why not create a pilot project where a business of interest to a subject area had it’s environment and products tagged in the real world, and that students could move around with special readers – you could even allow the students to research and populate the database that the system used. Although the initial outlay on hardware might not be cheap, getting spaces custom built in Second Life isn’t free either – it’s an idea to play with.

Randall also suggested something that again feels like it should be common sense in education, but that contradicts current trends in FE and HE – when building activities for your students in Second Life, you should make things less easy. If an activity isn’t as engaging or challenging as a game, students will probably switch off from it.

I wrote some other notes during this talk, but as with the “Cloud Computing” thing before, they probably need their own post to breath. We’ll see.

Q & A and Morning Break
So already, the upshot is that there are some useful tech tools already available that we can use, that if we choose to, we can even shift infrastructure online, but that we should use the tools to service our needs, and we should not be creating needs to fit the tools.

There’s some interesting, conceptual stuff in there already – granted, stuff that anyone familiar with the field may already be conversant in, but that’s barely ever the majority of an audience at events like this, so it’s useful stuff.

But of course, two of the four questions given to these first three speakers were aimed at Google, and amounted to a quite combative and thinly veiled “Are Google evil?” interrogative. Peters handled the questions a little defensively – probably because they actually seemed at odds with the gently genial atmosphere of the event and beyond the scope of her presentation.

Maybe she should have expected it – after all, as Mr J says, “Everybody barks at the biggest dog“. But it surprised me how cynical those assembled were about Google, who thus far have only earned distrust by being too superficially open, and generally making services that work quite well, and yet were so open to Second Life, which doesn’t even work half the time.

It was, I think, during the coffee break which followed this session, that I discovered that there were people in the lecture hall following me on Twitter – I was Tweeting blind, from my mobile, so had no idea that people were replying to me. It worried me – luckily, I hadn’t said anything too worrying – but it also caught the curiosity of my colleagues, who I think had always assumed that Twitter was some daft thing that I’d invented to look important. As opposed, of course, to something that somebody else invented to make a whole bunch of us feel important.

(My fellow Twits, incidentally, were Soulla Stylianou, who is marginally more Greek Cypriot than I, and Ammanall, who isn’t. Soulla Tweets a lot. It is probably nothing to do with her ethnicity.)

11:00 – Harold Fricker@RSC South East – Mobile Tech
I know Harold Fricker fairly well – he’s our local RSC e-Learning advisor, and he presents the Mondays@1 podcasts.

He did a really good job of giving an overview of Mobile Tech – I hadn’t seen him in the role of lecturer before, and he was intelligent and comfortable with his subject. I also knew that he hadn’t had a chance to properly caffeinate yet – his talk was brought forward from the afternoon at a moment’s notice – so it was doubly impressive.

Again, there was nothing particularly controversial in there, if you already knew the subject, but it was still an entertaining fifteen minutes.

11:20 – Ian Forrester@BBC Backstage – Why Portability Matters
Ian Forrester was the focal point of the day for me. I hadn’t heard him speak before, but I was utterly impressed with how sharp and entertaining he was, while delivering his slides in what looked like half the time he normally does.

I’ve talked about needing a Rosetta Stone to unlock or focus my thoughts on particularly complex or broad ideas or events before, and Forrester’s ideas and experiences took that role for FOTE 2008.

Forrester took the audience on a bit of a rollercoaster ride through BBC Backstage’s adventures in using online, open source and not so open source services. The stated theme of the presentation was the discussion of portability of data – that:

“As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors.”

But that the same time we should have control over that data, regardless of what platform they are hosted on.

Forrester said a lot about the idea of permissions, the shocking state of some services’ rights policies and the various different systems that the BBC had tried. To be honest, it was heady and dense stuff, and nothing I say is going to make as much sense as his slideshow – which is here: http://www.slideshare.net/cubicgarden/why-portability-matters.

