May 2008 – Page 2 – Matt Lingard

Future Technologies

Posted on May 8, 2008

Today I’m dipping into the Eduserv Foundation symposium 2008 “Inside Out: What do current Web trends tell us about the future of ICT provision for learners and researchers?” via the live streaming. If you’re reading this today, join in, it’s free!

Look out for other conference blog posts tagged efsym2008

The first session of the day is/was by Larry Sanders from New Media Consortium who publish the Horizon Reports. I blogged about the 2008 Report on CLT@LSE earlier this year so if you are new to the reports take a look there or at the Horizon Project wiki.

I missed some of Larry’s talk so what’s been most interesting is how well the live webcast is working – almost feels like you are there! It’s very easy to get distracted in the office though, you need discipline for online attendance to work. There is also a live chat for the online viewers on the streaming page, which during the end-of-talk Q&As is being shown in the conference venue. So the live participants get to see our views and a questioner just referred to some comments in his question to Larry.

Larry’s used of virtual bulleted lists in SecondLife as his presentation tool was questioned both virtually and by a member of the live audience. I have to agree that it didn’t add anything and actually made reading them difficult. Technology for technology’s sake?

Image: http://flickr.com/photos/mrstargazer/2467906248/

HE & Learning Technology in the Press

Posted on May 7, 2008

Guardian Newspaper I buy the Guardian fairly regularly. Yes, that’s right I buy the print version. Call me an old-fashioned ‘digital immigrant’ if you like but it’s portable, works underground and I can fill in the crossword! I almost always buy Tuesday’s Education Guardian and although the Higher section rarely has much to offer me – I usually find the comment interesting – there’s usually something in the education section as a whole that catches my eye. And then of course once a month it comes with ‘Link: Using Technology to teach and learn‘. Now I always read this (it’s in my job description!) but it is generally very much focussed on Schools. Usually though there is one page tucked away at the back for HE. No longer. The Guardian says:

From this week most of our coverage goes online to give more space to an area that gets little press coverage and yet commands huge budgets

Continue reading “HE & Learning Technology in the Press”

Net savvy?

Posted on May 6, 2008

Last week I finally got round to reading a couple of ‘google generation’ papers from earlier this year: Information behaviour of
the researcher of the future, PDF (a UCL CIBER Group report for JISC/BL) & Growing up with Google: What it means to education (Oblinger, a Becta report). Together the pair provide both a contrasting view and important similarities. My simplified summary certainly won’t do them justice!

Firstly the contrast, Diana Oblinger highlights a Google generation that are different from previous generations: “have integrated technology into their lives”, “constantly connected”, “demands immediate response”, lots of stuff I’ve heard before. There was only a limited reference to the diversity of technology usage and attitudes of this age group, for example my missing net generation post. The CIBER research was less sure about the neat Google generation label. The report suggests that as well as that age group being quite diverse (20% ‘digital dissidents’) there are many older folk using technologies in a net-gen manner too. One interesting stat for me concerned the user generated content of Wikipedia & YouTube: While it is mainly viewed by 18-24 year-olds; it is mainly produced by 45-54 year-olds and 35-44 year-olds respectively (From: Pew / Internet Typology Report)

Where the two papers came together was Continue reading “Net savvy?”