But his key points, at least as I understood them, were these:

There are a lot of very cool tools and ways of working out there in the “cloud”.
There are an awful lot of potential pitfalls to using these external tools, especially in the region of data portability and your rights within them.
It is important to be aware of how much control you have of your data when using these services, and whether or not you relinquish any.
Knowing this information means that you can make more informed decisions about which tools to use.

That’s boiling down a tremendous amount of smart talkin’ into a very basic, and perhaps self-serving, summary. Certainly, that’s how I understood Forrester’s presentation, but if you get the chance to see him talking about this anywhere, it’s definitely worth doing.

Again with the pragmatism and enthusiasm. It was inspiring.

11:40 – James Broad@Yahoo! – Web Technologies
James Broad was very clever, and very enthusiastic, and I loved watching him. He ran us through his introduction to technology, and a few of his favourite uses of it down through time, as well as showing us how the current web looks in contrast to the web of several years ago.

He was a fun speaker with the incredible optimism and enthusiasm of the very geeky, which I can relate to – although being a bit of a comic and film geek is never going to be as useful as being so very, very good with computers.

Having said that, the presentation was all about pumping the audience up, and I couldn’t tell you what the primary content was – there were a lot of tiny but potent ideas, but no real narrative to the talk. Which was well and good, because either side of Mr Broad, there were very, very disciplined speakers indeed.

He did posit an idea that had apparently only just occurred to him, and that didn’t go down too well with his audience, although I sort of saw where he was going – though I’m archly choosing to call it Stalker Life.

This idea was that in a couple of years, wouldn’t it be cool if – and frankly, “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” could have been his chosen subject – you could be in, say, a bar, and point your mobile device at someone, and see a bunch of information about them – such as what music they like, or what they’re drinking, or their status?

Now, the audience – and indeed the following speaker’s – gut reaction to that was one of slightly creeped-out discomfort, but it is actually a thought I’ve had before. I’ve since checked, and I’m apparently not alone, among a few of my peers, although knowing who I know, that isn’t saying all that much.

But if you combine what Broad was suggesting with the awareness of how your data will be used that Forrester was encouraging, suddenly it starts to sound more useful, and less creepy. Because the system becomes less invasive of one’s privacy if you consider that only the people who make their data available, at whatever level of penetration, will be scannable. And there are definite benefits to being able to scan a room and see if, say, your friends are actually even in the crowded bar yet, or perhaps more controversially, whether or not someone is single or “looking”, if they want people to know it.

I guess this is connected to Forrester’s talk – do we really need more security, or do we just need more transparency and awareness of what a service’s security really is?

12:00 – Philip Butler@ULCC – Personalisation
Philip Butler spoke in depth and well about the personalisation of the individual learner’s experience, as well as discussing solutions that he has seen in use.

There are some very interesting screenshots of some of the services that he has experience of, though I have to admit there is a point where I part company with this paradigm.

I’ve heard people talking about ePortfolios and the use of custom social-networking in education for a while, and certainly the examples that Butler gives could work pretty well, but I’ve always wondered what the value of a persistent and dedicated platform for delivering such things actually has for the student.

Further to that, the idea doesn’t seem compatible with the “cloud” – if it’s so important to have a clear representation of one’s educational progress through an academic career, we’d probably be better served creating an application or widget that fit into one’s Facebook or other pre-existing account, because trying to push a student into using a particular system that they haven’t picked for themselves would seem to only have any use for the duration of their time in your institution.

I need to think a little harder about this – there’s more to say, and Butler’s presentation suggested some really useful ideas and possible pedagogic functions, but I think this was around the time that my body was crying for lunch.

One thing that Butler did inspire in me was the following Tweet-burst:

The thing I always think when hearing educators talk about the ways they use tech?
That great educators make great education, regardless of the tools.

That’s something that I’ve always firmly believed in, and have tried to promote whenever I have been training teachers or lecturers in using some web-based app or other – I don’t think we, as trainers and technologists, or they, as often slightly nervous or tech-threatened teachers, can consider this enough.

It was obvious from the beginning of Butler’s talk that if he only had a sandpit and a stick, he could probably still teach his students something that’d stick with them, and even though I have a pre-existing bias against some of the tropes he was presenting, I still want to learn more.

Lunch
There weren’t many questions that I can remember. But there weresandwiches, and lots of fun networking and chatter. Harold Fricker let me borrow his laptop to check my Tweets – which is when I saw your quite disgusting comment, Mr Bish. You repulse me. At a very basic level that is not at all.

Caffeinated, but too well fed to really feel the benefit, we settled into the afternoon. By which point I was really starting to feel the lack of sleep.

14:00 – Tim Marshall@JANET – Visions Of The Future
Tim Marshall, like Butler before him, is at his core an educator and a professional. His resume contains years of outside broadcasting experience – I can think of at least one of my colleagues who would have probably sat rapt by hit presentation.

This was mostly about the current state of, and future innovations in, video technology and streaming, and was really quite interesting, but not really my field – I love AV stuff, but beyond wanting it to just work, I don’t have much interest in the guts of it.

However, Marshall was an engaging speaker, and his anecdotes about his work in TV were great, with his ongoing enthusiasm for his work apparent throughout.

14:20 – Maria Illia@LMN – Shared Services
Illia was a perfectly good speaker, but scheduling this particular presentation by her was possibly, at least for me, the only misfire of the event.

It was the subject matter that was the problem. What was given was a very competent business presentation, with a clear audience of London-centric existing customers, which for the most part meant absolutely nothing to me.

At least, I think that was the case. I spent a lot of the talk vaguely worried that I had just completely missed the point. I’ll admit, in my addled state, I was quite concerned that this was actually really vital and relevant stuff, and that I was only struggling with it because of those buggers next door, and their ridiculous awake-keeping activities…

14:40 – Miles Metcalfe@Ravensbourne College – Campus Of The Future
I was wrong, though, because Miles Metcalfe brought me back with a thump.

For a start, he’s an incredibly confident speaker. He won me over instantly, by describing his position as head of IT Research and Development at a primarily artistic and creative college as happening largely by default, and that “Basically, if it’s got a plug on it, it’s my fault.”

He also claimed to be “100% buzzword compliant”. That’s the sort of thing people say with false irony, before actually using one buzzword after another, but if Metcalfe had a thing, it was his no-nonsense delivery and willingness to measure his optimism with a healthy dose of sardonic wit.

The fact is, you don’t get enough of that in our field. Too often, people are either far too shiny and happy about the tech available, without really thinking about the problems that might arise, or otherwise they have the practiced negativity of the 90s techie.

Metcalfe talked us through his College’s new build, and the changing face of the IT department. The process they went through seemed determined to take a smarter, broader view to creating the best value and best potential pedagogy for the budget available.

The underlying ideas are still innovative, though they have been floating around in reduced form for a while – that focusing on user-owned technology, and allowing some of the budget that would normally go on paying for terminals and infrastructure to go towards subsidising personal technology.

Doing this, and shifting the focus from maintaining steadily aging suites to providing online services for the students in theory allows Ravensbourne’s IT department to take a more active role in supporting good, coherent pedagogy that recognises “Learners become practitioners and negotiate a public identity integrating extra-institutional practice into their institution-bound learning.”

Metcalfe is suspicious of trusting extra-institutional software as a service, such as that offered by Google earlier in the day, but he’s… you guessed it… pragmatic about using “cloud” based systems for many useful educational functions.

He was awesome.

Q & A and Afternoon Break
A lady asked the question of whether or not she should allow her students to “friend” her on Facebook. I suspect the question was raised with some irony, but it got a fairly lively reaction in the lecture theater, and a smatter of replies on my Twitter feed.

The general response was “no, probably not”.

By this point, either my tastebuds were shot, or the coffee just didn’t taste as good.

16:00 – John Hickey@Apple – Building 21st Century Learning Environments
I heard John Hickey speak a few weeks back, and a lot of that presentation was re-presented here, but he’s a good, solid speaker. And my neighbour on the pew, an old colleague from a past job, said he had a “lovely voice”.

He does at that. On this particular day, he was using that lovely voice to describe the different ways in which technology could help build a modern learning environment. To be honest, it was another quite interesting, but universal and not that detailed, discussion of the state of play.

It only differed really with a little Apple-pushing from Hickey at the end, though this seemed fair enough – the whole day was still relatively sales-lite, and the evangelising was presented in the form of a challenge to the world of education to be spectacular, or somesuch.

Plus the talk was probably a lot more valuable for members of the audience who hadn’t already had iTunes U – an interesting service, by the way – presented to them.

16:25 – Tom Abbott@University Of Warwick – Creativity And Media Production – Moving Beyond The Lecture Theatre
Tom Abbott wins big for being the first and only geek of the day to mention the Goons, and then the Boosh. And then to use a Matt Madden slide, without even drawing attention to it!

Another one of those enthusiastic speakers, Abbott made me want to visit Warwick and get a look at some of the things that they’re doing over there.

For a start, Warwick have built their own blogging platform, and it’s wired for easy video casting. This is available for all students, and there are various initiatives on campus that put video production equipment in the hands of those students.

The main thing I took away from Abbott’s talk was the quote:

“Fail again, fail better.”

Which was presented as a bit of a personal philosophy by Abbott, and actually fits in with my own beliefs – it means that creativity is about being brave, and that to get the best and most creative uses of this technology out of our users – staff or students – we should be encouraging people to take risks.

We can do this by making the tools that are easy for our users to use availablefor them to use. I’ve long held the belief that the biggest part of my job as an eLearning bod is to show people how easy this stuff is to do.

I’m hoping that Abbott’s presentation makes it up onto the website soon, because I remember it as being utterly awesome and inspiring, but it was late in the day, and my notes have fallen apart a little. The only thing in there that I haven’t mentioned, I’m not even sure was based on anything Abbott said.

It is that technology isn’t binary. Which is to say, it isn’t an either/or proposition; that something isn’t the fullest use of a technology doesn’t mean it isn’t a viable one.

Hey, maybe that’s an all new thought, that’s all mine. Certainly, I’ve been applying the “such and such isn’t binary” argument to a lot of things, recently.

16:45 – Alastair Mitchell@Huddle.net – Social Collaboration Tools For Staff And Students
Alastair Mitchell said a lot of cool things about his product, Huddle. Huddle is a scalable software solution for easy collaboration in a business or education setting, but I’m a little concerned that as far as students are concerned, it’s just another log-in to do something that other systems already do, albeit to a much lesser and less fluid way.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t worth checking out – it probably is. But your organisation is either in the market for such a tool, or it isn’t, and I’d already spent the day validating a few of my pre-existing notions on free and open technology, so I didn’t take in much except Mitchell’s enthusiasm, I’m afraid.

That isn’t very helpful, is it? Sorry…

Final Thoughts
Huddle bought us beer, and despite ourselves, we stuck around for a quick one. The day was generally a lot of fun, and certainly a great topping up of one’s enthusiasm for the field.

The day was pitched at a different audience to the recent ALT convention, and that’s cool as it goes, because we’re not all operating at that level just yet – it felt like more of a “state of the nation” event, and as such I thought it’d be a great day for middle and upper management to attend.

I like events like this, because they’re a great barometer for where the grass-roots EdTech discussion is at. This year, I was reassured to find that this discussion is evolving and maturing past the point of cheerleading or paranoia – although it’s still early in the lifespan of this technology and it’s use in education, a lot of people have had a few years to work with it, and start to see some of the potential pitfalls without hysteria, as well as having some experience of best practice with the actual benefit of some practice.

The other thing I was pleased to see was that for the most part, the subjects covered were less excited about the “flash” and spectacle of the tech on offer, and more about awesome and smart uses of data. Simple tools that users can adapt to their own uses.

Because this isn’t a revolution any more – if it ever was – no matter what gadgets and wizardry we choose to get excited about. This stuff is like water and air to a lot of our students already – we no longer need to debate whether or not it’s going to be useful, because they’re already using it.